The story about me, apocryphal or not, is that I could sing before I spoke. My parents went into bedroom one day and there I was standing in the crib singing God Bless America.
My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met.
At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum.
Most children turn out badly because they have the wrong parental image. This doesn't mean their parents are criminal. It means they are boring and cruel.
I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.
This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman.
I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape - jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I'll never forget.
My parents were so poor when I was a kid, I never went anywhere. I take our youngsters with us because I don't know anything that teaches them so much.
