Like all of you, my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. We ate sweet potato pie and jellied cranberry
sauce straight from the can with smiling and subservient red folk. We brought
civilization from the East Coast westward to ever more barbarous lands until we
reached San Francisco, which was, strangely, already here and already quite
civilized.
Like almost all of you, I also came from somewhere else
entirely. In my case, my father
immigrated from a small shtetl-like Greek village in the heart of Asia-minor; my
mother’s family from Sparta, the only town in Greece to resist 400 years of
Ottoman domination, primarily because it was so hard to get to and nothing grew
there anyway.