Through the wisdom of the gods and the randomness of fate, I was born the middle child to an eldest daughter and a youngest son. The first a healer of hearts and minds, and the second a man for all seasons.

If your pater was DaVinci, we could compare notes. Mine, was a mix of methods and modes. A curious stringbean of a man, who had wandered the streets of the Bronx as a boy, with a camera and who believed that science was sacred and that scientists were the brahmins of the twentieth century. He was a photographer, who captured on film the emotions of the great depression and the people and their war torn cities during the second world war. He tried his hand at sculpture making art from twisted wire or sheets of tin. He designed and built a piece of furniture based on form follows function a concept he had witnessed in the halls of a museum in Manhattan.

We first lived in a little house in a little town near the Ramapo River. A place where I grew to five in the glow of my not-much-older, adoring sister.  A sister who loved me like I was a child of her own. The family picked up and moved to a town further north. There the family grew to five. I now had a tag-along younger brother who joined the fold. With city folks for parents, I learned country ways. Spending my time hiking the trails in the mountains above the mighty Hudson, and picking apples for spending money.   I loved riding the countryside, first on a Schwinn and then on an elegant "English racer" with three speeds. I still had to push the bike up the two-lane roads that circled Storm King Mountain but riding down with the wind blowing through my unhelmeted hair was the thrill of a lifetime.

My first best friend was as different from me as night is from day, but as neighborhoods often do, forged us together in the cauldron of our youth.