Memory of a past life
I was born at the southern extreme of Megalopolis. Neither of my parents are from the city or the state where I was born. In fact, my birthplace was just a brief stop on my father’s rising career path with a major oil company. He's from metro New Jersey and my mother's from a small farming community in Iowa. They had met in Washington, D.C., at a party for the alumni of a now-defunct liberal arts college in the Midwest called Parson's and were married in a lovely white wedding in small church resting on the southeastern slope of Watchung Mountain in suburban Newark. They seemed to be constantly on the move during their short marriage; my dad had been transferred from York, Pennsylvania, where my sister was born in 1969, to Baltimore shortly before I was to arrive. Then, ten days after I was born, in 1971, it was on to the next stop. We moved on August 19, while I was still on a diet of mother’s milk, to Orange, a historic, rural community nestled in the foothills of the Bl...