When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.

The past is all we know of the future.

Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.