In the spirit of Columbus Day minus the theatrics over whether Columbus really discovered anything at all, I have a few things to say about my path to becoming a writer. Given what many of you have read on my blog over the past few months, it would be safe to assume that mine was hardly an easy journey to writer.

But it did start early. I was eleven when I first got the bug. My sixth grade teacher asked me to submit an essay for a city-wide competition for sixth, eighth and twelfth graders in Mount Vernon’s public schools. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote about, something about current affairs and race. It was ’81, still a time when many folks thought that racism and all of its ugly legacy would soon be at an end. I finished second in the competition, which was hosted by the local newspaper, the Mount Vernon Daily Argus (it no longer exists, replaced by Gannett Suburban Newspapers in the ’90s). I won $15, got my name in the paper, and went to A.B. Davis Middle School on the day I finished sixth grade to receive my award. But not before also introducing a future city council member and mayor at my elementary school graduation earlier that day.

In the summer that followed, I decided to write a book about the top secret weapons of the US military. I spent most of July and a good portion of August looking up information on the latest technologies in airplanes, tanks, submarines and missiles, hoping to find something that hadn’t already been reported on by the media. I also contacted the Defense Department to get pictures of their latest pieces of hardware. Even though I’d only sent a handwritten letter to “To Whom It May Concern,” I actually received a response that included pictures. Of the M1 Abrams tank, the B1 bomber, the F-15 and F-16 fighters for the Navy and Air Force, and the MX missile. Interesting pictures, but not exactly classified.

After about fifty pages of writing, I lost interest in my project. School and my first days in the gifted track magnet program known as Humanities was about to start. My studies of Hebrew and the Torah, the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, had begun to take over. And my mother had given birth to Yiscoc (pronounced Yizz-co) at the end of July, giving me a second younger brother and more responsibility.

Many of you who’ve been reading know some of the rest of the story. After a year of domestic violence and abuse at home and near outcast status in my nerd program, I almost completely forgot about the writer I’d wanted to become. Instead, my focus was on survival and making it to college by any way I could. I remember times in middle school and high school when a four-page paper seemed like an impossible task. Yet almost every teacher I had told me, “Donald, if you’d work a little harder, you could be a really good writer” out of complete astonishment. I took their words as a sign of insult, of an inability to understand that a child under the constraints of poverty and abuse couldn’t possibly “work harder” as a writer. Plus, as I told my AP English teacher during my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, “I don’t want to be a starving artist like Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson.”

So I spent my teenage years and most of my 20s in denial about my gift and the “discovery” that so many others had made about me. I went into the University of Pittsburgh with the ability to write in a sophisticated manner combined with the way I wrote when I was eleven. It was good enough to get me through my classes without making any improvements at all. Fortunately for me one of my instructors took an interest in me as a writer, took the time to point out my “colloquialisms” and “extended sentences” or helped me in formulating better arguments. I was grateful for the help, but didn’t think about it as a sign that I was born to write.

The re-discovery of myself as a writer began where it had gone off track, at home in Mount Vernon and with the end of my mother’s marriage to my stepfather in ’89. It was the end of the threat of violence and the need to live my life for me instead of for my mother and younger siblings that drove me to take my old writing from ’81 and ’82 and merge them with my memories of the more recent and chaotic past. I spent a significant part of my junior year at Pitt journaling about witnessing my mother’s abuse or my own experience with it, about running away from home or about being a Hebrew-Israelite. I took my first class in Black Studies because it was a literature class. I attempted to also take Creative Writing, but I could never get into the class because every student on campus seemed to beat me to the punch.

Then I got lost in the academic for about eight years. I saw myself as “an historian who loved to write,” I said on my occasions to my obnoxious professors and cut-throat fellow grad students who couldn’t believe that I wrote as well as I did, at Pitt and at Carnegie Mellon. One of the professors on my dissertation committee said, “You might want to think about a career in journalism,” what I considered an insulting response to my well-written and highly analytical thesis on multiculturalism and mid-twentieth century Black Washington, DC. I was determined to be a professor, to be a scholar and an intellectual (more on why the two are different later). Yet I also knew that something was gnawing at me, at my spirit. I knew deep down that something was struggling to come out and that I wouldn’t be happy until I knew what this something was.

