The summer of 1989 was a strange one for me.

Read more... )
Twenty-six years ago today, my father died.

It feels odd acknowledging this anniversary today, because time has worn away at the emotional pain and shock I experienced the night my father died. On the tenth anniversary of Dad's passing, my family took out an In Memoriam ad in the New York Times, which Mom appreciated. Today, Mom is also gone, and in a way posting here is much more of an acknowledgement of this momentous anniversary than taking out an ad in a newspaper.

I tend to think Dad was a fascinating person. He was born in December 1929, in the wake of the stock market collapse, and so grew up during the Depression, which affected his outlook for the rest of his life. When he was almost ten years old, he attended the 1939 New York City World's Fair, and fell in love with the visions of the future it presented. He graduated as valedictorian of DeWitt Clinton High School (which was in Manhattan at the time, I think) and started college at Columbia, where he was editor of the college newspaper, The Spectator.

But while he was in his teenage years and World War II was raging, news of the Holocaust came to the United States. My grandfather was a rabbi, and my Dad grew up in a religious household; but the Holocaust caused him to lose his faith in God and to break away from religion.

On the other hand, he felt a strong connection to the Jewish people. In the 1940s he ran guns to the nascent Jewish state of Israel, and then he dropped out of college, never finishing, in order to smuggle himself into Israel and fight in the 1948 War for Independence.

Dad was dedicated to journalism and newspapers. He used to like to quote Thomas Jefferson, who once said that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers. Dad spent his life working at a whole variety of newspapers in New York City. In the midst of all this, he married his first wife, Evelyn, and had two sons, my half-brothers David and Daniel. Eventually, Dad and Evelyn divorced. He met my mother Eleanor, married her, and had three more sons: Jonathan, Michael, and Joshua.

By the time I knew him, Dad had been working at the New York Daily News for many years. In 1990, the Daily News unions were locked out and so once again went on strike against the owner of the paper, the Chicago Tribune Company. Dad was in the Newspaper Guild union office twenty years ago when he collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead at St. Claire's Hospital. My brothers and I were in the Boston area at the time -- Jon in medical school, Josh and me in college. Jon and Josh were on a train home already because my father's mother had just died the day before, and they were going to NYC to be with my Dad for her funeral. We had no way of knowing that on Sunday, November 4, we would attend one funeral after another, with print and TV reporters gathered with our friends and family, the media there to report on my father's death as another tragic story.

My father was a strong believer in justice, in supporting the powerless against the powerful. Two months before he died, I marched with him in the NYC Labor Day Parade. The Greyhound bus drivers were on strike, and Dad – who always kept an eye on family finances – donated money to their fund without blinking. After he died, I found among his personal papers articles he had clipped about a Mohawk tribe in upstate New York struggling to get a piece of land back from the federal government. Dad always shared stories like that with us, to remind us that the fight for justice was a neverending battle.

Dad had been a reader of science fiction and comic books when he was growing up; by the time I knew him, he mostly read mysteries. But he inculcated in me a love of science fiction, and my one regret about my own writing is that he never got to read it. But his spirit infuses every word I write.

Yom Kippur begins tonight, and I haven't really had the time since Rosh Hashanah to contemplate what that should mean for me spiritually. What with my current schedule at work and the other usual chaos in my life, I've mostly only been able to plan for the basic necessities of keeping the holiday and the associated fast. (Truth to tell, Nomi has done more of the planning and preparation than I have.)

However, there's another way I've been looking at it, which is that I actually spent much of last year (on the Hebrew calendar) getting ready for Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, and part of the tradition is to seek forgiveness to those you have wronged (and to grant forgiveness to those who have wronged you). In general, we should all strive to be better people each and every day, but the Days of Awe leading up to Yom Kippur is specifically called out as a good time to do this. Many people during this time post general statements asking for forgiveness from those they have wronged.

I took this concept a step further last year, and oddly, it was spurred on because of my Harvard 25th reunion. As reunion was approaching last spring, I started to think about some of the wrongs I myself had committed upon friends and acquaintances, especially those in my class. I actually made a mental list and sought out those people at reunion to apologize for things I had done years ago.

I didn't limit my apologies to those classmates, though. I had one high school classmate as well whom I felt I had wrong, so I wrote a letter of apology and mailed it out. But in general, I made my apologies in person to my college classmates.

