“You had to use the back door, and you couldn’t mix in, or you couldn’t drink at the same fountain. And you know, they fought for it as the years went by, but lookin’ back, it didn’t bother me ‘cause I didn’t know any better. You get older, you learn, and realize that wasn’t nice, you know.”

“I had a recollection back to an incident that happened in Norton, when my brother was shot at by a local police officer. So I wrote up the story and I called my brother to say, ‘Was I imagining? Did this really happen?’ And he had forgotten, too.”

“When my grandmother died, my mother was really, really all alone. So she showed up one day, and she rang the doorbell, and I opened the door, and there she was! She had a suitcase and her little portable TV in her hand, and she said, “I’m coming to live with you.”

“Even though we lived in the suburbs, and everything was happy happy, there was still a lot of conflict going on. Both of my parents drank too much, and sometimes there would be money issues, but we couldn’t talk about that because we were all very happy.”

“You can’t sit and lament and cry over things. Honey, I am legally blind. I have to wear hearing aides and everything else. You think I let that bother me? Don’t. Let. Things. Get you down.”