The third age of discovery happened nearly eight years ago. My one-time literary agent asked me to take my erudite manuscript Fear of a “Black” America and make it more accessible to the non-academic reading public, especially since I wanted to reach them. I felt insulted again, but realized that she was right. “Therefore”, “thus” and “indeed” were all too much a part of my vocabulary, along with the standard 40-plus word compound sentence. In rewriting sentences, paragraphs, even entire chapters, I re-discovered my original calling. “I’m a writer who happens to be an academic historian,” I said to my wife one day in the spring of 2000. It had taken nearly two decades, but the person I was always meant to be had finally and fully surfaced.

I’ve wondered ever since if I waited too long to become a successful writer, if it would’ve been better if I had gone after this calling ten or twenty years ago. Or maybe I’m just a late-bloomer, that really all I have to hope for are a few minor and significantly underread publications in obscure journals or magazines. Life is what it is for each of us, where each one of us opens or closes a door to things, dreams, nightmares that can define us or destroy us.

Yeah, it would’ve been nice to have gone after Boy At The Window as a book in ’92 instead of ’02. But I know that at twenty-two and only three years removed from the terror of my childhood that I wasn’t ready to take a long hard look at my deep scars and the people who caused them. At thirty-two and years removed from those mama’s-boy years, I could stare at the abyss of my past and then take it apart, bit by bit, and put it back together again.

I’ve been a practicing Christian now for 23.5 years, a Christian in response to living with the dead, repressive and bizarre Hebrew-Israelite religion between the ages of eleven and fourteen. It was a conversion born out of desperation and a sense of hopelessness. For whatever reason, I needed something and someone to believe in who couldn’t and wouldn’t betray me, wouldn’t let me down as an imposter of some sort or another.

It all came to a head on my fourteenth birthday, December 27th of ’83. After a mugging incident and my Humanities classmates treating me like a real human being for a couple of weeks, I found myself in more despair that what had become normal over the past year and a half. Combined with my stepfather threatening to beat me up again because I allowed four boys to jump me at night and steal $13 from me–this despite defending myself vigorously for about three minutes before one of them reached in my pocket to take the money–I was just tired of feeling alone in the world.

That day, my birthday, was to be the day I would attempt to take my own life. I thought about two methods really. One involved getting hold of a samurai sword and committing seppuku, or suicide by ritual self-disembowelment. I certainly felt ashamed enough. But it was too messy, too painful, too much for skinny me. The other was an elaboration on my earlier thoughts of jumping off the bridge on East Lincoln that connected my part of Mount Vernon to Pelham. The Hutchinson River Parkway ran underneath.

I went down and around this stone bridge that cold and hazy afternoon. There was a path, a hiker’s walkway under the parkway and a pedestrian bridge that went under the overpass, crossing the Hutchinson River (really a stream at this point of its run) into Pelham. I looked at the bridge height sign from that spot as cars flew by on the parkway. It read “13.2 feet.” Then I walked from the river and made it back up to the bridge. I looked down at the cars underneath as I put myself, one leg at a time, atop the short stone wall, meant to keep young kids from falling off the bridge I guess. As I stood there, I kept thinking “What do I have to live for anyway?” Tears started to well up as I continued to look down at the cars zooming by on both sides of the four-lane parkway.

Then I had thoughts. And having any thoughts at all, especially thoughts of anything other than suicide, will short-circuit any attempt to kill yourself. One was of the remote possibility that taking my life could actually hurt someone else, my mother, my family, maybe even my classmates or teachers. A second, even more sobering thought was that I could survive the thirteen-foot jump. Only to be run over by a car going at fifty or fifty-five. And I could possibly survive that, too. But I could end up brain-damaged or paralyzed or a vegetable in a coma. There were too many risks involved to just jump off the bridge. For a few seconds I stood there, lost and not sure of what to do next. My next thought, my third one, was that maybe, just maybe, this is what hitting bottom really feels like. Maybe something good for me and my life was just around the corner. Maybe if I hold out a little longer, I’ll find a reason to live my life and live it well. My fourth thought brought me to Maurice. “Wouldn’t that be the best revenge, that I overcome every situation in my life and become successful? Wouldn’t making the ultimate comeback from the edge of the cliff be better than ending it all now?,” I thought.

