Chapter One

"Daddy, look at those blue jays. They are so beautiful!" "Yeah, they are, Son, but they sure are destructive and raise a lot of hell."

Steve was an absolutely adorable child. He won the most beautiful baby award at the Boston University School of Theology Baby Show, where I was in school, and made an appearance, picture and all, in the Boston Herald newspaper. He exuded charisma, and people loved him. He was so vitally alive.

When he was four or five years old, he ran away from home. After a frantic search his mother found him swinging on a fence down at the local grammar school. He kept saying to her, "I want to go to scool; I want to go to scool." It was not a portent of things to come. As bright as Steve was, and he was very bright, he never did well in school. From the beginning he had difficulty with reading, writing, and math. We later came to believe that he had a serious learning disability.

Within a few years he developed a deep hatred of school and everything connected with it. School became a place where he acted out, defied his teachers, and showed off for any of the kids who would pay attention, and no few did. We tried everything we knew to do: counseling, special school, and special classes. We tried gentle love at first and then tough love, but nothing seemed to work. By the time he was fourteen, he was in wholesale revolt against school, cutting class and being disrespectful to his teachers. That same year he and a friend took our car while we were away one evening and rolled it