I discovered to my fascination that although my wrongs had weighed heavily on my mind for these past twenty-five years, almost every classmate found them irrelevant. One classmate remembered the event I wanted to apologize for but she dismissed it. Another classmate didn't even remember what I had done to him, but understood why I apologized and gave his forgiveness anyway. Essentially, I rediscovered the old adage that sometimes the person who commits the wrong is hurt by it more than the person who was wronged.

My classmates literally had forgotten or stopped caring about wrongs I had done to them, and I was carrying the burden of guilt for over two decades.
As it is, there are still apologies I want to make and for all I know, there are people out there to whom I need to apologize but will never realize it. All I can really do this Yom Kippur is my best. But because of my experiences this past year, I think I will be able to once again find some meaning in this holiday.

For those of you who are also observing, have an easy fast and may it be meaningful for you.

How can it possibly be fifteen years ago for something that to many of feels like it happened yesterday?

Exactly fifteen years ago today, terrorists attacked the United States of America. They flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon near Washington, DC. They most likely would also have flown a plane into the Capitol building but were stopped by the passengers of United 93. Almost 3,000 people died that day.

Because I'm obsessed with exactness, I've made sure for a while now to know the exact times of certain events that took place on 9/11. The bare sequence of events at the World Trade Center was as follows:

8:46:26 AM: North Tower Hit
9:02:54 AM: South Tower Hit
9:59:04 AM: South Tower Collapsed
10:28:31 AM: North Tower Collapsed

I'm a New York City native, born and raised in Queens, and I grew up in a city in which the Towers always stood. On 9/11, I was a teacher at a private school in Newton, Massachusetts. The following comes from my journal, a hand-written one that I was keeping at the time.

"The second [staff] meeting ended early, and I went back to the Science lab to check my e-mail. I idly noted a message...which said that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I didn't really think much of it and I went back to the Information Center. Shortly after the meeting...began, [a colleague] walked in and asked if we had heard the news. He told us that two planes had hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and he set up the small TV to receive CNN. They showed pictures of two commercial jets crashing into the twin towers...

"I ran to the phone...to call [my younger brother Joshua] at work. At 9:35 AM I called and got him. He had just gotten in, and he said that he seen the smoke from the 7 train. I told him to stay in touch, but due to circuits being busy, I wasn't able to reach New York City again for a while.

"The rest of the day passed in a blur of rumors and news. I kept checking webpages; when I couldn't reach CNN, checked the New York Post webpage and the Newsday webpage. [I had called Nomi, and she had suggested the second-tier news sites.]

"At 10:15 AM, the...students returned from their physical education class...and...we told them the news...

"When the meeting with the students ended, I collapsed in tears..."

There's more, of course, but to summarize, I spent the day trying to get news of family and friends, making sure they were all safe. They were.

I was scheduled to help teach a kindergarten class that afternoon. They were doing a unit on bears and I had a very large Folkmanis brown bear puppet with me that day. The school had deliberately kept the kindergarten students unaware of the day's events, so when I walked into that classroom, they were all smiles and laughter as they played with the bear puppet I was holding.

The drive home was surreal, knowing that fighter planes and battleships were protecting New York City. Nomi was already home, as her office had sent everyone home early. The rest of my family was safe, but my older brother, an emergency medicine physician, had been called up to report to New York City. Nomi and I took a walk at 5:30 PM, which included browsing at Brookline Booksmith and getting ice cream at JP Licks. Everything on TV was the news; we watched C-SPAN, which was running a feed from the CBC, so we could get the Canadian perspective.

The next few days, the events were fresh in everyone's mind. On Wednesday, I flinched at hearing an airplane in the sky, then remembered that all commercial flights had been grounded, so it had to be one of our military aircraft, protecting us. I bought my regular comic books that day; Adventures of Superman #596 had an eerie panel of the twin towers of Metropolis being repaired. A friend came over that evening after attending a local religious service.

On Thursday, Nomi and I were sick of the news, and Animal Planet had gone back to regular programming. We watched a documentary about moose to help us get our minds off things.

And life went on. Today, I'm no longer teaching, but editing science curricular materials in Boston; my younger brother no longer lives in New York City, but in Eugene, Oregon with his wife and three children; and my older brother is still an emergency medicine physician in the Boston area, specializing in disaster management.

