Ceisiwr Serith

I have been married since 1981 and a father of a daughter since 1982. My wife is simply amazing; quite easily the smartest and nicest person I have ever known. She has a very successful career as a vice-president at an insurance company and as an actuary, a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. On top of all this, she is cute. I don't just mean cute in a physical sense (although she is). Cute is as cute does, and she does cute. I sometimes wonder how I ever won her.My daughter is, of course, equally amazing. As well as being beautiful (not just my and my wife’s opinion, by the way), she is brilliant. She speaks Spanish fluently, and shows an interest in languages in general that makes me very happy. Like her mother, she has a big heart, but like her father she still can accept some of the hard facts of the world without blinking. I hope this will come in handy in her chosen field of social work. She's a truly amazing combination of the best of both of us, with her own mysterious nature added.I myself was born in 1957, in North Tonawanda, NY, and spent my early years in Tonawanda. These two towns, separated by the Erie Canal (they are, in fact, where the canal really ends, despite what the song says), are delightful reminders of a nicer time. Visiting them is like taking a trip back in time.I didn’t live there long, though, since my father was in the Air Force. We lived in a number of places, including Germany. It was while we were there that I went to Berlin. This was while the Wall was still up, and I was privileged to see it, and to cross it into East Berlin. The contrast between the two was shocking -- the West, a vibrant, colorful, living city, and the East, a city of grey, with rubble left over the WWII, even then in the late 60s. When I was taking classes at the University of Massachusetts years later, I would see Communist students handing out copies of the Daily Worker, and I would want to shake them and scream, "You've never been to East Berlin. You've never seen the Wall."For college I went to Holy Cross, a good Catholic school, where I met my wife. I received a degree in psychology, with a secondary concentration in Eastern religions, in 1979. The fact that after twenty-five or so years my training in psychology is obsolete leaves me with mixed feelings. I am grateful, however, that pyschology majors were required to take a course in statistics. That has stood me in good stead, and I think that everyone should be required to take it, on at least a high school level. We are confronted daily with statistics -- polls, gambling odds, and such -- but few of us really understand them. Many people still believe that if a series of coin flips has come up consistently heads, the odds against the next flip coming up heads are greater than 50%, or that the odds against a shuffled deck of cards being in order by suit and number are greater than those against any other order. Just the other day I read how in a poll the majority of people polled believed in one thing, with the breakdown something like 49/47%, with the rest undecided. A plurality rather than a majority, but it was even worse; the error of measurement was 4%. In other words, statistcally speaking, the question was tied. People should know these things. But I digress.After college I served in the Air Force myself, as a communications officer, stationed in England. (I had gone to college on a ROTC scholarship.) My wife and I developed a love for England and the English, and have been back a number of times. We have even considered living there after my wife retires.I served my hitch in the Air Force and got out. I won't say that the Air Force and I parted on the best of terms, but I know that both of us seemed relieved. My wife and I didn’t like the idea of someone else raising our daughter in daycare, so we decided one of us would stay home and take care of her and the house. My wife wanted to try the working world. Fortunately, I was quite eag