This is the opening of a much longer bio I wrote ten years ago.
I was born in the Royal Hospital, the Bronx, New York late on the morning of March 10, 1960. I grew up in Jamaica, Queens County, New York in a development of garden apartments called Parkway Village, a hamlet of two-story brick apartment buildings interspersed with parkland and playgrounds. This bucolic hideaway was originally built exclusively for employees of the United Nations world headquarters in Manhattan. People from the boroughs refer to Manhattan as “the City.” By the time my parents were looking for a place to live, most of the U.N. employees had fled to the City. While the borough of Queens was the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, I grew up in an This is the opening of a much longer bio I wrote ten years ago.
I was born in the Royal Hospital, the Bronx, New York late on the morning of March 10, 1960. I grew up in Jamaica, Queens County, New York in a development of garden apartments called Parkway Village, a hamlet of two-story brick apartment buildings interspersed with parkland and playgrounds. This bucolic hideaway was originally built exclusively for employees of the United Nations world headquarters in Manhattan. People from the boroughs refer to Manhattan as “the City.” By the time my parents were looking for a place to live, most of the U.N. employees had fled to the City. While the borough of Queens was the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, I grew up in an area of even greater diversity with friends and neighbors from many lands.
I am a first-generation American. Unlike most first-generation Americans, my parents immigrated from different countries and met in America. My mother came from Norway. My father came to America from Lithuania by way of Germany. My mother grew up in the remote countryside north of Bergen on the west coast of Norway where my grandfather ran an oil depot on a fjord. Unlike so many my first-generation friends who spoke Greek, Polish or Armenian, I did not learn a foreign tongue from my parents.
My mother told stories of Nazi troops quartered in the family home and British dive-bombers trying to blow up the fuel tanks the family tended. My father grew up on a farm outside of Vilnius, the capitol of Lithuania. He lived through the German occupation and when the War ended, he fled to newly liberated Frankfort, Germany to pursue a higher education. He arrived in the States in 1954 with several of his contemporaries. My mother immigrated to America in 1955 to escape (the man shortage in) post-war Europe. My parents met and married in 1956, and my sister was born in 1958.
My father was the only one of his family to escape the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. Despite the separation in time and distance, from this side of the Iron Curtain, he was able to re-establish contact with his family. He kept up a lively written correspondence with his brothers and a sister. My mother also wrote and received a lot of letters. With all the international mail arriving at our home, I was inspired to take up stamp collecting. Stamps are miniature artistic representations of the landscapes, heroes and icons of every nation on Earth. Stamp collecting, a largely antiquated pursuit today, stimulated my curiosity about art, geography, commerce, history and world culture.
My father worked as an electrical engineer planning wiring diagrams for power-plant control rooms. My sister and I called him Pop, never Dad. He woke up every weekday morning at 5:00 A.M. to leave early enough to get a seat for the long ride on the E-train to downtown Manhattan. While he worked in the City, my mother worked at home as a freelance textile artist. After breakfast, she transformed the dining room table into her workshop. My father was a quiet man, while my gregarious mother proved more adept at adopting the culture and learning the language of her new homeland. After school, I would come home to Mom toward the end of her workday and we talked about our day’s journeys. She showed me her art works in progress and related her triumphs and frustrations while I talked about my trials and travails at school. In the evening the workshop would miraculously disappear into some special dining-room cabinets and the table would be set for dinner.
My parents were old school, old world, hardworking people who didn’t curse and rarely raised their voice. Despite not being very wise to the ways of their new world, they meant well and certainly wanted the best for their children. My parents were culturally conservative, yet not religious. They did not become fans of the great popular music of the era. Despite being free spirits of their generation, my parents were too old to b ...more

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“Creating harmonious, thriving societies will be humankind's greatest triumph and without that--everything else we have accomplished will be for naught.”
― Edmund Mazeika, Blueprint for Local Harmony: A People's Guide to Utopia