His name was Joe….

Updated 2/27/2026

Updated Again on March 1st, 2026

His name was Joe.

Joe was born in a room that had a spotted linoleum floor and all the base trappings of a standardized healthcare institution. The facility was aged, it showed the years it had lived through a sandy, rough exterior.

The paint was a faded cappuccino beige, colored in part by age.. another part of its appearance was due to neglect. This faded tan was once a prominent brown.

The hospital was located across the street from a fire station. The area was swarmed with a disproportionate number of civic duty men and people who either found themselves in service related jobs or in seemingly secure positions that would hold through different periods of economic turmoil.

These were the vocations & professions that their parents had pushed them towards.

This hospital provided a good sum of the taxable, county & state provided income generating jobs of the area. Also, these were professional spaces that were deemed available in the small, somewhat cow-filled farmland.

This town was based in central Texas. Texas state was the launchpad for Joe.

Although this was the starting point, Joe’s family inevitably relocated. They moved before he could grasp the magnitude of how this impactful change in location would change the overall course of his entire life.

This move happened before he was able to read, write or articulate how the letters came together when scanning signage.

He was not sure what was posted atop some of the wooden, frameless signs of officially incorporated surrounding towns and cities.

His family began their domestic migration before he could clearly enunciate the phonetic sounds of any discernible English words. He was often curious where in Texas he and his family had once resided. His curiosity grew but much of the documented paperwork that had been offered to provide information about his young life was lost. It had been blown about in the everyday mix of life. In his case, that included moving, creating space for guests, including family. This made it either unretrievable or difficult to obtain. Much of the paperwork he came across through diligent efforts to scour the files of his household was disappointingly crumpled. These papers had been stained by coffee, butter, and they wore age on each corner as an obvious badge of their lived-time.

Joe could recall a point in his life where his family was able to proclaim a small, comfortable, two bedroom residence as their own. Their abode was a home that he proudly identified as his own when he recounted his early days. He enjoyed sharing the details and features of this home where his family once experienced life- together.

There was one bathroom just behind the mustard yellow dwelling that his family shared during that time period. That grainy mustard colored home was not far from the southern coastal Florida regions his mom had imagined herself one day living near. Joe knew the residence was sufficient enough in size & he reminisced about the days when his family was living together under the same enamel plaster-ceilinged home.

That structure was significant for different reasons. Despite the variety of reasons, Joe knew that it once housed his mother, three siblings and young Joe before they all ventured north toward Boston.

Massachusetts was the next state that his mother envisioned a new focus upon. She began to daydream about a life in Massachusetts.

Now that she’d re-considered her dream of living in Florida, she placed a new concentration on bringing her children up-to the Northeast.

She had heard about the prominent brick veneer of Harvard University, the clean streets of Boston and she knew that Universities were splayed about all through the ‘smart state’, as Massachusetts was referred to by her friend Joy. She hoped her children would benefit immensely from this relocation as a culture of aspiring young people had the capacity to inspire her offspring to “reach & pursue college degrees,” she once explained to young Joe. Massachusetts would bring a better life, one full of aspiring academics; she daydreamed, hoped and thought to herself. She even prayed at night as the lights went dim around the house. She prayed that this move would work out to open new doors for her children.

Joe wasn’t sure how life might have turned out had his family stayed put in Texas or what might have been, had they settled in Florida. This curiosity crossed his palate of thoughts, he wasn’t sure if this move to Massachusetts was something his family benefitted from or if it was the specific reason his oldest brother Jason began to spiral downward.

Joe was certain of one thing about the Boston area, he loved the trains, ride the buses and he appreciated how accessible the city was with this elaborate transportation system.