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And the honour and distinction of the individual consist in this, that he among all the world’s multitudes should become a source of social good. Is any larger bounty conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find that by the confirming grace of God he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men? No, by the one true God, there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight. ‘Abdu’l-Baha
“Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.” and “It is clear and evident that all men shall, after their physical death, estimate the worth of their deeds, and realize all that their hands have wrought.”
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This picture was taken in O’Fallon, Illinois, and I’m guessing 8th grade. O’Fallon is where my parents finally divorced. The Beatles and Rolling Stones entered my life, and sports and a few close friends my happiness. I see the problems at home in my eyes. My mother and father fighting. My father moving to a bachelor apartment. My mother fighting with Sandy when she returned from dates with her future husband.
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In New Delhi with Lua in my arms, visiting from our home in Kandy, Sri Lanka for the dedication of the Lotus Temple.
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Here I look happy and Lua looks happy to be with me. We were living in Sri Lanka and attended the opening of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Delhi. I remember Lua at this time as being very close to me. Aileen used to say she was my favourite, and she didn’t like that. I had no idea that soon after this picture was taken Carolyn pretended to go on vacation with the children to her sisters home in the States, and called me to tell me she wasn’t returning. This started the process towards my first divorce. I had no idea in this picture that it represents the end of a normal, natural relationship between me and my first 3 children up to that point in their lives. Although for years after the separation and divorce I fought the idea that the relationship with my children was over, I lost the fight to distance and an ex-wife that believed that ex-husbands loose their rights to fatherhood.
The decisions that I made (with Carolyn) in the early 1970s were unaffected by the defection twenty years later. I still only want to serve socio-economic development, and live a Bahá’í life of service. I eventually found Svitlana, another story later in the memoire. We celebrate our togetherness year after year with the eyes of people who have lived through disappointments. What a miracle, we say, out of the whole world, we “found” each other. Who could have foreseen it? It must have been fate all along! We just had to wait for the soviet union to break up, and a Russian daughter to anchor me to the region. And, our relationship gets better every year.
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This picture is in the mountains of south-west Virginia, during my undergraduate years at Virginia Tech, prior to my marriage to Carolyn Hayes. Carolyn took this picture. A couple of years later, not far from where this picture was taken, Carolyn and I enjoyed our “honeymoon”, hiking and camping in the mountains surrounding Blacksburg, Virginia. For more than 10 years I was faculty at 4 different land-grant universities in the States (although part of this time I was outside the US). If I had stayed in the states, I would have chosen to be associated with one of these universities.
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This picture was taken by Beverly Sher, in Guta, Ukraine. Beverly spent a couple of months with me after her husband died, and before I met Svitlana. Later we met in India where she and her husband engaged in the study of the Vedas, practiced brahmacarya, and travel in the inner circle of Swami Paramanand Giri Ji.
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The last part of my professional career was with the International Finance Corporation (private sector branch of the World Bank). When I was encouraged to social-economic development work by John Huddleston, I never could have guessed that at the end of my career I would be a senior staff member in one of the Bretton Woods Institutions like him, and enjoy my pension from the same group.
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