When I was fourteen, my best friend, Joe Larson, developed leukemia. I remember a conversation we had where we talked about the future. For me, the future was wide open and packed with unlimited potential. For my friend, Joe, the future stretched maybe as far as Christmas. He talked a lot about how great that Christmas was going to be. The differences in how we viewed life and its potential was so vastly different that it forever changed the way I looked at the world. Joe passed that year four days before Thanksgiving.