Dominick

In this episode of The Missing Conversation, host Steve Evans sits down with Dominick — a men's health researcher at Johns Hopkins who grew up on food stamps in central Massachusetts, raised by a single mother in a house full of tension, without a father of his own to model the man he might become. Dominick reflects on the pivotal moment his sophomore year when he realized his life was on him — riding his bike to sign his own scholarship papers — and on the truth that it took a whole village to make it happen: the uncle who offered consistency, the priest who knew his family, the people who bought his uniforms and drove him to practice. He traces how, without a father to copy, he built himself "à la carte" — taking a little from each of the men in his life, idealizing the pieces worth keeping. He speaks candidly about the quiet, lasting weight of poverty — how it narrows a young man's vision to the immediate and follows him into adulthood — and about the curiosity and empathy that pulled him outward, from a dorm-room morning watching Mandela walk free, to the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, to a life of service across the world. With warmth and humility, Dominick explores marriage to a partner he never had to convince of the big things, the immediacy that shaped every decision, and standing now at the edge of the empty nest — concerned, but not worried — landing on what turned out to matter most: that relationships are central to who he is, and that a man is built, and rebuilt, in the company of others.