And as all my friends know, there have been other changes in my life. In 2007 I lost my mom. In 2008 I published a book collection of many of my short stories. And in 2009, Nomi and I welcomed two precious and adorable girls into our lives. Being a parent changes your perspective on a lot of things, and 9/11 is no exception. When the attacks happened, I was worried for my mom and my brothers; if something were to happen today, my first priority would be to make sure that my children were safe.

I probably don't need to tell anyone this, but today's a very good day to remind your loved ones, families, and friends how much they mean to you.

Fifty years ago today, the TV show Star Trek was first broadcast in the United States.

Many other people will say much more relevant things than I can about the show. And anyone who knows me is aware of how much this one TV show influenced me. So instead of discussing its influence, I want to share my earliest memory of knowing about Star Trek.

When I was little, my mom had a book that she would read aloud to my younger brother Joshua and me. I wish I recall the title. It was about a little kid playing with toy cars, and on one page, as we were sitting in the living room, Mom read out the following words:

"Beep beep! Honk honk! Star Trek!"

We laughed. What had happened was that Mom knew that my older brother, Jonathan, liked to watch Star Trek, and she had just remembered that it was about to be shown. (This was when it was in syndication on WPIX, channel 11, in New York City.) So just as she finished the sentence "Beep beep! Honk honk!" from the book, she called out to Jonathan, "Star Trek!"

We joked about this for years.

Alas, I don't recall which episode I watched first, or what brought me in. I do recall buying Star Trek books and toys and being a major nerd about the show. As a kid, I owned a tribble. I listed to the Trek records that came with comic books. In high school, I even made one of my classmates put on Spock ears when I was put in charge of doing a play for a class; I had decided we should do a scene from Star Trek. (Mark, I apologize.)

But it all began because my parents knew to encourage our interests.

Live long and prosper, Star Trek. I can't wait to see what comes next.

Thirteen years ago today was the Great Blackout of 2003, which hit much of the northeast United States and parts of Canada.

Read more... )
I'm delighted to announce that in the July 2016 issue of Apex Magazine, released today, I have an interview with Andrew Fazekas, The Night Sky Guy, about his new book "Star Trek The Official Guide to Our Universe: The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages." If you follow the first link above you can find out the rest of the contents and buy the issue for the incredibly low price of only $2.99.

(And you want this issue. I've already read some of the stories in here and they're most excellent.)
Happy Independence Day to my fellow citizens of the United States of America! On this day, among other things, I think of the story of George Washington's letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790. This letter is one of the great American documents, in which the first president of the United States made it clear that this was to be a country with religious freedom for all:

"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

If you'd like to learn more, here are some links:

Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport (from Teaching American History)




This picture is for you, Mom. I wish you were still alive to see it.

You died in 2007, before the historic elections of 2008, 2012, and now (I hope) 2016. You had no way of knowing what was going to come next.

I remember how you told me once what it was like for you as a little girl, growing up thinking Roosevelt was king, and what a shock it was for you and your friends when he died and you suddenly had to adjust to a new president for this country.

Your granddaughters were born in the first year of the first black president. All their lives, that is the president they have known. If all goes as I expect and hope it to, for the next eight years they will know a woman president. For almost their whole childhood they will not have known a white man as president. Given the 43 presidents this country had beforehand, I think that is a remarkable achievement.

Things are still not perfect or equal for women. But...

Your granddaughters are growing up in a world where they will be able to envision themselves realistically in so many more roles than you were allowed to. I remember your stories about fighting to go to Columbia Law School and about graduating in 1964 to find that law firms did not want to hire a woman.

Today, much of this country is posed to hire a woman as president.

And perhaps, one day, that might even include one of your granddaughters.

13055829_10102800160083541_4639387918940259061_o.jpg

"Andrew Eliot's Diary

"May 12, 1983

"My Harvard Twenty-fifth Reunion is next month and I am scared to death.

"Scared to face all my successful classmates, walking back on paths of glory, while I have nothing to show for my life except a few gray hairs.

"Today a heavy, red-bound book arrived that chronicles all the achievements of The Class of ’58. It really brought home my own sense of failure.

