The short story about me is that I was born in Washington, D.C. three blocks from the White House at the tail end of the 1960s, and spent my early childhood in the Virginia suburbs. When I was eight, my parents separated and my father moved to New York City. I would visit my dad every other weekend, and came to feel the city was my second home. 

My visits continued through high school, when I’d moved to a small rural town in Pennsylvania where my mother had found a job teaching at a university. The contrast between quiet small town life on weekdays and the ruckus of Manhattan on weekends was simply a fact of life for me, but was one my friends at school found exotic, and for a few, hard to believe.

I started college at an architecture school in Chicago, transferring after a year to a small liberal arts school in rural Ohio. After graduating, I made my way to New York to work in book publishing and marketing, settling in Brooklyn, where I met my wife. When our second son was born, we left the city for New England, spending five idyllic years in Concord, New Hampshire. Work ultimately drew us back to the New York area, and we moved to the New Jersey suburbs where we live today.