I was born on June 9, 1951, in the good old black-and-white days, when Kodak had yet to pump rosy red into the cheeks of infants. My photograph album shows a smiling, brown-eyed cherub with bushy hair spiking on the top of his head. My hair never curled, so to this day, I have straight limp hair. But enough of that. I've shown you my baby photos -- now I'm embarrassed. Until the late fifties, Dad and Mom lived with their three children in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I was born. I was the second child -- a year younger than my big brother, and five years older than the so-called little one. We three boys enjoyed a country-style childhood that included prancing after butterflies and bees, catching tadpoles in a jar, and learning to live the bilingual life. Yes, until five, I spoke mostly French. My mother was a WW2 war bride. My father, an army private attached to the mopping up forces in Europe, went overseas after the conflict ended, but arrived early enough to meet my Mom. She was a Resistance agent who had just been released from a German prison in Munich. They married in Paris, and moved to Massachusetts in the late forties. I awoke to the world probably between the ages of three and five. Unlike many people who claim to have no early memories at all, for me there was John, to show me the way, and to serve as a living example of what to do and not to do. We were pals throughout childhood, and even into our teen years. John was "Jean" then (pronounced something like jaahn)), a Frenchy just like me. He was someone to babble to, someone to share confidences with, and someone whose being so enveloped mine as to serve as an alter ego. He was in charge of explanations. He was the guy I liked to fight with, because, all told, if he held me down and demanded surrender, he wasn't keen on humiliating me. Deep inside, Jean was a softy, and still is, a loving man rather than a hateful one. Jean was thin, and I was chunky. He was the talented one, and I was the practical one. He was a companion to share the quiet moments of the night with, before the opiate of sleep swept into my arms and legs, and dragged me into unconsciousness. And he was there, at five in the morning, aching for breakfast, and always ready to play creative games. Between the ages of five and twelve, Jean and I were constantly together. I feel his presence beside me still. His life has been very different from mine, and we haven't spent a whole lot of time together, but those growing years sway the balance of my feelings perpetually in his favor. His sympathy for me is the feather stroke that propels my belief in others, and to an extent, continues to guide my ability to love. David was younger than me by five years. Trailing the pattern of behavior set by Jean and adjusted by me, David must have been hard-pressed to develop his individuality. He did, I suppose, years later, when Jean and I left the nest. Always small, square, and the target of frequent teasing, he grew into a tall, strong, likable man; more kindly and social than his older brothers. Mother raised her three boys in the tradition of cultural self-improvement exemplified by her father and older brother. Her father, Ernest, born to a peasant family in rural northern France, rose by self-application to the position of notary public in the vicinity in which he lived. He married a gentlewoman, joined the military reserves, and retired with an income from his land holdings. Mom's older brother, René, was a self-styled archeologist, an eccentric -- but erudite -- schoolteacher. Mom lived her short forty-two years in the shadow of a great personal sacrifice. During the war, she had joined the French Resistance and been arrested by the Germans. For three years she remained locked up in tiny cells in Belgium and Germany and had eaten the imitation food Germans soldiers gave their prisoners. She traveled in cattle cars and wound up in 1945 in a forteress called Stadelheim in Munich, where she was freed by the Americans. Later, in Paris, she met my father, and embarked for the U.S. She lived in the U.S. until 1966, when she died of a massive brain stroke. But, I fear I'm getting ahead of myself. The first five, seven, or nine years of life before I learned to measure continuity, and to turn off and on again my emotions and attention, were possibly the richest ones in my life. Childhood seems to have formed a whole series of sensations dissociated in time. I remember, for example, the sound of crickets in the dry night air, air that made me wheeze and cough, or the cool, damp flatness of dark night spaces that seemed to yawn the usual dimensions of reality. And there were the soft bristles of my teddy bear sleeping against my cheek, my nightlight, mother's goodnight kiss, and the glass of water she always left on the bed table. Through it all, my brothers and I had a series of house pets, Christmases, and natural disasters; the mumps, measles, and chicken pox; the passage from picture-books to books-with-chapters -- accompanied by my tantrums, as I recall; baths, enemas, and chest compresses; birthdays, spankings, the booming voice of my giant