I am a cradle Catholic. You might even say I was raised in and around the Catholic Church — in and around parishes in Asia and the Middle East. My three brothers were altar boys. I participated in every possible Catholic religious and social activity. Missing Sunday mass was not…

Perhaps it is the media-saturated world we live in, or the decade spent in the often volatile Middle East, or a combination of the two. When I heard the news of the terrorist attack in Kabul this week, I barely lifted my head to look up at the television screen…

I shuffled into the nondescript medical office in North Austin with a folder under one arm. It was the early 2000s and I was having a medical examination performed as part of my United States Permanent Residence application. After the routine physical, the nurse sat me down to go over…

It was a day in early December 1994. I wasn’t planning on going home for Christmas that year, so I purchased a small package of Christmas cards at the Texas Eckerd drugstore on “the drag” (the portion of Guadalupe Street between 26th & Martin Luther King Boulevard) and headed to…

I never learned her name. We were about halfway through a flight from London Heathrow to Dubai and the flight attendant seemed clearly fed up with the passengers and their constant demands — demands that bordered on the whimsical or even on the downright obnoxious, like the passenger who demanded…

It was a late evening in the middle of April 1984. My mother, two of my younger brothers and I had just disembarked a Cathay Pacific flight from Mumbai, India (then Bombay). We were joining my father who was already working in Dubai. As we stood in an immigration queue…