70 is the new 60. Or was it the new 80?
Candidly, sometimes it feels like both.

I am publishing this book in celebration of my 70th Birthday. "Celebration" is a relative term. As in, "Better than the alternative."

Most of us have had the experience of waking up, looking in the mirror, and saying, "Holy crap. I've turned into my father/mother."

As a byproduct of both my good luck in living to 70 and my dad's bad luck in dying at 62, a glance in the mirror now generates the thought, "Holy crap, I've turned into an OLDer version of my father."

70-ish. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "So it goes."

When my dad died, I found myself wondering about who exactly he was when he wasn't my father. Undoubtedly, he had an existence independent of that identity, an existence of which we all were largely unaware.

We don't imagine our parents as kids. As stupid teenagers. As young parents. Per Field of Dreams, as someone with their whole lives ahead of them. Trying to fill in these blanks was one of the drivers behind writing Immigrant Secrets. And now, with more sand in the bottom than in the top of the hourglass, that was also a driver for this book.

At different points in life we are all both victims and empathizers. We all have stories. We all have traumas, either personal ones or inherited ones.

We all have birthmarks.

And so Happy 70 to me. Maybe I'll add to this over time. Or maybe not.