My being was an accident. My paternal grandparents and their older friends raised me. Raised by grandparents was an incredible life: quiet conversations and readings opened with wisdom and caring. Wandering in the deciduous forests of southern Indiana and swimming in the large limestone quarry pits that housed the great buildings of New York and Washington D.C., I grew up with generations of stone cutters and carvers who migrated to the States from southern Germany and northern Italy between our Civil War and WWII. Older people who looked at life in the past, present, and future dimensions. This is the framework of learning.  

In our homes, we spoke German, Italian, Hebrew, or Latin. In a six-room school with eight grades, we learned English slowly.

Jews and Catholics and stone.  

When I was 14, both of my grandparents passed within six months of each other; though I was cared for and had two part-time, after-school jobs, a first-year counselor at my high school had declared me a ward of the state. An Episcopal priest found me a summer job in western Alaska as a carpenter's laborer, and having my lodging and meals paid for and money in my pocket, I applied for a passport at the end of summer and left Anchorage for Europe to look for family members whom I hoped to find in Germany. 
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I'm a third-generation US-born citizen, and my family came to America from the 1860s to just before WWII. Three of my German family did not survive the death camps, but I found one of my uncle's sisters, Charna, in Israel with her daughter, Arelia. Charna survived by living deep in the Youglasavian forest during the war; I lived at kibbutz Ein Gev on the east side of Lake Tiberius (Sea of Galilee) for about two years before being drafted into the US Army in late 1968. In the Army, I served as a medical sergeant in a small airborne unit (5th Special Forces), including Vietnam and other deployments in the early 1970s. 
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When I was discharged from the Army, I had forgotten how to be a civilian, so I lived 30 miles up Rock Creek east of Missoula and learned how to tie flies and fly fish. About once a month, I would drive to Missoula for supplies and laundry and buy used books, mostly classics on philosophy and poetry. When I began university, it was with a GED. When I finished my first years on campus, I had two BAs with honors in anthropology and English literature. Years later, I would graduate with a master's and a doctorate in education. My military persona is gone, and I still don't know how to be a civilian. But I still read used books, tie flies. I am blessed with two amazing daughters, grand and great-grandchildren, and an incredible, loving, caring, brilliant, hard-working, educated wife, who also retired from teaching as a special educator at the master's level. I am, essentially, an English teacher, a father, a husband, a good friend to a few people, and a welcoming man to those I met and those I know as neighbors. Life is good. 
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(More to be written...)
 
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