Detours: Think being a teenager is tough? Try being a first generation immigrant who becomes a teenager in America and your parents are old country and old school. Think about generation gap, cultural gap, and inadequate language proficiency to express yourself. Then think about 1964, when white girl marries black boy and stays married for fourteen wonderful years. Follow that with a marriage to an intellectual elite twenty-eight years older, whose mission is to play the role of Prof. Higgins to his young wife. Too bad he died too soon. There's much more I could have learned from him. But I'm on my way to a good education. Then follows the marriage to a man twenty years younger. It was never meant to be, except that thirty years later it's still going strong.

Lots of detours from life's main highway are the teachable moments that compel me to write.