To simply wake up every morning a better person than when I went to bed.

My father was very big on marriage.

Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.

You don't have to become something that you aren't to become better than you are.

Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.

I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.

But perhaps more important, as someone wishing to make a comment or two about contemporary life and values, I don't have to dig through libraries or travel to exotic lands to arrive at a view of our modern situation refracted through the lens of the preindustrial world, or the uncommercialized, unfranchised, perhaps unsanitized-and therefore supposedly more "authentic"-perspective ofthe Third World. Very simply, this is because that "other" world, as alien as if separated by centuries in time, is the one from which I came