A Portrait in Places
The Making of a Citizen of the World
Gien, France
It began, as these things often do, with a single audacious decision made at an age when most of us are worrying about algebra homework. Michael left Jamestown as a Rotary exchange student and landed in Gien, a small town on the banks of the Loire in central France — a place of porcelain kilns, medieval bridges, and the measured rhythms of the French provinces. He left American, in the way teenagers are American. He returned fluent, transformed, and already looking past the horizon.
Medellín, Colombia
Years later, it was Medellín — a city in the Aburrá Valley high in the Andes, once notorious and now one of the great urban reinvention stories of the hemisphere. Michael lived there long enough to inhabit the Spanish language rather than merely speak it, to understand the texture of paisa culture, to know the city not as a visitor but as a temporary resident. It was the kind of immersion that changes how a person thinks, not just how they talk.
San Antonio, Texas
Now home is San Antonio — a city that sits at the cultural crossroads of the United States and Mexico, where Spanish and English mix easily on the same street, where the Alamo and the River Walk and the old Spanish missions all coexist within the same few square miles. For a man whose life has been a steady crossing of borders, San Antonio is a fitting place to put down roots. His brother Tim Jr. is out in Arizona, one sister in Roanoke, Texas just up the road, and another sister in Rochester, New York. The rest of the country is a short flight away.
Monterrey, Mexico
Yaamy comes from Monterrey — a city in the northeast of Mexico, cradled by the Sierra Madre Oriental, industrial and cosmopolitan, home to some of the finest universities and most ambitious entrepreneurs in Latin America. It is a city that has long looked both north toward the United States and south into the Mexican interior, and its people carry that dual orientation with grace. That Michael's wife comes from such a place seems, in hindsight, almost inevitable.
"He is our child who opened up the world to us — the one who showed us, by going out into it, that the world was larger than we had imagined, and more hospitable than we had dared to hope."
There is a particular kind of gratitude a parent feels toward a child who has shown them something new. It is not the gratitude owed to a teacher or a guide — it is quieter than that, and more durable. It is the recognition that this person, whom you once held in your arms and carried to bed, has grown into someone who can genuinely widen your field of vision.
Michael did this for his mother and me. Every postcard from Gien, every phone call from Medellín, every Spanish phrase spoken at a family dinner, every introduction to a new friend from a country we had not yet visited — these accumulated, over years, into a different understanding of what our family was. Not just a family rooted in western New York, but a family with reach. A family whose members had business, friendships, and affections on multiple continents.
The photograph on this page was taken on an autumn afternoon at Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia — the kind of setting that feels, to a Western New Yorker, both familiar and slightly elevated. The grass is the grass of our childhood. The light is the light of our own autumns. But the couple standing on that grass represents something we did not plan for, and are all the richer for: a son who made the world his classroom, and a daughter-in-law who brought her own country with her when she joined our family.
Yaamy is from Monterrey, which means she is from a place of mountains and industry and serious food and very direct conversation. She fits in well. Michael is from here but belongs, by now, to several places at once — which is, when you think about it, the most American thing a person can be.
There are moments in a parent's life that invite reflection on what one's children have become. When we reflect on Michael, what we find is this: a man who took a chance on Gien at sixteen and never stopped taking chances afterward, who learned languages the way some people learn skills, who chose to live in places where he would have to earn his belonging, and who in the end chose a partner whose own life is a crossing of borders.
The world is larger because of him. And so are we.