When I was nine years old, I wrote to my Swedish great grandmother Emma Olson in Michigan. She said she was astounded that I was so talented a writer; she said I had to consider writing as a career! She had a seventh grade education, and how she knew my talent and destiny I did not know, but my mother’s side of the family knew she had said it, and she was their matriarch. What I heard was her pride in me. It made me feel good, and made me think about what I might do as an adult.

On Dad’s family side, when fourteen I wrote to my musician uncle Dick. He was my model, and I wanted to be like him. In my rural, emotionally subdued environment, Uncle Dick was educated, talented and flamboyant. When he graduated from college his first car was a 1954 two-tone green and yellow Chevrolet. That seemed like flare to me, and what I wanted to be like.

In response to my letter, at the next family dinner he loudly told everyone that I was clearly gifted and could be a writer if I wanted. In Uncle Dick’s eyes, I could also have become famous as an actor or a musician. According to his description of me I was approaching the cafeteria of life with a huge and effective appetite.

All I needed was to continue to prepare myself. Going to college was a given. I started piano with Uncle Dick when I was six, and the clarinet when I was twelve. I took clarinet lessons, and by the time I was a senior in high school I was a student with John Smay, who taught clarinet at the college I planned to attend. In ninth grade I had Bob Dreher as Music/Band Director for my school. He started a Jazz Band and got me to play tenor saxophone for that. I thought he was good, because he was, and as proof he had his own professional jazz band, Bobby Dreher and his orchestra.

A music career took a different path though. When a senior in High School I lost the contact with my Uncle as a role model. Having planned to major in music in college I instead pursued interests in philosophy, religion, business and economics.

The first time I saw my Uncle after I started college we did not have much time to talk, but he was insistent, “Don’t go into music, there’s no future in it!” Though I stayed with the college orchestra (called band in those days) through senior year, I only did it because leader Ward Rounds caught me each opening registration for classes. When he asked if I were signing up for band I often told him I didn’t think so, but he persuaded me to do it. Even though I told him I wasn’t practicing anymore, he said, “But we need you, you’re so good anyway.” Beyond senior year in college I never played again.

Many years and many academic papers later, I sat with my doctoral dissertation advisor Bob Handy. In an early advisory session he said to me, “You have a gift. What you write in first draft usually needs little revision.”

With this in my background, what people had said and all the academic papers of thirteen years of higher education, I worked for years as a teacher and school administrator in New York and spent years in training as a psychoanalyst. This changed at forty when I became the freshly fired Head of a New York City private school.