My grandfather (seated with pipe). Germany, 1943 T here's a beginning to things. A starting point. A place we look at and say, "Ah, that's how that began." For me, and my life, the starting points are fluid and change with my evolutions. I was born in a country that no longer exists. West Germany. Post World War Two the world was still wounded and afraid of a powerful, unified Germany. The West was, well Western, under the occupation of the United States, Great Britain and other Allied nations. East Germany was under the thumb of the Soviet Union, walled off from the Free World. Nuclear War was the ever-present threat, and the two Germanies were the big speed bump of the Cold War. Good times, good times. I toddled around Bavaria in the early 1970s. A child of two cultures - American and German. The irony that grandparents on both sides did their measured best to snuff one another out wouldn't occur to me until much later. My father was an Army Soldier, too, and ...