Country roads take me home; I’m humming the John Denver song, the radio’s off, I’m making my own music like I do a lot of the time when I’m driving. When I take off on a journey it’s always Willie and On the road again, sometimes, when I’m cruising during the day I’m with Tim McGraw going Everywhere, but at night, on a lonely country road it’s always Denver.

And I am on a country road, two lanes of mcadam, a single white line down the middle but it’s not taking me home, I’m in the west part of Missouri really not heading anywhere in particular, I had a vague notion of turning north in Kansas, wandering through the Dakotas, but maybe not.

I like the backroads of America, the interstate system is great if you want to get from point A to point B the fastest but they’re homogenized. Flo

It was fall and school had just started again. My twin brother Karl and I were feeling pretty darned good, after all, we were in high school now, 14 years old and freshmen.

There was something we called “The Race.” Our father had died when we were infants, he'd left our mother well set financially, she didn't need to work but she did. She was a sales executive with a communications company with a mid six figure income but Karl and I figured the only reasons she was employed were that she had the opportunity to meet men and that she didn't have to handle normal motherly duties, we felt like she hated us for being impediments to her, in her mind, idyllic life.

Her idyllic life, what a joke. To the outside world mother was a paragon of virtue, a beautiful woman of 37, a high payi