With that, I got down from the stone wall and went on a long walk through Pelham before going home. I spent the rest of my time off going through everything I could find at home and at Mount Vernon Public Library about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three major religions west of India as I saw it. I wanted to know once and for all how to situate myself spiritually. I didn’t want to wake up at thirty only to realize I wasted another fifteen years, ready to commit suicide again. I picked up an old Bible we had in a storage bin underneath my bed. I went to the library to compare Biblical text with the Qur’an. I read key Talmud scriptures that matched up with key Islamic ones.

Two revelations came to me from these exercises. One was that there wasn’t much of a difference between Islamic and orthodox Jewish law. The other was much more significant. Forgiveness and redemption wasn’t automatic in either belief system. You had to go through some form of ritualized spiritual purification to gain Jehovah or Allah’s amazing. You had to earn your forgiveness if you were a Jew, a Muslim, or a Hebrew-Israelite. Messing up even in the smallest of ways left you on the spiritual outside looking in for a connection to The One. It was like being disconnected over the telephone with no way to dial back in except through a holy day of atonement.

In reading the Gospels, it started sinking in that Jesus’ life was about providing a path for each of us to gain unconditional and unearned forgiveness, including me. I read the New Testament at home late at night so that I wouldn’t get caught venturing into forbidden scriptures. Somewhere between Matthew and Mark I found myself, maybe for the first time, realizing that I’ve been searching for someone to save me. From myself, from my family, from a life without meaning, from a life of hell-on-earth, and certainly from an afterlife without my proper place in it. I was finally in a place where I felt like I could turn myself over to my God, possibly through Jesus.

But I wanted to be as sure about this decision as I could be. After the last few years of watching my mother, Maurice and Jimme make so many horrifying and almost fatal ones, I wanted this decision to be more correct that any 100 I’d gotten on any test. I wanted my potential conversion to Christianity to feel as good as I did the day I served as the introductory speaker at my elementary school graduation. And above all else, I wanted to be at peace with my decision so that if anyone asked me about the Hebrew-Israelite thing again, I could respond to their questions—and their questioning of my decision—with honesty and good information.

It took four more months of research at Mount Vernon Public Library and using my Afro-Asian History and Literature classes to explore different religions before I became a Christian. Despite my wildest expectations, my life didn’t immediately get better. It would be another three years before I went off to college, and another five before my stepfather would be out of our lives.

But I did learn something about the need to have something, someone to hold on to in my mind and heart in order to–as Jesse Jackson would say–“keep hope alive,” to invest my faith in. I wasn’t ready to put that kind of unshakable faith in myself, and every person of authority in my life had proven to be unable to live up to the minimal expectations of food, clothing, shelter, security or love that I had. For me at least, becoming an atheist would’ve meant giving up on the idea that someone out there had a vested interest in me succeeding and surviving this life, that my life was indeed worth living. While my faith and my relationship with God and Christianity has had its ups and downs since April of ’84, the lesson of the importance of hope and faith to make my life worth something hasn’t been lost.

Authenticity–otherwise known as “keepin‘ it real” for those of us whom are Black and into such an idea–is itself a dangerous and disingenuous concept. There’s a big difference between “being yourself,” as the more common saying goes, and “keepin‘ it real,” as Dave Chappelle demonstrated in one of his hilarious skits from his now defunct show a couple of years ago. “Being yourself” requires all of us to trust in ourselves, our abilities, our quirks and ticks, our very nature of living and being. It requires all of us to relax, to be okay with ourselves when others in our lives are less than accepting of the qualities that make us who we are. “Keepin‘ it real” is more like a gettin‘- somethin‘-off-yo’-chest attitude, one that allows us to speak our minds when we’re angry or upset or lustful. It can empower us to take life on in the spirit that others approach us.

