The Stories of My Youth

These are the stories from my youth that have weathered the erosion of time. Now that I have made 50 plus circuits around the sun, I feel that it is safe to put them in print. The statues of limitations have expired and the players have all grown or moved on. Many of these stories share a singular theme, the idea that I've been really lucky. Not lucky in the sense of winning at bingo or the lottery more than the average person, but in that I am still alive after so many mishaps and misadventures where natural selection would normally have selected against a peculiar set of traits.
Perhaps there is some caution in these stories that others might find profitable. The same propensity to think abstractly rather than pragmatically that motivated a school boy to dive head first into a snow pile also propelled me through to degree in mathematics and a successful career as a computer software architect. If a child appears to particularly devoid of common sense, they might yet have a bright future.
Just make sure to instill in them some sense of caution. I want to thank the people who made this book possible. I thank my wife for proofreading the drafts as they emerged over recent years. I also thank Vanessa aka "Boo" who edited the book into its present form. She's already a better writer than I and yet she is barely in her teens. I truly think this collection of stories will ultimately be known as her first book instead of mine.