father (well, he was a giant then), phonograph albums, and each Sunday, Roman Catholic mass. My grandparents on my father's side were traditional French-Canadians who gloried in his choice of a wife, and she loved them. They were simple people who emigrated from Quebec in their youth and found a living in America, but never mastered the English language. They only learned enough of it to spoil their French. Outside their house in Springfield, they merrily hailed their English-speaking neighbors and employers, whom they treated with fairness and courtesy, but who lacked a je-ne-sais-quoi -- perhaps a French je-ne-sais-quoi. The world outside was indeed American. Mom, Dad, and we kids knew. Dad, of us all, was the most drawn to things American. He loved American cars, American frankfurters, and American coffee. He spoke better English than French, which gave us a pretext to make fun of him, just as we snickered over the archaisms of our Canadian grandparents. (In French-Canadian lingo, a jacket was a frock coat and a car was a chariot.) At the end of the fifties, Mom and Dad decided to travel to the big city, New York, where Mom hoped to teach in French and get a French education for her children. In the early sixties, we all enrolled in the Lycée Français de New York, a French private school for well-to-do New Yorkers and for a sprinkling of French plain folk living in America. At the Lycée, rich and poor sat side-by-side, with the plain folk often enjoying (as Jean, David, and I did) subsidies from the French government. Nor did it hurt that Mom taught third grade at the same school. The Lycée remains a shining moment in my life, even though I struggled to keep up with its demands, and often felt out of place within its walls. The school was a colonial outpost on the shores of the New World, a beacon wishing to outshine all others. But since admission was based less on intelligence than on affluence or expatriate status, the Lycée was often satisfied with instilling high standards in torpid minds. I effectively sleepwalked through the ordeal, and, in 1969, received a passing grade at the French "Baccalaureate" (the French University entrance exam). The Lycée taught all the subjects in its curriculum in French, with the exception of English Literature and American History. The French government flew young teachers to America to sharpen their wits before they went on to apply for professorships in Europe, and students benefited from their up-to-the-minute knowledge. I, for one, was always pleased to listen to a teacher map out the full scope of a subject, the far reaches of the known and unknown. Later in life, I was happy to remember the ambiguities that puzzled the best minds, and watch as problems were slowly solved with time. At the Lycée, I dabbled in philosophy, which intrigued me because it sought ultimate explanations: "Why am I here?" "What am I doing?" "Where am I going?" "How?" "Tell me, Socrates." "Tell me, Aristotle." "Hey, what do you say, old man?" "Is there a rhyme or reason to life, or is it all a farce?" But my true love was art. I had a moderate degree of eye-hand coordination, and a skill at translating my natural exuberance into pictures. In class rankings, I invariably came in first, second, or at worst, third. Later, I would discover that there were multitudes more coordinated and talented than me, and I would be shamed by the discovery. My life in those days was divided between two social groups -- the society of the Lycée, with its artificial grandeur and its mix of rich and middle-class kids, and the little community of Woodlawn in the North Bronx, where my parents owned a house. At school, many of my friends were the well-heeled sons and daughters of bankers and celebrities, while in the Bronx they were the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants. I developed an inclination to suspect the motives of the mute and speechless masses, inherited from a class to which I didn't belong. Ironically, I never once met a graduate of the Lycée in later life. My mother died one sunny winter afternoon in early March 1966. While taking the elevated subway home, she had a brain hemorrhage, and died a few hours later. I was fourteen, devastated, and I'm not sure I ever learned to accept her death. But, of course, life went on. Like other baby boomers, when I came of age, I felt the whole world must come of age too. My peers claimed we were witnessing the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but I had my doubts. We sang Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'" – but what were they changing into? Jean, with his talent for leading me, introduced me to rock music and the Beatles. And on my own I learned to wear my hair fashionably sloppy. I even went as far as to buy a white turtleneck sweater and a gold pendant with the word "Peace" on it. But the girls didn't like it very much -- nor me. When I was sixteen, my father found me a job at the Bronx Zoo, washing dishes in its cafeteria, and later I worked with him in his auto parts store. With earnings from my weekend employment, I purchased a ten-speed bicycle. As I pedaled to and from