"I stayed up half the night just staring at the faces of the guys who once were undergraduates with me, and now are senators and governors, world-famous scientists and pioneering doctors. Who knows which of them will end up on a podium in Stockholm? Or the White House lawn?

"And what’s amazing is that some are still married to their first wives...."

-- Erich Segal, *The Class* (1985)

mabfan: (book-cover)
See that link below? That's a link to the ebook of "I Remember the Future" at drivethrufriction.com. Right now (Friday, May 13) the ebook is $4.99, but tomorrow starting around 11 am EDT the ebook will be their Deal of the Day at $2.50!

So...mark that link now, and grab it within 24 hours of the deal going live, in case you don't have it yet.

In observance of Yom HaShoah, I link to my short story "Kaddish for the Last Survivor." (Continued thanks to Apex Publications for continuing to keep it available for anyone to read on their site.)
Friends:

I'm delighted to announce that I'm running for re-election to the Board of Library Trustees of the Public Library of Brookline. This would be my fifth term if I am re-elected.

As it turns out, though, I'm facing a contested race this year (yes, again). Two challengers have chosen to run along with the four incumbents (including me) who are running for re-election.

Having been on the Board longer than anyone else running this year, and as I am currently serving as chair of the Board (and have been for almost two years), I have the experience our town needs. You can find out more about my experience and accomplishments on the Burstein for Brookline website.

And, as much as I hate to say this, political campaigns cost money. I am once again actively fundraising. If you are so inclined, please visit the Burstein for Brookline Contributions page to find out how to donate. You can mail us a check or use PayPal. Either way, no donation is too small, and all donations help in getting me re-elected to the Board.

Folks,

With only about $850 and 2 hours to go, the Pangaea II project needs you! Anyone who buys my second Tukcerization offer will get TWO names for the price of one!

Follow this link to back the project: Pangaea II.

Want to read what I said about this project when the Kickstarter started? See my blog post: Pangaea II - A New Kickstarter.
It's hard for me to believe, but 60 years ago today my maternal grandfather Louis Cohen died of multiple myeloma far too young.. (On the Hebrew calendar, Louis died on 19 Shevat 5716, so his yahrzeit was a few days ago.)

Sadly, I never knew him. I'd like to share his story.

Louis Cohen was born in Ukraine. I've seen his birth certificate; it's in Russian.

Louis emigrated to the United States when he was around the age of six or seven years old, with his parents, Jacob Cohen & Yetta Sokolovsky, and his younger sister, Molly Cohen. The family settled in Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that was attracting a lot of Jewish immigrants and was considered a nicer place to live than the Lower East Side. Jacob got a job delivering canisters for soda water, and eventually he bought the business. My mom remembered that he made his deliveries driving a green truck.

Although Louis did not know English when he emigrated, he picked it up very quickly. Apparently, as a child he started school in a special class in which the students mostly did arts and crafts. But with his ability to learn English quickly he soon moved into a regular class. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, went on to Pace Institute for two or three years, and became an accountant. He began keeping the books for his father Jacob.

In 1929, his parents bought a house in Flatbush for the whole family, located at 817 East 45th Street between Avenue D and Foster Avenue. On June 1, 1930, Louis married my grandmother Clara Baker in Boston. They were fourth cousins; either their grandfathers or great grandfathers were brothers. After they got married, they moved in with his parents. Furthermore, my Mom's aunt Molly married Irving Bell, a dentist who went to Tufts Dental School, and they also lived in the Jacob Cohen house. Apparently it was not uncommon for a large extended family to stay under one roof for such a long time.

Louis and Clara had two children. My Mom was born in 1936 and my uncle Robert was born a few years after.

Sometime in the 1940s Louis joined the Masons. As he was in his thirties, he was a little too old to be drafted into World War II. In fact, he kept missing the window to be drafted, for which he was very grateful.

Around 1945 Louis joined the law firm of Morrit & Eisenstein and did their accounting and the accounting for their clients. Later on, lawyer Fred Johnson also joined the firm, and the four of them worked very closely together. Mom tells me that Fred Morrit was a State Senator and a songwriter, but I haven't been able to find much information about him, or about Morris Eisenstein.

