The amazing tale of Brandeis graduate Daja Meston

Released on March 16, 2005
Contact: David Nathan 781-736-4203

Lost and Found Left in Nepal at 3, Daja Takes Decades To Find Out Why

After Being Raised by Monks, He Makes His Way to U.S.; 'Mother Where Are You?' A Leap From a Window Ledge

By CLARE ANSBERRY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL MarchB 15,B 2005;B PageB A1

BOSTON -- Daja Meston, a slight young man with dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, walked into the admissions office at Brandeis University in 1993 with an extraordinary story.

He told the admissions officer that he had no formal schooling and little money. Then 23 years old, he lived in a Boston settlement house for exiled Tibetans with his 24-year-old wife, and worked at the salad station of a seafood restaurant. In lieu of an application, he presented a 1981 People magazine article about himself as a child. The headline read: "For an American Boy- Monk in Nepal, the Path to Buddhism Began in Beverly Hills."

Over the course of the hour-long interview at Brandeis, Daja explained that his hippie parents had left America in the 1960s in search of spiritual enlightenment. Daja was born in Switzerland and sent for three years to live with a Tibetan family in Nepal. Meanwhile, his father suffered a breakdown and vanished in the Himalayan Mountains. His mother became a Buddhist nun. When he was 6, she enrolled him in a monastery.

Daja Meston, as a young monk, standing with his mother in her Buddhist nun robes in Kathmandu, Nepal.

He was an odd casualty of an era in American history when many young people dropped out of the mainstream and abandoned their homes and families in pursuit of enlightenment and adventure. Some turned to communal ways of child-rearing. Some, like Daja's parents, essentially quit parenting and left their children for others to raise.

One of the refugees of that generation, Daja is still trying to reconnect with the world and people his parents left behind. In the monastery, Daja spent many lonely years exploring broad philosophical riddles including "What is change?" and "What is right?" He later would embark upon yet another journey, one that would take him to Hollywood and China, where he once more made headlines attempting to take his life in a politically motivated leap from a hotel window. Now, though his family story was unusual in the extreme, the questions propelling him were universal ones: Who are my parents? Why did they make the choices they made?

Daja Meston was born Sept. 28, 1970, in a Swiss cottage surrounded by daffodils and pink-blossomed trees. The house had become a way station of sorts for a generation of wanderlust hippies, his parents, Feather Meston and Larry Greenberg, among them.

They had met at a wedding in Southern California in the late 1960s. Flower children in the classic sense, they experimented with psychedelic drugs and went to love-ins. At some point, Larry changed his last name to Greeneye.

Larry, a self-taught artist with a bushy dark beard and thick black glasses, owned an art store and painted in the style of Picasso. Feather, her given name, was a child-welfare worker with long, light brown hair. They were disillusioned with a materialistic society but viewed it from opposite realms.

Feather was the only child of celebrities. Her father, John, helped create and write the television show "Gunsmoke." Her willowy mother, Rosemary, a Vogue model, acted and doubled for Katharine Hepburn in movies. Even her grandmother, Bernardine Szold Fritz, was a Hollywood insider, writing about Marlene Dietrich's slinky lamC) gown for the New Yorker magazine.

It was a privileged childhood but not a happy one. Her parents' marriage ended in divorce after 10 years. Feather says she lived with her alcoholic mother in a series of small apartments. When her mother tried to commit suicide, teenage Feather joined her father and his second wife, a famous bullfighter, on their honeymoon in Europe. They sent her to boarding schools. She began drinking and missing school, she says. "I was quite alone."

At center, Daja, with fellow monks in Nepal in 1981. His mother sent him to the Buddhist monastery when he was 6 years old.

She became resolutely independent, allowing space in her life only for her grandmother. Thrice married, Bernardine Szold Fritz lived in China for 10 years and shared with Feather her fascination for eastern religions and Buddhism.

Larry's parents were poor and lived in a run-down Los Angeles neighborhood. His father couldn't hold a job, and his parents often fought about money, says his older brother, Albert. Larry, the fifth and youngest child, was sent when he was about 7 years old to live with an older brother. At about age 10, he went to live in an orphanage.

Larry spent much of his youth alone, he and family members say, sketching, painting and memorizing long passages from classic Greek literature. When he was about 17, he dropped out of high school, left the orphanage and joined the Navy. Four years later, he returned to Southern California, sold tires for a short time and opened an art store.

When he and Feather met, both were ready to distance themselves from their pasts and start a new life. About five months after their first encounter, they married in her grandmother's Beverly Hills garden. Bride and groom wore matching tie-dyed outfits. Within days, Feather's mother, who hadn't attended the ceremony, committed suicide.

Feather says the death of her mother had no profound effect on her. "I just wasn't that close to her," she says. View the entire story online at the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB111084695948279382-IFjgoNjlal4oZyoaoGHbKuJm4,00.html

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The Wall Street Journal

submitted by David Nathan