😮 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.

old man standing before me.

“Fifty years, daughter,” he said, not boasting, almost ashamed. “Not because he was good. Out of duty.”

And that’s when it hit me, the moment that made me disgusted with myself: this man who smelled of the street, who was about to be sentenced for petty theft, had been the only thing keeping El Güero alive for half a century.continue reading …