My family? Hmmm... what can I tell you about my family?

Well, that's my Mom when she graduated high school, and that's my Dad in his first year of college. We had a little house in Queens, NY until I was 5, then we moved into a great house in Rosedale, NY (which is still in Queens, near Kennedy Airport).

Here's me with my brothers: Mark is the 2 year old with the sippy cup on his head, Chris is the 10 year old right behind him, and I'm the six year old on the right. We were a nice, middle class black family, movin' on up. We were the first black family in our (formerly) white neighborhood, and we tried to be perfect. We got to be pretty good at it, until the cracks started to show.

It's difficult to know what to say in this public forum, so I think I'm going to stop now.

Okay, it's time to say more.

As recently as a 1996, my family was pretty fractured. I don't want to embarrass anyone publicly, so I won't mention any specific acts (including my own) but we ended up pretty far away from either other, ideologically as well as physically.

But a couple of things have started to change that. First is my dad's recent health scare. It looked for a second like he was having major heart trouble, and like magic, the family that didn't seem to care banded together.

And, as cliché as this might sound, the internet has brought us closer together. First my aunt got on the internet, then my brother got on the internet, and now my mother is on the internet. Aside from sending each other jokes, we talk about real stuff and solve problems and help each other out. We talk way more than we used to. It's really cool.

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