Looking back now, I realize that most of the "friends" who came my way were atchays. I'd always wondered why I often got impatient and annoyed with them, and, for a time, I thought that everyone else in the world was like them. It was most difficult to believe that I was right most of the time and to have all these "friends" try to make me believe that it was I who was wrong. It made me a brutally frank person--the only way to get back at them was to tell them what they really were.

At 66 I know better, though I am still a brutally frank person. One has to be, especially when one is a minority. There are still atchays everywhere--in religion, in politics, in education, even in literature and in art.