What is interesting in life is the relationships that we encounter that potentially open up the world to us, portals that open up and expand our worlds if we choose to walk through them and allow them to transform our lives.

Back in 1982, I was married with two children and working service jobs while trying to earn my master’s degree in political science from UW-Madison. It was a struggle. One of my fellow grad students was Curtis Conner who was married and had taken a job with the Madison Urban League to support himself and his wife Gail.

The Madison Urban League needed a basic skills instructor to work in its clerical skills training program to help strengthen the students’ writing skills and basic grammar, but also to help those students who lacked a high school diploma to earn their GED.