Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode I handpick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

You know, there's been a good number of stories on the podcast that really tap into childhood

and revisit childhood experiences and I think that's probably for a couple of reasons.

I think children are brilliant and I love how they use their imaginations but it's also

because being a child, a person early in their life is such a unique experience.

Children are brought into a world that's already spinning and working and churning and they

have to figure out what's going on around them at the same time they're, you know, learning

to eat food and walk and read.

They have to square the world with what they know or have experienced, right?

The boy in this story is in the fourth grade.

His family immigrated from Mexico and now he's being raised solo by his dad.

They've been dealt a tough hand and the boy is doing his best to understand why and

how these things have happened while also dealing with school and crushes on girls.

The author of this story, Luis Alberto Ureja, has said that it was inspired by his own

boyhood, his own dad who worked driving a bakery truck.

And the story has brought a lot of personal memories, letting back for me.

Luis's dad drove a Helms bakery truck and my childhood in Sacramento, it was the wonder

bread truck and there are more similarities that I'll talk about after this story.

Anyway, it's a really special piece that comes to us from the anthology small Odyssey

series.

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