My late father (RhA) teased me for bucking trends that most young man my age would take. He told me, "People start a family with two but you started one with four!"
What would a new immigrant do when the duties of fatherhood literally materialize overnight to care for a family and in a brand new country where the INS is not the friendliest of governmental agencies one would ever want to deal with?
A string of jobs had to begin, a fight for citizenship had to commence, and of course the drudgery of life renders all of us oblivious to the fact that death is grinding its way a picosecond at a time in an inevitable indefinite integral. For the uninitiated, the seconds we live add up to seconds we approach death. This summation that has no definite known boundaries is what math geeks would drily call an indefinite integral.
Heh, what a newlywed couple like us is to worry about? Ricki (RhA) and I were like teenagers then; we were approaching things as immortals. Sure we were from the get-go poor; a jobless immigrant Physix student and a special education student who just happens to be a supermom of two beautiful children. We were typical idealistic hippies who were determined to enjoy life and raise a family one way or another! Luckily for us, the grand parents generously allowed us to live in the home Ricki was living in at the time without rent to pay. So, odd part time jobs that deal with cash only were possible for me to undertake beside my PhD studies at MSU. The stipend I got as a TA coupled with the paperboy delivery and the carwash jobs, we were barely managing as a family. Love and unflinching belief in the goodness of fate were the antidotes that kept us moving forward. Love of one another, love of children, and love of life, as bitter and as harsh as it was for us then, did not stop the sensual lovemaking nor the childbearing! We were a children-making machine and a positivity-churning engine!
Yacin was born, a definite new inflection point and onto Act 3...
Note: This act was completed on 07/06/20.
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