I turn 37 tomorrow. It has also been 24 years since my dad died......

With the death of Ari, I am headed for what appears to be a surreal, sad birthday weekend. But, amazingly enough, I have been here before! My birthday is March 4, 1970. I was born in Roanoke Memorial Hospital in Roanoke, Va. My sister Lale, now Lale Lovell, was born in the same hospital almost exactly four years later on March 17, 1974. My childhood birthdays were very happy ones. I remember my Aunt Mulhime (who died in 2003) coming from Istanbul and my uncle Ilhan (who died in 2000) both coming to our apartment in the little town of Zonguldak Eregli in the Western Black Sea part of Anatolia for my 8th borthday in 1978. (We lived in Turkey for two years from 1977-79, so my father could work at a Turkish plant for his employer, G.E. I was not born there as some people assume) Sadly, all of that changed five years later, when my dad died of a massive heart attack at our Diamond Road home on March 4, 1983, my 13th birhtday. It is an experience which remains unsettling to this very day. In a strange twist of irony, my stepfather Ralph Wright, who I did not get along with until the last few years of his life, died on my 26th birthday from complications due to a heart attack. I was attending Radford University at the time, and I was at a total loss of how to handle the situation and the coincidence. There have been some good things that have happened on my birthday over the years. I remember taking a road tip on March 4, 1994_ my 24th birthday, and I ended up in this desolate town called War, Wv. For some reason, it was a trip which resonated with me for many years. I even wrote a popular newspaper column about it. And, I actually started my job at a weekly newspaper in Woodstock, Va. on my 29th birthday (well, it was a happy day at the time!) I suppose there is some sort of surreal connection between birth and death, like the connection that Robert Frost made between fire and ice. But, I will be damned if I can understand it. I suppose it is reasons like this that make fundamentalists turn to religion, and I turn to David Lynch movies.