text: Here's one you'll like.  I left home at 17, at the end of my Jr. year in high school, after enduring 12 years of spousal abuse by my step dad... and my mom still wouldn't leave him, so I left. That was in Albuquerque.  I drove up to Denver, met with my uncle, and he got me a job as the caretaker for the Mother Cabrini Shrine in the foothills outside of Denver.  It included a summer retreat for Cuban refugee girls that Cuban parents sent here to get them out from under Communism; Catholic organizations took them in. The Cabrini Shine retreat was run by Catholic nuns.  I was their "little heathen" who lived about half a mile down the road in an old stone ranch house.  They'd call me up every time they encountered a rattlesnake, and I'd come kill it for them.  One time they called me in a panic... their male and female German Shepherds had become stuck together in intercourse while the nuns had the hose on them.  Couldn't relax.  Funniest thing I ever say in my life.