Chapter 2

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the rose! That Youths sweet-scented Manuscript should close.
- Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaìiyaìt of Omar Khayyaìm, 1879

2
I was raised very well. Early on, my existence was, if anything, a culmination of Grandma’s house, Oreo cookies, ballparks, snow forts, smiling faces, and occasional far off destinations (Hawaii, Disney World, London, Paris). It was from within the folds of said experiences that a burgeoning young mind, wrought like a kitten with a variety of interests, came to exist. From baseball to Beethoven, lesbians to Les Miseìrables, Bird to Bach, tennis to Tchelitchew, vandalism to Van Eyck, masturbation to Mozart, hand jobs to Hamlet, and still today, golf to god, kayaking to Kant, and sex to… well, sex… I was enthralled with the world around me – a sponge. Anyhow, somewhere along the way, one of my fascinations became my family, or the history of, that is….

As it turned out, the further I delved into my ancestry, the further I realized what a mutt I am. Nabokov would have likened me to a tossed salad. Unfortunately, even an image as innocent as that, in the euphemistic lexicon of contemporary America (USA, that is. I, like most U.S. citizens am in the habit of thinking of the United States as the single composition of all of the Americas), can imply an undesirable and somewhat repulsive image. Quite like America itself, if you think about it. We are all Romans – look at the people around you sometime, you’ll see what I mean. We dress ourselves up in pretty clothes, we drive around in our SUV’s, and we sleep comfortably each night knowing that our home security systems are hard at work. We have become such slaves to our wasteful ways that we no longer realize how fortunate we are. Perhaps that is what initially drew me so strongly to her. She was an occasional, brief escape from the darkness of the imitation of the real world that the real world around me had become. Say that three times fast.

And so, the interested young man that I once was, left home… abandoned his nest in search of all of those things that had compelled him for so many years… and what did he find?

Her.