About Rewind I started writing Rewind on my birthday, in December of 2004. , I was having breakfast at my home in Miami. Seated on my balcony that overlooked the bay, awash in blues, I was suddenly struck by the urge to write something about myself, about the events in my life, some good, some bad, but all contributing to who I was at that moment. I poured another cup of coffee and began to write a story I called Rewind. It turned out to be a metaphor of my life. In the story, I am a leaf on a branch of a strong tree growing next to a pond. It's a parable about my upbringing in Tangiers, Morocco. Tangiers is in the very north of the country, where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean converge at the Straits of Gibraltar. Maybe that's what prompted me to write the story in the first place. Like that tree, I grew up with a view of water, met lots of characters who taught me about life, and migrated from place to place in search of a home. This volume is the product of that labor.