Some musings about my meanderings over the years:

While most of you have spent these past 35 years doing something tangible with your lives, I, for the first 15 years at least, ardently wallowed in liberal arts experimentation; only rarely pausing to revisit the emotional trauma of my high school days. I graduated from Antioch College in 1976 with a BA in Human Development, a patchwork of Education and Psychology courses. I studied French for a year at the Université de Besançon, the one undergraduate experience that justified Antioch's ridiculously high tuition. Living in France was pivotal to my moving beyond the crippling self-esteem issues I'd struggled with throughout my life in Harrisburg. I would return to Europe several times after 1976 for intellectual breast-feedings and cultural defibulation.

Another watershed experience that provoked a fuller sense of personhood was a stint with the United Methodist Church in Brazil. Serving ostensibly as a Mission Intern, Rio de Janeiro was the perfect place for me to be, circa 1980. Brazil was also my first encounter with the kind of poverty and human suffering that usually reserved for non-prime time documentaries in this country. Again, no great formal achievement were achieved there (though few people can say they've been both sobered and wash ashore by Copacabana's sometimes deadly undertow). What really I took away from this wouldbe journey of Christian mission was a kick-in-the-teeth vignette of Earth's profound beauty and ecological wealth mated, mule-fashion, with the profanely wasteful stewardship of same; surreal natural slendor amidst equally surreal human misery. O Brasil, I was forever changed by my experiences in the northern state of Bahia, the most African place in the Americas. I left intoxicated with a musica da lingua Portuguese.

My father died in 1981. Funny how parents are immortal until they die. Then it occurs to us that they're not gods. I remember vividly my last goodbye to him and not having even the notion that I would never see him alive again. As with Life, Taoism is confusing only for its simplicity. It is a blessing that things should happen in proper order, that parents should not have to bury their children.

I married my late wife, Clarice Beverly Titus, in Spring Garden, Westmoreland, Jamaica in 1984 fatefully enough. Our daughter was born in 1986, BeYonne. She's 22 now and preparing for dental school, having graduated from Howard University. Clarice passed in 1996, five years after my mother's death in 1991. For a while there, it seemed the closest thing to joy in my life was the salty-sweet warmth of welled-up tears; not always so disagreeable when you've loved and lost so much.

I am so blessed, or at least that's how I colate reality. BeYonne and I soldiered on for the next several years, until Thedra Lewis came into our lives. We were married August 16, 2003, the day after my birthday. We've not had a harsh word between us, and she and BeYonne are the best of friends. I currently work as a Security a nalyst for a consulting firm in Washington, DC, while Thedra, with a far more marketable MBA, has works with a trade association in a Maryland suburban of D.C.