My Passion

I was a bit disappointed that the Soviet Union’s spy in the sky was just a puny small light in the clear night sky of October 1957 as my family watched from near the farmhouse. Moments later when I looked again. Sputnik was gone.

I remember the first rose that I planted with my mother’s help in a small garden plot next to the farmhouse as I was growing up in southern Queensland. It was Red Radiance, with deep red buds that opened into a rounded ball of petals and a delightful perfume. I was about 10 years old. The moment when the first blooms opened and I knelt to smell was one of my first experiences of beauty. I know that because it created in me a desire for more.

“Dad, what’re they doing?” My son Erik stood by my side while we waited for my wife Joan, my daughter Tara and four- year-old Ivan, to catch up with us. They jumped off the last terraced step. The engineered trail emptied us from the tall bluffs to the ocean beach below. “What’re they looking for dad?” Tara asked when she joined Erik and me on the beach.

It was the summer of 1961 and my home team was winning. On weekends, I joined my dad in front of the TV to watch the magnificent Yankees in action. He sipped Scotch and explained the fine points of the game. I cheered as the runs came in. Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra were like my uncles, my big brothers.

I just checked into my room at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) dorm in NYC for my first ever “Origami USA Convention”  in late June of 1994. My assigned roommate hadn’t arrived yet.

Long before I began to trace the Milne/Curry Human Family tree, I learned about ancestry for cows. My education in this topic came as part of the development of a herd of Jersey cows on the Wonglepong Farm in southern Queensland, Australia by my parents Bert and Doris Curry.