Don't spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.

The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says 'you're cute', I'll say 'thank you', but I appreciate it much more when the other one says 'you make me laugh so much'.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy's big challenge is not having a Parkinson's patient for a husband. It's having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient.

I urge you to be challenged and inspired by what you do not know.

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.