That title is an ugly sentence to anyone with experience in two or more of those classifications.

My best friend was an American raised in a middle eastern-American house, in a German-Irish town, in the middle of the sticks. How sticky? Well, we were the town in the sticks that didn’t inbreed, you know, progressive.

The only reason I’m writing this is because he told me he wanted to write a book someday. A book about growing up in the sticks as an American, raised with all the prejudice associated with an immigrant from the middle east. That would have been a hefty tome, even without that whole 9/11 thing.

Anecdotal evidence could yield a few hundred pages, but I knew him, the anomaly of a person he was. Weeks from Duke Law graduation, weeks from drinking with his friends in the midwest again, he was taken from us.

Over a year later on Memorial Day, that’s what I remember. This video always makes me tear up, and that semester was the highlight of my college career. There aren’t many days I would want to go back to, but these certainly were among them.