But keepin‘ it real doesn’t allow me to relax, to truly be myself. If keepin‘ it real is only about having an I’m-not-taking-no-crap-from-nobody attitude, then it’s not a standard I’d call authentic. Sure, I tend to keep my BS quotient monitor on so that I can sniff out crap in my life. But I don’t think that this is a Black thing, a way to show how Black I truly am. There are roughly 40 million of us in the US, which in my mind leaves us with at least 40 million ways to be Black. Each one of us can listen to hip hop and enjoy country music or hard rock. I can love Zane or Michael Eric Dyson and read Eric Schlosser or Kurt Vonnegut. Most importantly, I can can keep it real by being real with myself, by being who I want to be.

Of course, this isn’t such a problem for me these days unless I decide to hang out at a club (this is rare with a wife and a four-year-old, by the way) or when I talk with someone–Black, White, Latino or otherwise–who thinks that Blacks should sound “Black” all the time. But it was much more of a problem during my Boy At The Window days. It’s hard enough as a tween or teen to figure yourself out without the added pressure of how to be Black by the time you grow up. My refusal to act anymore “Black” than I obviously was made for few Black male friends. For whatever reason, Black women seem more accepting of each other’s quirks than young Black men.

It was a sin for me to listen to music by White groups like Tears for Fears or Wham! (which is playing right now on my iTunes). I sounded “White” because I could say words like “specific” or “pontificate” instead of “pacific” or “preaching” without sounding like I was former NBA star Moses Malone. I wanted to be White because I was part of a gifted-track program while in middle school and high school. I had to hear all of that and much more in the years before college, and to a much lesser extent, during my college years.

It didn’t matter that I was an active member of a Black group on campus at Pitt or that one of my minors was in Black Studies for some. I couldn’t “speak truth to power” as well as others because I sounded too much like the oppressors who were running Pitt. Of course, that all sounded like BS to me. College isn’t something any of us are forced to attend, and while campus leaders were frequently unresponsive to our demands, we sounded so irrational at times that I thought we couldn’t communicate our calls for inclusion and diversity without sounding like we needed rabies shots.

It was in the midst of those PE (Public Enemy) and Michael Bolton (yeah, I went there) times that I realized that I couldn’t live my life well unless I made my own independent and conscious decisions about how to be myself, even if it did mean risking the occasional ridicule among the folks who just wanted to keep it real. I decided that folks weren’t worth putting up with if they didn’t like how I sounded when I opened my mouth or if they thought the way I looked at the world was too White for them.

As for my music, well, that communicated more about who I was and am than almost anything in my life short of my belief in God. I’ve always liked a bit of everything, from The Bee-Gees and Anita Baker to Sugar Hill Gang and Geto Boys, from Billy Joel and Phil Collins to Maxwell and Luther Vandross, and from U2 and The Police to Earth, Wind & Fire and Terrence Trent D’Arby. If anyone went there in more than a mild joking way, that’s likely one of those times where I decided to keep it real.

Obviously this is a theme in Boy At The Window. It’s impossible to understand my transition from Mount Vernon to Pittsburgh, from high school to college and independent living without understanding how I saw myself as a young Black man. This struggle with authenticity was one that absorbed much of my first year and a half at the University of Pittsburgh. I can only say that my conscious decision to see much of this conception of Blackness as BS was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. My life would be far less interesting, vanilla even, if I’d decided otherwise.

Tonight is the start of Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement for religious Jews all over the world. Even though I haven’t been a Hebrew-Israelite for nearly twenty-four years now, I still remember my Yom Kippur days at temple in solemn prayer and the days before in endless fasting (which is a great way to save money on food if you have to stretch every dollar like my mother did, by the way). Shalom to everyone who understands the significance of atoning for their sins and looking for a way to reconcile with Yahweh.