One thing that makes me proud of my grandfather has to do with his support for my mom. In the 1950s, there was no major emphasis on women's education, but Louis supported Mom's education wholeheartedly. He was very proud of her, and even though he didn't want her to leave home he did support her decision to attend Mount Holyoke college. Mom only spent a year there, though, because soon after she started college Louis died. When that happened, Mom came home and transferred to Barnard so she could live with her family.

Louis died of multiple myeloma at age of 50, knowing that he had helped raise and support two wonderful children. Sadly, both of Louis's parents were still alive when he died. They passed on themselves in the early 1960s, while my mother was in law school.

I remember him.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy, the day when the space shuttle exploded and NASA lost seven astronauts: Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. Their sacrifice is memorialized at Arlington National Cemetery.

For the people of my generation, the Challenger tragedy was our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. Because a schoolteacher, McAuliffe, was on board, many schools had chosen to show the launch live to their students over television. The launch took place around 11:30 AM EST, and seventy-three seconds into the flight, the shuttle exploded. People were confused at first, but it soon became clear that NASA was experiencing what they euphemistically refer to as an LOCV: loss of crew and vehicle.

I didn't see the explosion live, but I still remember that day vividly. My own story is as follows. I was in 11th grade at the time at Hunter College High School. One of our school's Chemistry teachers, Francine Salzman, had applied for the Teacher-in-Space program but not been accepted. So we were all keenly aware of the meaning of the launch.

The school's lunch period took place from 11:10 AM to 12 noon, if I remember correctly, and after eating lunch I went to hang out in the school library with friends. I was sitting in the front area of the library when my friend Christina Sormani walked in and asked if I had heard the news about the shuttle. I said no, and she told me that it had blown up during the launch. I protested that she was kidding, and she assured me that she wasn't.

I realized she was serious and I started to cry. I cried so much that Tina thought I personally knew one of the astronauts. I didn't, of course; at the time, like all of us, the only one I could actually name was McAuliffe. But I was crying for them nevertheless, and for the dashed hopes and dreams of an entire human race that yearns to go to the stars. I knew that this would cause a major setback in our space program; and I could only hope that it wouldn't crush it entirely.

That afternoon, when we got home, there was an ironic coda. My father had been applying to the Journalist-in-Space program, and on that very day we received the postcard from NASA indicating that all his applications materials were in. And years later, in 2003, McAuliffe and my father were my own inspirations as I applied unsuccessfully to be an Educator Astronaut.

Last year, I was part of an anthology called Pangaea edited by Michael Jan Friedman. As I recounted in the blog post Pangaea – The Anthology, Michael had come up with the idea of an alternate Earth in which the supercontinent had never broken apart. He invited a bunch of writers to contribute stories to this new shared world, and we were delighted to do so.

The anthology was so successful that Michael is doing it again. This time, there's a few new voices in the book, and we're working to share our characters with each other as well as the setting. Also, there's some new developments in the world of Pangaea, as can be inferred from the subtitle: "The Rise of Dominjaron." Who or what is Dominjaron? Well, you'll find out in the book...

Personally, I'm planning to continue the adventures of Betsi and Devora from "The World Together" and I'm excited to have them interact with the characters created by my fellow writers. And I'll be writing two new characters, both of whom will be named by people who support the project, as I've offered two new Tuckerizations. Better move fast, though, as the project went live over the weekend and the first of my two Tuckerizations has already been claimed!

The Kickstarter for Pangaea II can be foiund by clicking on the title. You can go there to get a full description of the book and the project, but here's the list of authors who have agreed to take part: Kirsten Beyer. Ilsa J. Bick. Michael A. Burstein. Peter David. Kevin Dilmore. Michael Jan Friedman. Robert Greenberger. Glenn Hauman. Paul Kupperberg. Ron Marz. Kelly Meding. Aaron Rosenberg. Lawrence M. Schoen. Geoffrey Thorne. Marie Vibbert.

Join us as we explore another world, a world that might have been.
Nine years ago today was when my mom, Eleanor Mae Cohen Burstein, died. At the time, I posted the following on LiveJournal and received many, many replies:

Eleanor Mae Cohen Burstein (1936-2007)

She was 70 years old when she died, and I had just had a message from her the day before in which she sounded fine.


