Anchorage Reunion

Laura and Heather doing a tour of Europe as Curtis (Heather's husband) concludes a sanskrit conference in Oslo. Curtis, who received a free-ride Harvard PhD on the subject, is a professor at Univ of Virginia and at the very top of his niche field of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism study. He tells me the conference was a real geek fest. I bet. Curtis made his name discovering a 12h Century Hindu poet who had been lost across the ages and languages.

Curtis and I discuss the Buddhist caves of Beziklik, which Sonnet and I visited in '97, in Central Asia on the northern edge of the Taklakan Desert.

Laura and Heather, meanwhile, grew up with Sonnet in Alaska as teenagers. Their father an IBM salesmen who was stationed in Anchorage for six years before returning to the Lower 48. They attended the alternative secondary school, Steller High, which attracted the eccentrically smart or oddly misplaced (school tagline: "based on the philosophy of responsible freedom, personal initiative, and individualized education").

Today Laura is a primary grade teacher at Manhattan County School on 85th and Columbus, across the street from my 2nd NYC apartment. The school founded in 1966 during the Civil Rights era as an independent progressive school with equality, social justice, and diverse community and from the inspiration of Martin Luther King, Jr. It all fits together.