😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.

Part 2.
The old man said the name, and I knew it.
Not from the photo. From my mother. From when I was a little girl, and she would sometimes say, almost to herself, “Güero, poor Güero.” She never explained who he was. I thought he was a dead friend, one more of those taken by the war.

And there, right in the courtroom, that old prisoner was telling me continue reading …