When Teressa was six and her brother Manny four, their mother died and their father disappeared. Their mother's doctor and her husband adopted them and they grew up in a good home where they were supported in the challenges of growing up Mexican in an Anglo family.
In 1905 Manny, then eighteen, entered the Naval Academy and began a life characterized by duty, honor, routine and the engagement of his life to a greater purpose. It led him and his young wife into the maelstrom know as the Great War, he flew experimental aircraft and she was a surgeon in a hospital tent on the Western Front.
Teressa went west, well not really very far west. She was going to be an actress in San Francisco. Unfortunately the San Francisco Earthquake destroyed her dream along with a thousand others. Shortly thereafter a childhood sweetheart reappeared and she married him and followed him back to the South Pacific where she spent half her time sailing on a 73 foot island schooner and the other half living in a house on a cliff that overlooks the Coral Sea and is 20 miles from anywhere.
This is the story of their different lives and how they ended up at the same place.