part-time jobs, I sang "Nowhere Man," the Beatles song. "Nowhere Man, can you hear me?" Maybe I was the Nowhere Man. But then again, maybe I was just going nowhere at a good clip. Looking back now, the sixties certainly were a muddle for me -- what with my mother suddenly dying, and my father taking over the organization of the household; Jean doing the cleaning; I, the cooking; and little David just cheering us on. To top matters, I couldn't stand my middling status of neither child, nor adult. I suppose I was like someone caught in a revolving door, unable to enter or leave. I was also an in-between son – lacking the straightforward authority and defiance of my older brother, yet lacking also the cheerful submissiveness of my younger sibling. I entered young adulthood unprepared for its rigors. My program of studies at the Lycée suddenly came to an end, and I was forced to decide which way to go. Having applied to Fordham University's School of Fine Arts at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and been accepted, I waffled. Wouldn't it be more interesting to travel to France? Jean, always my guardian, borrowed money from friends and relatives for my flight to Europe. (He had just completed his first year of studies there.) Aix-en-Provence University, a few miles north of Marseilles, France, was offering a program of fine art studies for future art teachers. Would I come? Yes. And I went, I saw, I flopped. The first year at French university serves as a weeding out process. Since higher education is free to anyone with a French baccalaureate, the French university system can hardly manage the influx of crowds of candidates at one time, so it doesn't make it easy for them. I memorized thousands of fine art slides, acquired overnight an appreciation for modern art, and attempted vainly to keep up with my assignments. After a while, I simply gave up, and spent the remainder of the term watching movies, reading English books in the library, and visiting museums. Aix-en-Provence in 1970 was still the refuge of lost souls it had been for the Impressionists and Post-Expressionists. Paul Cezanne, the Cubist painter, wandered the landscape for twenty years, painting cottages, hillsides, and the local bald mountain, la Sainte-Victoire. Unlike Cezanne, I never painted outdoors, or ventured far from the interminable and circular streets of Aix, but I developed, like him, a capacity to tolerate my own company. By summer, I had little to show for my year in France. So I accepted a three-month stint as a counselor at a summer camp in the Alps for the children of French National Railroad workers. Even though I proved useless as a sports coach, the children liked me well enough, and my peers were generally gracious. My counselor's pay barely afforded me an airline ticket back to the U.S. And in New York, I managed to get a low-paying job as a ticket taker at a posh movie theater and to move into a wretched boarding house in Long Island City, Queens. I was one of those youths who, when they reach their adult years, still look like teens, and have trouble being taken seriously by their own age group. My interests were mostly limited to intellectual pursuits, such as reading and painting, and I lacked the self-assurance required to make good friends easily. Those I did make were often misfits like me. To make matters worse, the clothes styles of the seventies usually failed to fit my frame. I was simply too short, square, and chunky for Mod Squad attire. Since I looked the harlequin no matter how I tried to dress, women tended to shun me. But I did appeal to father figures, and Jerome was one of them. He was my roommate for two years during my early twenties -- an elderly, bespectacled, Haitian man, with an amiable countenance and a rare gift for sympathy. Jerome was my trusted friend at a time when I felt abandoned by the whole world. My real father remarried, taking as his bride a young working-class woman who loved him well and loved him long, but who found little room in her heart for his earlier offspring. On the other hand, Jerome nursed my fragile sense of self with his spontaneous and genuine affection. He must be long dead and buried now, but in memory I can still see his rotund form puttering in the kitchenette we shared, inviting the landlady to his room for noisy love-making, or poking his head out of his door, his hair disheveled and his tee-shirt stained, to greet me with a warm smile. In the evenings, before he went to bed, he would pour two tumblers of Chivas whisky, and exclaim loudly, "Tu veux un grog?" I joined him in his nightcaps. My pal Jerome faded from my life much too soon. I think I failed to appreciate his qualities and to perceive the neglect and prejudice that made his life hard. He was willing to befriend a young white boy, which made him an object of criticism and ridicule in the predominantly black neighborhood in which we lived, and made me feel that he was attributing to me a value I didn't possess. I see how misconstrued these feelings are today. Jerome was grasping toward a racial harmony that should have been, and may hopefully still evolve. March 12, 2001