I don't really have much to say about her passing today. I've thought about discussing her life a little bit; as many of my friends know, Mom attended Mount Holyoke, Barnard, and Columbia Law School, and in her later years worked as an Administrative Law Judge. She died before she got to meet my children, but she did get to enjoy some of her other grandchildren before she passed on. Although today is the anniversary of her passing on the Gregorian calendar, her yahrzeit was a few weeks ago.


At the time she died, Nomi and I had just joined Kadimah-Toras Moshe, and I remember how everyone came together for us, although many in the community barely knew who we were.


Anyway. I just felt compelled to note her passing, and that I miss her still.
Ladies and gentlemen:

It is my pleasure to inform you all that the KAS Creations Film & Media adaptation of my short story "I Remember the Future" is now available to view on Vimeo's Video on Demand. Click on the title to be taken to the film.

The film is eligible to be nominated for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and (if you're a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) for the 2016 Bradbury Award. (Nominations have already opened for the Bradbury.)

The film is NOT free to view. You can rent it for $2.99 and watch it within 24 hours, or you can pay $4.99 and purchase the film, which would allow you to download it and/or stream it anytime.

I'd like to thank the filmmaker, Klayton Aaron Stainer, for making the film available in this way, thus ensuring its eligibility for the Bradbury Award and a better chance at a Hugo nomination.
Twenty-five years ago today, my father died.

It feels odd acknowledging this anniversary today, because time has worn away at the emotional pain and shock I experienced the night my father died. Fifteen years ago, on the tenth anniversary of Dad's passing, my family took out an In Memoriam ad in the New York Times, which Mom appreciated. Today, Mom is also gone, and in a way posting here is much more of an acknowledgement of this momentous anniversary than taking out an ad in a newspaper.

I tend to think Dad was a fascinating person. He was born in December 1929, in the wake of the stock market collapse, and so grew up during the Depression, which affected his outlook for the rest of his life. When he was almost ten years old, he attended the 1939 New York City World's Fair, and fell in love with the visions of the future it presented. He graduated as valedictorian of DeWitt Clinton High School (which was in Manhattan at the time, I think) and started college at Columbia, where he was editor of the college newspaper, The Spectator.

But while he was in his teenage years and World War II was raging, news of the Holocaust came to the United States. My grandfather was a rabbi, and my Dad grew up in a religious household; but the Holocaust caused him to lose his faith in God and to break away from religion.

On the other hand, he felt a strong connection to the Jewish people. In the 1940s he ran guns to the nascent Jewish state of Israel, and then he dropped out of college, never finishing, in order to smuggle himself into Israel and fight in the 1948 War for Independence.

Dad was dedicated to journalism and newspapers. He used to like to quote Thomas Jefferson, who once said that he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers. Dad spent his life working at a whole variety of newspapers in New York City. In the midst of all this, he married his first wife, Evelyn, and had two sons, my half-brothers David and Daniel. Eventually, Dad and Evelyn divorced. He met my mother Eleanor, married her, and had three more sons: Jonathan, Michael, and Joshua.

By the time I knew him, Dad had been working at the New York Daily News for many years. In 1990, the Daily News unions were locked out and so once again went on strike against the owner of the paper, the Chicago Tribune Company. Dad was in the Newspaper Guild union office twenty years ago when he collapsed of a heart attack and was pronounced dead at St. Claire's Hospital. My brothers and I were in the Boston area at the time -- Jon in medical school, Josh and me in college. Jon and Josh were on a train home already because my father's mother had just died the day before, and they were going to NYC to be with my Dad for her funeral. We had no way of knowing that on Sunday, November 4, we would attend one funeral after another, with print and TV reporters gathered with our friends and family, the media there to report on my father's death as another tragic story.

My father was a strong believer in justice, in supporting the powerless against the powerful. Two months before he died, I marched with him in the NYC Labor Day Parade. The Greyhound bus drivers were on strike, and Dad – who always kept an eye on family finances – donated money to their fund without blinking. After he died, I found among his personal papers articles he had clipped about a Mohawk tribe in upstate New York struggling to get a piece of land back from the federal government. Dad always shared stories like that with us, to remind us that the fight for justice was a neverending battle.

Dad had been a reader of science fiction and comic books when he was growing up; by the time I knew him, he mostly read mysteries. But he inculcated in me a love of science fiction, and my one regret about my own writing is that he never got to read it. But his spirit infuses every word I write.

December 2016

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