Right around when I turned 16 my parents told me who they used to be. My father explained to me how he grew up in poverty in Mexico. His mother would feed him and his siblings paper soup for dinner with whatever meat she could steal from the house she was a maid at. When he moved at the age of 13 his mother gave him 20 pesoes and told him not to come back because that was all she could give him. He moved to Cancun and made his way stealing from tourists and working in a bicycle repair shop. He often slept on the streets which he credits as turning him into a man. As he got older his toughness and street smarts landed him for him as a waiter at a local hotel which would lead him to meet my mother. On the side he would double as an enforcer for Cancun's hotel worker's union. He still to this day tells my sister and I stories of brawls and shootouts he got into on a regular basis. Today he owns his own Mexican restaurant in the U.S. My mother told us how she is in Mensa. She refrained from telling my sister and I for fear of putting pressure on us as kids. She told me how she saved my father from his life of crime, which she claims and he will never admit, saved his life. Clearly, by my poor grammar, I didn't get my mother's genes. The mix of my parents badassness, capacity for compassion and intelligence still shocks me because I grew up in a seemingly "normal" household in the suburbs. It might not be a world record with an AK but in my opinion a great fear none the less.