Here’s a brief geographical summary of my life: I was born and went to school in the Bronx and attended CCNY, a few stops away on the D-train. Starting as a biology major, I took Latin to fulfill my language requirement and then, attracted to the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans (as well as put off by the math required for science), I transitioned from north campus to south and majored in classics and linguistics. At the end of my sophomore year, I took my first trip abroad to attend a summer program on the Greek island of Poros.

I spent much of junior year bemoaning my return to drab New York and before the end of the spring semester returned to Europe with no particular plan beyond traveling. Having no money was a bit of a drawback, but I managed to wend my way from Luxembourg down to Greece, hitchhiking and taking trains when necessary. Meeting up with other tapped-out young travelers along the way – it was the era of hippie migrations – I learned that one could earn room and board on an Israeli kibbutz without having working papers, and that’s where I headed.

I had a Jewish upbringing and attended Yeshiva for eight years, but Israel wasn’t high on my list of places to visit. While I wasn’t in any sense a hippie – I was traveling with a valise, not a backpack, had short hair, and hadn’t yet experimented with illicit drugs – I was taken with my fellow travelers’ tales and dreams of seeing such exotic places as Katmandu, Goa and Timbuktu.

I lived on a couple of kibbutzim and then moved to Jerusalem. After scraping up some money, I bought a boat ticket back to Greece and briefly visited a famed hippie retreat, the caves of Matala in Crete. Hitchhiking north through what was then Yugoslavia, I found I had contracted hepatitis. Unimpressed with the hospitals in Zagreb and Ljubliana, I opted for Switzerland instead.

Through the kind help of a doctor at the hospital I stayed at, I worked for the next half year as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital and almost decided to stay in Switzerland and become a nurse. I ended up returning to New York, moving to Brooklyn and finishing my BA degree. From there it was off to graduate school in Iowa, ending up trying to eke out an existence on a five-acre plot of land.

From there it was off to Liberia, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was there my career as an English language teacher began. I got to travel to Senegal, The Gambia, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Never did make it to Timbuktu but got as far as Mopti and Bandiagara. I returned to the US with the idea of spending the rest of my life traveling and teaching English, and to that end enrolled in a program in Vermont to get an MA in TESL. After a brief internship in Mexico and a short-term job in Boston, I embarked for South Korea where a teaching job awaited.

After three years in Korea, I returned to the US with my wife and eighteen-month-old daughter and found a job with an intensive English program in North Carolina. Shortly after the birth of our second daughter, I was transferred to Colorado where we lived for the next two decades. Our latest move, several years ago, brought us to Oregon where we now reside.