A little about my family...

Let me tell you a little bit about my father...
When he was born in Rangoon, Burma, his grandmother dedicated him to the thunder god. I don't think he's paid his respects since then, and I'm not sure he remembers how to. Either way, he's always been a little "touched." Last year, for example, he was on the 20th floor of the Merchandise Mart, where he still works. Going down the stairs, he landed badly and twisted an ankle. From the groundfloor to the twentieth level there are a lot of stairs, and, with an injured ankle, the cement flights become a dangerous gauntlet. To make things worse, he was in a service section of the Mart, where almost nobody went through. By chance, though, a stranger happened to be passing through, and helped my father down to where he could be treated. The last words he told my father were, "You're lucky. There must an angel watching over you."

But that's not where his stories begin. His stories begin in the country of Burma, or Myanmar as it's called today. A mystical land, it seems to me, where you could reach up into the trees and pluck ripe mangos from the branches, fly kites in the sun until you're a deep mocha brown, and make monkeys fall, inebriated, from the canopy above you as you lead elephants through the forest.

Ah, but I err. One of those is my mother's story, and another is my mother's grandfather's story. Only one ofthe previous paragraph is of my father.

So, let me tell you a little bit about my family...