My grandfather (seated with pipe). Germany, 1943

There'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 had been to Vietnam to help them become the shining democracy the US knew they kept stuffed deep inside. Americans have always been helpful that way. Cuba, Indonesia, Korea, Panama, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria have all waited for their freedoms to arrive at the end of countless rifle barrels. And still - for some fucking reason - they resisted! 

My mom was a gorgeous blonde whose father had been a Military Intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht during the war. It must have been quite a special feeling for the conquered German to welcome his new G.I. son-in-law into his family. 

So, I was born into some crazy times, in a changing place, with loving parents who hoped that somehow my future world would be better.

By the time I started school the reoccurring theme of my life surfaced. With Pop being in the military we tended to move. A lot. in fact, I did my kindergarten year of school not just in three different countries, but on three different continents. I may well have been the only kid in the world who enjoyed Nutella, Wonder Bread and kimchi sandwiches. 

Travel and immersion into various cultures is a natural state of being for me. I feel far more comfortable being among people that I can learn something from, in places I've never seen before, than I am sitting in one spot for too long. This has become the defining thread from which my life's fabric was spun. To set foot in 36 different countries is a neat feeling, but to have shared a meal with strangers at a streetside food stall, or to take cattle down to a creek for a morning drink with Maasai herders, or share a sleeper car with a Chinese grandmother and granddaughter who force fed me snacks and tea, or to be held at gunpoint in the dead of night in not one, but four separate countries is the stuff that really shaped me. 

It wasn't just about traveling for vacations, either. I didn't get wanderlust as much as I hadn't ever known the feeling of being "home." I think I was trying to find where I truly belong. 

That's my starting point - the origin story. I'm a citizen of the world, and a storyteller with a shit-ton of stories to tell.