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Author Garcia offers exuberant, sometimes terrifying scenarios of life nearly shattered, then salvaged through determination and spiritual focus. He battled tough realities from early childhood. His father, hard-working but alcoholic, beat the boy harshly for the smallest infraction, making him work in the garbage collection trade at an early age. Garcia's first brush with death occurred when, riding with his father, his uncle at the wheel, a disastrous collision with a gas tanker could have killed all three. The seven-year-old felt dead, then awoke in hospital with serious injuries.
With a loving, protective mother, he started school when the family moved from Texas to California. On unsupervised streets, he faced constant bullying while forging a lifelong friendship. In junior college, Garcia was drafted to serve as a Marine in Vietnam. There, in the jungles, he was under constant threat of extinction, sensing that he had died many times. Until his fifties, Garcia coped with employment changes, romantic liaisons both discouraging and positive, and serious addictions to illegal drugs and alcohol. Those self-punishments would lead him to his third encounter with, and conquest of, the death trauma he had suffered from since childhood.
Garcia's life events are vibrantly arrayed here, including varying types of employment, including a stint as a county-based correctional officer, a truck driver, a store manager, and in a self-created janitorial service. Now in his seventies, retired and happily married, he writes with verve and with the clear intent to assist others facing the kinds of drug temptations and ruination that he underwent. His deeply religious outlook was a saving grace as he emphasizes on nearly every page of this lively narrative. Garcia offers readers what he has found: a hopeful path to fruitful living devoid of haunting, life-threatening experiences and bolstered by God's care at every turn.