WHEN I WAS BORN, Martin Luther King had been dead for a month and a half. Robert Kennedy had less than three weeks to live before he would be shot down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The Vietnam War was raging on and on and somewhere in Upstate New York, in the middle of all this chaos, I was born. My mother was only 18 years old when she had me. It was a small town. We were Catholic. My mother was not married. Need I say more?