I was born in New York City in 1949. As a youth I grew up in Queens attending public schools.

My father, a dentist, and my mother, a schoolteacher, had weathered the depression. My father had to wait seven years between his first and second year of dental school becoming a shoe salesman to pay for his return. My mother’s parents lost their house and moved to an apartment during those years.

They both instilled upon me the need to get an education and have a career that people needed. When I told my dad I wanted to be a writer he laughed “who ever heard of Jewish writer?” he declared.

My parents gave me a choice of careers: lawyer, doctor, or dentist. Being good at science, I choose medicine. It wasn’t easy to get into medical school in 1970. It seemed like every Jewish child in New York wanted to go to medical school. I didn’t get in my first try. I received forty rejections, one from almost every state in the Union.

After spending a year as a night orderly, emptying bedpans and removing the dead to the morgue at a local hospital, I was accepted to the Medical College of Wisconsin as an alternate, number thirteen on the list. Just two weeks before the term started my number came up.

Four years leader I graduated with honors. My Internship at the University of Pittsburgh was a year without sleep. You didn’t even have time to eat. I can remember eating the untouched breakfast of a man who had just died when I was making rounds. I still can see the nurse’s expression when coming out of the room; she couldn’t fathom how the dead man had eaten his breakfast.

Moving on I completed a residency in ophthalmology at New York University, and while studying for my board exams and deciding on a place to practice went up to Monticello, New York. My brother, also an ophthalmologist, rented me his office two afternoons a week to use.

And that is where my book, Eyes Of A Different Color, begins. After Iris’s death I moved back to New York. I was an hour outside of Manhattan in Sullivan County. There were few people to date where I was. Personal ads were the means before computers to meet a woman.

I placed one in New York Magazine and a beautiful co-ed at New York University answered. She was taking a course in sexual variations and as part of her assignment replied. Although Caroline never intended our meeting to be anything more than a two-page written report, we started to date.

I don’t know what she saw in me, especially when she and her mother visited my apartment and saw mushrooms growing out of the rug due to excessive dampness. Her mother started to cry. I guess the mushrooms weren’t edible.

We married and I started my career as a solo practitioner. There ensued a long and costly battle to get hospital privileges. Even though I was board certified, and an honor graduate, the local doctors restricted competition by denying access to the hospital for new doctors.

I was too stubborn to leave and sued the doctors and hospital. Eventually, I got approval but could never feel any “love” towards my fellow physicians.

Caroline and I have one daughter, now twenty-eight years old. After some thirty years in Middletown, New York, I retired and we moved to Williamsburg, VA. I love history and collect Civil War memorabilia of which I have written a dozen published magazine articles.

Caroline hates history and thinks Colonial Williamsburg should be razed for a Bergdorf Goodman department store. I think she may regret giving me her real phone number back in 1984, but love doesn’t always follow reason.