As for me, the beginning of the end of my Hebrew-Israelite days started the day my stepfather attacked my mother (see my blogs from June and July 2007 for more details), Memorial Day ’82. But it wasn’t until Yom Kipper in September ’83 that my search for my own higher power began in earnest. I missed a day of school to go to temple with a bunch of hard-looking, salt-and-pepper bearded men for several hours of kneeling and praying in Hebrew, a language that I didn’t know more than ten or fifteen words in. All of the men were dressed in their Afrocentric garb and wearing yarmulkes, having fasted for three days before making the journey to temple to atone for a year’s worth of sins. All that was missing was the sacrificing of an unblemished lamb, the ritual rendering of its body and its burning as an offering to the Lord of Hosts.

Then it hit me. What in the world have I done in the past year that I needed to atone for? Masturbation? Fighting a guerilla war with my stepfather over my right to see myself as someone he couldn’t control? Telling my mother that she should’ve had an abortion three months before the birth of my only sister? I uttered the words I needed to for atonement for these sins, but I realized that I didn’t care and surely didn’t believe in what I was saying. I felt that I had every right to fight to live my life, to survive my situation as best as I could, since Jehovah had abandoned us and saddled us with this asshole as a pretender, a charlatan of a man with no moral center.

And where were the women, the folks who cooked and cleaned and worked so that these men of Yahweh could gather in the One’s house and be cleansed temporarily of their transgressions? Worshipping in a separate room or at home, I guessed. My recent experience with abuse and my knowledge of my stepfather as a abusive adulterous liar and general SOB left me questioning the whole Hebrew-Israelite. By the time we left temple, I realized that I didn’t believe anymore. The whole Lost Tribes of Israel thing wasn’t exactly bullshit. It just stank of rotting intestinal flesh to me.

It took months of personal study time and my ninth grade Afro-Asian History class to keep me from becoming an atheist. Learning about Eastern religions and being able to see the big three belief systems of the West (Judiaca, Christianity and Islam) through a fresh set of eyes soon led me back to God. I realized that what I’d been looking for since my stepfather had come back into my life in ’81 was for someone or something to save me. I was seeking redemption, someone or something to tell me that I was worth something and that my life meant something of value to others, to this world or the next. It took seven months, but I became a Christian out of the simple need to have someone to look to as a shining example of personal and spiritual redemption.

That’s not to say that Yom Kippur is useless or is a crock. Yet for me, carrying around the weight of my sins and the sins of my parents and guardians proved to be too much. I needed (and still need) to have a higher power, God, the One in my life where I could take my sense of hopelessness, my feelings of disillusionment, my wounds of betrayal and give them up for hope, for peace, for love and faith, for the strength to carry on. One day a year for atonement, at least for me, is not enough. Not if redemption can only be granted once a year.

I’ve made it a rule as part of my weekly blog about Boy At The Window to not mention the names of folk who serve as character in my manuscript (family and the deceased are generally the exceptions that I’ve made). Today I’m breaking this rule, for no other reason than the fact that the person in question may in fact already be dead. I don’t do this without some internal conflict — I would prefer for my characters to remain anonymous. But one way or another, I need some answers around this missing person.

Her name is Brandie Barrie Weston. She would be thirty-eight years old, an African American woman about five-seven and overweight. She would also be severely mentally ill, homeless, and missing for the better part of the last five or six years. During the course of Boy At The Window I attempted to locate Brandie for an interview. Only to discover most of the facts listed above. I spoke with her mother about two years ago, who told me that she was either homeless in New York City, had gone south to Atlanta, or was wandering somewhere out west.

About a year and a half ago, another interviewee and former classmate had informed me of a couple of Brandie sightings by him and a couple of other folks in New York in 2003 or 2004. I interviewed one other classmate, this one in March of this year, who said that he’d found classified ads that Brandie had placed in an indy rag in Los Angeles, ads that rambled on about “the oppressor” and how she was a “foster child” (not true) and a multiple degree graduate of the “University of Homeless Services.” I stopped my search after that interview, realizing that even if I found her, the illness (likely schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) would likely make it impossible for me to interview her or even hold a coherent conversation.

