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We watched them die slowly and incrementally with both sadness and joy.

They morph and then disappear before us into unrecognizable beings. We hope there's still a connection in them somewhere to a long lost past.

We seek it odd places, like that scar from a misadventure when they fell. It comforts us to see it now as it pained us then to guide them through the ordeal.

Yes.....

They die off into adults like pupa into butterflies and the children we once held and loved are lost to us.

There is still love usually. Different and distant.

Angst and joy, love and agony until they repeat the cycle and only dust of their elders remain does the epiphany come.

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I found this to be quite interesting. As someone who avoids all groups because I don't think anyone has a corner on the truth, I find people who are able to confront their own preconceived notions honestly and take action really because they had an encounter with a group or person they oppose quite an accomplishment.

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Freedom is the freedom to say: Two plus two equals four.

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Great men dream of being ordinary;

Little men dream of being great;

Ordinary men have dreams of their children's potential greatness.

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I discovered I was black in 1969 at a place called Town & Country Day Camp. I was the only black boy and I had exited my bubble into a larger white world which had no tolerance for me. At the time I was just a young lad and had no idea of the cruel world outside of my home. I'm not sure why my parents thought this was a good idea. Just seven months prior Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The inner cities that had burned were just starting to cool off. Yet here I was, the lone black child in the sea of whiteness, except for my sister, left to fend for ourselves.

On the first day my name is stripped from me and I became blackie. I guess that was a step up from nigger because little kids weren't supposed to say that word I guess, especially little Jewish kids. They said I was dirty they tried to wipe the black off of me. The boys gathered around and wiped me attempting to cleanse me of my complexion and make me white. Try as they may, I was still brown and still dirty in their eyes. The camp counselors did nothing to stop this; they just watched. I endured this and similar types of torture for the next two months until I went back to school, back in my safe bubble where there were other kids like me who had brown skin and lived in neighborhoods with people with brown skin.

I recall coming home one day from the camp crying to my mother I'm saying how much I hated white people. She told me that I couldn't hate white people because I would be hating myself because I was partially White. Then she would explain how my great-grandfather was a white man who married my black great-grandmother. She said I would be hating part of myself by hated all white people.

After hearing such a story I would suck up my tears and try to put my anger and hurt and check. Possessing that knowledge would never stop me from wondering why they hated me so. I wondered what sin have I committed for them to persecute me? I am just a child and I have no agency. I did not choose this body nor this color. I did not choose my hair nor its curl. I did not choose the shape of my nose nor the thickness of my lips. Yet I bear these sins so offensive just purely based on how I look that they felt the need to hurt me. It was 1969 and I had just turned 4 years old and I was persecuted for the sin of being black in America.

Welcome to Town& Country Day Camp

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When I was a child I was raped by a guidance counselor. I told no one as I thought telling will be worse than what had happened to me. Being a boy, boys don't do these things with other boys and certainly not with grown men. After all it was considered shameful, such was the social construct then and still is today. I would not risk the incident to be exposed during that era. To complicate matters more my mother had an intense and volatile temper and I had no idea in which way it would erupt if the matter came to light.

As I matured, but still in my teens I began to perform music in the New York City Rock and Jazz club scene. That scene also was full of gay men who saw me as a prize. They would often touch me as I walked in and out of the club or going to the men's room. I was perhaps 15 or 16 years old at the time and these men were in their 30s to 50s. Not all were predators and many were good people who took care of me but the incident still left me a bit scarred.

Years later as an adult I was planning to have a barbecue at my home and my then-wife was planning to invite some dancers and one of the dancers was this man who was flamboyantly gay in a way that reminded me of that trauma. I opposed his presence to my home and I made it clear that he was not welcomed. My daughter became very angry at me and accused me of hating gay people. I wanted to explain myself but I felt she was too young at the time to hear that history and I wasn't comfortable to expose what I went through. She was just 12 or maybe had turned 13 at the time. Shortly after this she began screaming profanities at me we never really spoke again.

I used to go to The view bar in New York City after work. I went there until it closed. It was a gay bar for the most part but a relax place where even if you weren't particularly gay nobody would bother you. I played pool, have a drink and chat with some folks. I'm not sure why I went but I did. I didn't pick up anybody and nobody tried to pick me up. It was however comfortable and it reminded me in some way of the good times I had around gay people when I was young.

With the birth of my second daughter her godfathers were a pair of gay men, a couple actually, friends of my second wife and more like extended family of hers. We used to spend most of our holidays with them until they died one from AIDS and the other from a heart attack. I miss them dearly and I wish my first born could have met them as they were really wonderful men.

There's no real reason for this post other than getting it off my chest. Something I should have said decades ago....