I walked away from prison on an April morning. It was sunshine all the way home -- and too there was sunshine in my soul.
I paid my debt to society. "Two sentences to run consecutively," the judge pronounced. "Upon completing one you'll begin the other." Shackled with handcuffs, I was led away.
I mopped floors, clean toilets, scrubbed staircases and walls, sloshed through mud on the prison farm in springtime, sweated in the fields in summer, and froze in the winter cutting down woods on prison land -- all the while doing hard time.
Day in day out, month after month, year after year I trudged the same contour of existence.
Then the day finally arrived when the payment was fully paid.
"Thompson, front and center," shouted the cellblock guard, and the cell door opened. Moments later the state owned vehicle transported me to the bus depot -- and I was en route home.
It was such a beautiful sunshiny morning and in so many ways imaged my new beginning, and this is the narrative of that beginning "behind the story."
The remarkable truth in what follows is that there is hope for the fallen.