Three weeks ago, another former classmate called to tell me that Brandie was dead. She’d received this information via email as part of an email chain that went through three or four other people. There wasn’t any real evidence in these emails, not a newspaper obituary or death notice, not an article from the police blotter of a body found or anything to confirm the rumor. I said that I would check into it.

Since then, I contacted another classmate, one that at one point in life was Brandie’s best friend, who then went through the email chain himself and declared her dead. I also contacted the L.A. County Morgue, an emergency homeless shelter for the mentally ill in Santa Monica, traced Brandie’s travels to L.A. and Berkeley/Santa Cruz, and discovered that she was in a band as a backup vocalist prior to and at the beginning stages of her homeless wanderings. Yet none of it gave me any evidence that she was alive or dead. I’d contact her mother, but I knew from my phone conversation with her two years ago that she’d know less about Brandie’s current existence (one way or the other) than I do.

It’s truly sad in so many ways. I first met Brandie a bit more than twenty-seven years ago, before we became classmates in our gifted-track program at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon. Our’s wasn’t anything close to a friendship. We met because Brandie’s mother and my father Jimme were drinking buddies. On the day we met, me, Jimme and my older brother were at Brandie’s place with her mother. As Brandie walked into her bright and yellow apartment, idiotic me said, “Wow, she’s fat!” Not exactly the best first thing to say to a girl in the beginning stages of puberty. She was beyond pissed off with me for years after that. It wasn’t until high school that we even became weak acquaintances. This despite having bumped into and conversed with Brandie’s mother and Brandie’s older sister on multiple occasions throughout those years.

There are a lot of things I remember about Brandie. Her infectious laugh and smile. Her off-center creativity. Her love for music — which I assumed she picked up from her mother, a great singer in her own right — along with the arts in general. Her contrarian attitude toward Mount Vernon High School and its hundreds of cliques. Most of all, I remember her saying to me, “You’re such a pessimist, Donald! You need to be more optimistic about life.” Brandie said this to me all of the time in our last three years of high school. It suggested that I needed to be more like her, that I needed to take the things that happened to me less seriously than I actually did at the time.

The last time I saw Brandie was in August of ’93, yelling out of the back of someone’s beat-up Chevy something or other near Gramatan Avenue and Hartley Park in Mount Vernon. She seemed happier than she was at the end of high school. I was in the middle of a family visit and getting geared up for my third year of graduate school, this one being my first at Carnegie Mellon. I waved at her, realizing that she hadn’t changed much since the first time we had met.

I wonder whether anything I ever said to her, including the “Wow, she’s fat!” ever affected her outlook on life. Or was it years of insults about her weight, her face, the constant comparisons with her sister, her mother’s slights and anger, her college life or the everyday unfairness of this world that triggered her downward spiral? All I know is that somewhere between ’87 and ’07 Brandie traded in her optimism for depression, that she preferred the life of a mentally ill wandered minus meds to the lifelessness that comes with anti-psychotic medication. Or maybe she didn’t trade in her optimism after all. She left for L.A. in the hopes of making it, despite the awesome odds against her. Either way, I hope to find her soon.

in 2001, the not-so-famous day before you-know-what, I was a tired and disgruntled assistant director of a social justice nonprofit project en route to Atlanta for a 2 pm meeting with some hotel folks at the Emory University Conference Center. I was doing a short one-day trip to run reconnaissance in planning a winter retreat for the folks that we funded. For the trip I only packed one-pair of everything casual and wore a suit on the flight in, went from the airport to MARTA rail to a cab to the meeting and then to my hotel in Buckhead.

I was in the middle of five weeks of insomnia caused by my neurotic worker-bee self, my idiotic and paranoid boss at the time, and by my family in Mount Vernon. I had learned about a month before that my seventeen-year-old and youngest brother Eri had knocked up his girlfriend back in April or May. She was due to make my high-school-dropout-of-a-sibling a father — and my mother a grandmother for the first time  — in January. My mother was going nuts over this reality, and wasn’t exactly pleased with me for having turned off the money faucet for her and my siblings at 616. My then boss had run me into the ground with travel and projects all during the spring and summer months, with my only real break my honeymoon with my wife in Seattle in May.

