IT TAKES GUTS to live on the street and survive, and more than a few smarts. If you are the one who lives there, you try to stay warm, dry and find enough to eat. You move from sidewalk to sidewalk, dumpster to dumpster. It's a stressful life, and dangerous, because you never know who you'll run into. Is that person eating across the table from you homeless because of circumstances beyond their control, or because he is deranged and dangerous?
If you're an alcoholic attorney or a semi-crazy old woman, you could find yourself in real trouble, because the man across from you at the burn barrel might be a killer - and insane on top of it.
Even if you're not living on the street, but a First Responder designated by society to deal with the homeless, you, too, must be cautious. Will that seemingly harmless man be carrying a gun, or a knife, or a lead pipe? Watch your back.
Autorentext
I was raised till age 15 on a farm in Central Idaho. My dad was a Czech immigrant and my mom was an Oklahoma City businesswoman. I graduated from Gonzaga University in 1968 with a B.A. in English.
In the days before women routinely became street cops, I read a book by a woman who did. And I had to try it. I started in 1981 and worked for 21 years as a police officer, first in Davenport then in Cheney, Washington.
In the police academy in Spokane, 1980, there were 22 men and two women, Lynn Bain and me. We've been friends ever since.
In 2002 I hung up my gun belt and went back to school for a BA in Education so I could teach Criminal Justice at Lewis & Clark High School. After three years of that, I decided that the public school system and I were not going to see eye-to-eye, so hung up my lazer-pointer and turned my attention to the martial arts school I'd established in 1998.
I'd studied marial arts since 1974 and, over the course of 34 years, earned a 4th degree black belt in Goju-ryu Karate. But I'd also, with my current husband, team-taught women's self-defense based on the well-known "Model Mugging" system.
Since I'd first been able to put words to paper, I'd aspired to be a writer. So, here I am.