I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

I was so lucky to have parents who supported me 100% with whatever I was doing both financially and emotionally. Having that they made my life so much easier. Instead of becoming a bartender and trying to survive while trying to pursue your dreams I didn't have to worry about that aspect. I could just pursue my dreams.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

When death the great reconciler has come it is never our tenderness that we repent of but our severity.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from but our severity.

My mother taught public school went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

My dad's a beautiful man but like a lot of Mexican men or men in general a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more I would say conscious evolved.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

My parents were working class folks. My dad was a bartender for most of his life my mom was a maid and a cashier and a stock clerk at WalMart. We were not people of financial means in terms of significant financial means. I always told them 'I didn't always have what I wanted. I always had what I needed.' My parents always provided that.

There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.