The honeymoon might as well have been five years ago on September 10th. I was mentally preparing myself for my next move. I wanted to quit my job. But I also knew I needed to get my family off my back. So I also decided to do a family intervention, to confront my mother and siblings about all that was wrong with our lives and with our family. I wasn’t sure about doing this, about possibly and permanently damaging my recently strained mother-son relationship.

Yet I was tired, T-I-R-E-D of the demoralizing weekly telephone calls where my mother would say “Tired” with a sigh that seemed to have come from a dying zebra whenever I asked her how she was. I was tired of pouring money into a bottomless pit of laziness, not on my mother’s part. Of my younger siblings, one was a college dropout after graduating with honors from Mount Vernon High School — this after having been labeled mentally retarded in kindergarten. Two — including my youngest brother — were high school dropouts. Eri had spent two and a half years in ninth grade. And my only sister Sarai was an eighteen-year-old little girl, having been completely infantilized by my mother. My older brother Darren still wallowed in his miseries, the result of a kid being placed in a school for the mentally retarded for fourteen years after teaching himself how to read at the age of three.

Then I woke up the next morning around 8 am, went downstairs to the hotel restaurant, came up to my room just before 9 am and turned on the Today Show. I saw the one tower on fire, heard the cries and assumptions about terrorists and thought it typical media hype. Then I saw the second building get hit. I was in so much shock that while watching I continued to pack my bag — not that I had much to pack — as if my noon-time flight was actually going anywhere. After catching the MARTA train downtown and hearing that all flights had been grounded — except for the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family (okay, I didn’t find that one out for a few days) — it finally hit me that my nation, my world was under attack. As soon as I got back to my hotel in Buckhead and re-checked into my room, I called my wife and my older brother Darren. My wife had just gotten home from her job, four blocks from the U.S. Capitol. She also had an adventure getting back from her office that morning. Darren was a mail courier who delivered almost every day to the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers. I didn’t hear from him for four days because the telephone lines were so jammed.

I was stuck in Atlanta for three days. I couldn’t so much as rent a car or take an Amtrak because of the attack and the immediate impact of grounding the airplanes. I ended up getting back to the DC area by Greyhound, a most unpleasant sixteen-hour experience. I was on a bus with White guys who wanted to beat up a South Asian man because he “attacked our country.” There was this constant sense of senseless coming out of the mouths of the passengers all trip long about “kicking some ass” and “nuking them.” And then I woke up in time to see the damage done to the Pentagon by the third airplane attack as we crossed the Potomac into Washington. I was mad, but not just at the terrorists. I was pissed because I knew that our acquiescence to our government’s ridiculously one-sided foreign policies with regard to the Middle East had contributed to this ridiculously vicious response.

As an obvious consequence for me, I didn’t do my family intervention for several months. My insomnia continued for another six months, complicated with images of my first home, the New York City area, seared in my mind’s eye. But when I did do the intervention, I’d had nearly half a year to think about what to say, time to allow my anger and rage to be channeled into suggestions for my younger siblings to live. My relationship with my mother hasn’t been the same. It was really nonexistent for a couple of years, but it has gotten better. Eri’s since finished his GED, learned how to drive. Unfortunately, he also joined up with Uncle Sam as a Army reservist and is serving in Iraq. My other brother Maurice is almost finished with his associate’s degree, and my sister moved to Alabama with friends in order to live her life.

These events influenced my decision to write Boy At The Window sooner instead of later. I realized that later may in fact be too late, that if I waited too long I would be cheating myself of the opportunity to help others, to influence the hearts and minds of those who’d been abused by life or family or friends in some way or another. These events also helped me to understand that victory and defeat in our lives aren’t absolute. They can’t be. For if each of us are true to ourselves and to the lives we choose to live as fully as we can, we have to be prepared for success and for challenges, and ready to accept that those closest to us may or may not be ready to turn their own lives around, even with your help.