Ryan Spires

For a summer in college I worked at a home for developmentally disabled adults. They had four residents and only one of them was capable of speech. It was difficult to work with them, knowing this was the limit of their abilities and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I would occasionally run into a person that would resemble one of my boys and I would think, this is what Roger would look like and be doing if his brain hadn't been damaged It could happen to any of us. Our brains are amazing but delicate things. I wanted to explore the concept of losing someone close to brain damage and poking at the idea of what people would be willing to risk and lose to gain something of the person back.  That's the spark that led me to write this short story titled Maddie, which I will put out here in three parts.  I put some bits of the four residents into Maddie. In a very small way, it's my tribute to them and their struggles.  As a warning, it's a rough...

Like many other children of the 50's, my dad collected baseball cards. Legends with names like, Mantle, Maris, Koufax, and Aaron, were neatly arranged and sorted in cardboard boxes. Time is the great separator, and my father lost track of his collection, cast away like many other aspects of childhood. Those cards were worth hundreds of dollars in the 1980's. He often lamented that fact and it wasn't lost on me. My meager allowance earned from dishes, dusting, vacuuming, mowing, and shoveling was divided into two piles. The first fed a savings account, which back in the 80's could actually earn you some money. I would take the rest of my earnings, jump on my Huffy bike (no GT or Haro for me), and pedal my way to our local card shop, Extra Innings. It wasn't hard to fall in love with collecting cards and it didn't hurt that the home team won two world series (87 and 91) and that the steroid era wasn't in full swing yet. You opened the door to that cramped ...