You would think that after 52 years on this earth, I would have learned this lesson by now, but alas, here I am. I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and have lived here most of my life, with a brief detour to Austin, Texas in the late 1990's.

Someday I will have a book of my journey in adulthood that is a series of poems and prose. One of the poems I wrote decades ago in 2001 during my year of chemo started by posing the question: Did the saw whir, or did it hum when you cracked my cranium?