We stayed to the lighted streets when we could and were about a block away from home when an old pick-up truck came racing down the road toward us.

My father let my little sister and I do whatever we wanted to do and go wherever we wanted to go. I am sure he cared about about what we did but I can't imagine the strain of having to raise two young girls on his own. He was 16 years older than my mother and in his 50's when she became very ill and unable to take care of a family. I think this made his drinking worse and he was drunk more often than not. When my father was sober or slightly inebriated he was wonderful, funny and charming; I loved my father then and could forget the bad times, almost. One evening in the summer of 1980 (I was 13) my little sister and I wanted to go to a movie; Xanadu, I loved that movie! My father said sure but because it would be dark out, when the movie ended, he wanted to be there to walk us home; we lived about 6 or seven blocks from the theater on Colorado Blvd. What a fun time my sister and I had, we threw popcorn at a couple of cute guys in front of us, drank our soda and sang along to ELO (I think this was our 4th time seeing Xanadu). Once over, my sister and I went outside to wait and wait and wait and wait. No Dad. We would have called home but our phone had been disconnected. After about 45 minutes we decided we had to walk home without an escort. We stayed to the lighted streets when we could and were about a block away from home when an old pick-up truck came racing down the road toward us. My sister said she recognized one of the men as our school janitor and waved. The truck made a u-turn and then we noticed there were at least five men in the back whistling at us and not one of them was the janitor from school. RUN RUN! I screamed. We did and luckily we were not followed. When we got back to our little apartment the door was unlocked and we found our father passed out on the couch with a drink spilled on the floor next to him. We tiptoed quietly upstairs to bed. I had trouble falling asleep; the adrenaline from running still pumping through my veins. I hugged and petted my kitten ChaCha and eventually drifted off. The next morning my father didn't even mention not picking us up; I wanted to scream at him for forgetting.