On a Wednesday morning in mid-August 1974 my 54 year old uncle died in my arms. I was visiting his family in Southern California, down from San Francisco for a few days, meeting my mother's brother for the first time since I was a toddler. I was supposed to fly back to the Bay Area that afternoon. My aunt had left for work and my cousins were still asleep while I was awake in my sleeping bag on the living room floor. At 8:55 AM I heard a groan and a loud thud, ran to the kitchen and found him on the floor unconscious but sputtering. As I cradled his head in my arms and called out to my cousins he went limp. They tried to resuscitate him while I called the police, but he was gone.

That event, devastating to his immediate family, changed my life too. It felt like the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under me. About a week later I was in a car heading across country, unexpectedly going back to Cornell University for my junior year. I hadn't planned on doing so.

In April I had returned to my parents' home in White Plains from a nearly 8 month overseas adventure, mostly in western Asia and the Indian subcontinent. I had become ill in Kathmandu, and after a couple of bad weeks I went to a local clinic. It was in a rustic crumbling-brick building in a dusty neighborhood, with a sparsely equipped examination room and a dirt-floor waiting room furnished with rough wooden benches. The people I sat with all had advanced illnesses--a youngish man with a softball sized tumor in his neck, a toddler with encrusted skin, a misshapen old woman barely able to walk--and I wondered what they thought of a strapping 20 year old foreigner with no visible ailment sharing the bench. After a brief wait, the doctor asked me a few questions in broken English and handed me a two week supply of pills and said I should be fine.

But I wasn't. I couldn't absorb enough nourishment and I kept losing weight. When I had lost almost 40 pounds I decided to exercise my first-world privilege and return to the States earlier than I had planned and get proper medical attention. I didn't let my parents know I was returning, partly because I didn't want to worry them, partly because I wanted it to be a surprise and partly because after making my way across remote and strange lands I wanted to see what it was like to land as a traveler, rather than a local, in NYC.

For the first leg I flew from Kathmandu to Patna in Bihar State in India. When I boarded the plane in Kathmandu they didn’t mention anything about political unrest and rioting in Bihar. But when I landed in Patna there was a dusk to dawn curfew and I had to either get to a hotel or take a train out of the city. I opted for the train. I took a bicycle rickshaw from the airport to the train station and on the way I saw soldiers everywhere and we passed two dead bodies in the street, students killed during rioting, surrounded by crowds. The train station was claustrophobically and frenetically packed, delays were rampant, and after I finally got on a train it sat about 100 yards outside the station for several hours before it departed. Sixteen or so hours later I arrived in New Delhi, only to learn that some time after my train had left a bomb had gone off at the Patna train station, wounding several people.

I had an open-ended ticket from New Delhi to London on BOAC and I was lucky to get a seat on one of the two flights that week. At the New Delhi airport I was told that the plane had mechanical trouble and I was to be rebooked on a Syrian Arab Airlines flight. I was a bit concerned because Syria was officially still at war with Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and as a Jew I knew I wasn't welcome there. The agents said it was a direct non-stop flight from New Delhi to London and I had nothing to worry about. But once airborne, that plane had mechanical problems as well, and we touched down in Damascus. It turned out great. No problem at passport control and we wouldn't be able to fly again until the following morning so they put us up gratis in a high-rise hotel in downtown Damascus, the nicest place I had stayed in months. I woke up at 5 AM and wandered the streets of the then beautiful city, walking past mosques and minarets under a smoky, sunlit yellow sky for two hours before catching the shuttle to the airport.

In London I stayed in a youth hostel for a couple of days waiting for my flight back to the States and the most vivid memory I have is trying to relearn sitting on a toilet seat after 6 months of squatting over Asian toilets.

Eventually I landed at JFK, took a bus into Manhattan, a train to White Plains, another bus to within a half mile or so to my parents' house, and walked the rest of the way home. I was a sight. I had given up my western clothing, was wearing Indian drawstring pants, sandals, a Nepalese yak wool coat and a backpack, and was 40 pounds lighter than I was when I had left. When I rang the doorbell and my mother answered, she screamed and had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling and it took her several minutes to pull herself together. At that moment I realized how crazy I was to have surprised her and to this day I still feel a little guilty about it.

I saw the doctor the next morning, got treated for a bad case of amoebic dysentery as well as food-borne hepatitis, and spent the next month hibernating at my parents' house, gaining weight and strength. It was the only time I ever drank milkshakes with the intention of gaining weight. But my wanderlust hadn't ceased. So in late May I flew to San Francisco, where some friends from Cornell were spending the summer. I slept on a kitchen floor for a couple of weeks and then several of us found a beautiful house in the Sunset district that we sublet from two high school teachers who were traveling for the summer. It was a cool house, with hand thrown pottery and macrame, hippie influenced but neat and clean.

I fell head over heels in love with San Francisco. I loved the neat rows of well-kept houses, the cycle of fog and sun, the diffuse glow of the late afternoon light. There was a steep hill about a block from our house that had a great view over the Sunset and Richmond districts and Golden Gate Park out to the Pacific in one direction, and Twin Peaks to the other, an ideal pot-smoking perch.

I got a lucrative job for a few weeks painting a couple of empty apartments on Nob Hill, which paid for most of the summer. But mostly I was playing guitar and singing on the streets. I had this romantic notion that if the right guy walked by at the right time I'd be offered a record contract. It never happened of course. I wrote poetry and songs and watched TV, mostly Perry Mason reruns and the news building up to Nixon's resignation. I hitchhiked to LA and back just for the fun of it. On the way back I was picked up by a bunch of hippies smoking pot in a VW bus (yes, really) at an entrance to I-5 in the Central Valley in 106 degree sun and was dropped off two hours later in the Sunset district, where it was 52 degrees; I'd never experienced a weather fluctuation like that. I was living the ideal life of youthful freedom.

My friends were planning to go back to Cornell after the summer, but I decided I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. So I applied to UC Berkeley as a transfer student and got in. Trouble is I wasn't allowed to enroll until the following January, which presented a few challenges. Once our sublet ended in late August, I'd have to find a job and a place to live until I could start my junior year at Cal. I figured I'd go visit my mother's brother's family in southern California for a few days and when I returned I'd start the apartment and job search.

I never got that far. My parents flew out to LA for the funeral and I stayed in southern California for several days. Curiously my mother had stepped into a pothole, fallen and broken her ankle the same morning that her brother died. Turned out that happened at 11:55 AM in New York and her brother collapsed at 8:55 AM in CA, perhaps simultaneously. An uncanny coincidence.

When I returned to San Francisco after the funeral I was still in a state of shock. The idea of being alone, finding a job and an apartment, and just having the energy to persevere felt overwhelming to me. So a few days later, I was in the backseat of my roommate's car, zipping across the vastness of America with a long-haired Belgian Shepherd's head resting in my lap. A week later we were back in Ithaca, school was just starting, the chill of early fall was setting in. My life had taken a new direction. It was one of my first lessons in how a single event can profoundly change the course of our lives forever. The next year I met my wife-to-be Terry and my now lifelong friend Steve. The rest, as they say, is mystery.

Photo: Back at school, circa 1975