My parents always said that we came to the US from Cuba in 1962 carrying nothing but the clothes on our backs. And that was true enough. But even then I knew that they also carried with them emotional and psychic scars that shaped a world view which colored my own emerging sense of the world around me. The stories they told my siblings and me were not only of the loss of their home, business, and dreams, but the loss of a birthright to a tropical paradise of incomparable beauty. And they carried a worried sense that their best days were now behind them.

As a child of five, I had a passion for learning - English came easily to me. Much harder was adapting to a new role as family translator and interpreter of both English and “Americanism”. My parents feeling isolated and rudderless necessarily turned to my elder brother and me to communicate with strangers and, as importantly, to help them make sense of their new environment. This role, the natural preserve of parents, placed grownup burdens on us as kids. I was lucky to learn early on the importance of this responsibility and to appreciate the satisfaction that came from fulfilling it.

My parents’ loss permeated my early years in this country. This sense of loss kindled in me a fear of the fickle nature of life and a yearning for security, even while their reliance on me gave me the confidence to assert myself. This conflict between desiring safety and pushing to take risks has at times been a balancing act and, at others times a leap of faith. By choosing to become an architect, a portable profession, I hoped to guarantee that I would always have a practical set of skills that I could practice regardless of language or locality. By coming out as gay in my mid-twenties I dared to hope to become myself fully, regardless of the family and societal obstacles I was bound to face.

I have often wondered what my life in Cuba might have been if my parents hadn’t made their life-changing decision to emigrate. And who I would be today in that alternative scenario. I will never know of course. But what I do know is that more than anything else I received from my parents, their brave decision to start over with nothing in a strange land is their legacy to me, and as Robert Frost wrote,” it has made all the difference.”