During the most difficult period of my life, I wrote this short story for an evening writing class that I took trying to keep busy and trying to get my personal life back on track. I was single again after many events ended up with me getting divorced. I had finished my four year tour of duty in the Air Force in Wichita, Kansas and was working as an engineer at Quaker Oats in St. Joseph, Missouri.

At that time, I had felt lost, lonely and very guilty for being responsible for the failure of my marriage and leaving a newly born daughter behind. She and her mother had moved back to Green Bay.

I found this typewritten story in old family files. It had many typos because I was too lazy back then to retype long documents like this on a manual typewriter.

I scanned it into Word, cleaned up (I hope) most of the typos and edited some of the badly structured sentences. I was impressed with my young self reading it, if I do say so, though I doubt it would ever win any writing award.