I’ll never forget the day I left Kingston, Jamaica for Brooklyn. After all, an airplane is a pretty crazy concept for a little kid whose feet had only ever left the ground to scurry up the trunks of mango trees. But there I was in a big metal tube, hurtling across the sky. And if that wasn’t mind blowing enough, I was soon walking out of JFK airport and into a frigid New York November night. Prior to this, my understanding of cold weather was a rainy day in which the temperature dropped below seventy-five.
But things got even freakier when we went to visit a cousin in the Bronx and I was led underground and onto a train that shot through the earth at top speed, before making its way onto airborne tracks on the Manhattan Bridge. A few days before, I was among the clouds. Now, I was beneath the earth.
Through one of the train windows, I spied the twin towers of the Word Trade Center. I don’t think I’d ever seen a building in Jamaica taller than three stories, and now here I was, looking up at two glistening silver structures that stretched so high, they seemed to connect earth to sky. Who built them? Man? Machine? Or monster? Who lived or worked in them? I was mesmerized. It was possible to get into some kind of moving contraption and almost instantaneously be transported to the most magical of places. My mind was blown. My imagination ran wild. I think it was then that my love of travel, and of storytelling was born.
Like many children of Caribbean immigrants, it was decided, prior to my birth, that I would be a doctor. And I almost made it, until junior year at Syracuse University, when youthful curiosity got the best of me. Soon, I was on a detour to, of all places, Hollywood, where I would associate produce a Showtime documentary on the history of Black musical stars in Hollywood, and script supervise multi-camera television sitcoms. Script supervising, combined with the outbreak of the Coronavirus, led to the creation of the ZoopLoop stylus tether, with a fellow script supervisor friend. It keeps you from losing that digital stylus of yours that you spent all that hard-earned money on. And we were granted a U.S. patent for it. Isn’t that just crazy? This little Jamaican girl. I had thought patents only went to people like Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla!!!
Last, but not least…writing. For me, it’s akin to breathing air. Along with the novels, I’ve published some travel articles (including on the blog page), and a short story. Other than that, I live for the Yankees, and am always in search of the perfect Old Fashioned. Cheers. And thanks for stopping by.