IN THE FALL OF 1988, I was an 18-year-old man in my first year of college. I had escaped my small hometown and made it a whopping 80 miles away to Akron, Ohio. I felt trapped and insisted upon going to college come hell or high water, so I’d worked a job at Kmart and finagled every bit of financial aid I could. My mother didn’t understand why I wanted to go to college and asked me several times why I didn’t just go into the military. You know, like the other boys.
One night, I was walking on campus and saw a young man showing every sign of distress. He was unabashedly crying: red face, leaking tears and snot everywhere. The kind of crying that makes the chest convulse, and the words can only escape between sobs. His situation became clearer the
