We honor the dream by doing the work. —Cleo Wade

Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible, that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.

Happy is the man who avoids hardship, but how fine is the man who is afflicted and shows endurance.

They would open conversations about her with “You know your mother was the first woman to…” Then they would conjure a character so fiercely determined, so independent, I had trouble reconciling it with the mild, uncomplaining mother who slept in the bedroom next to mine.

maybe? I didn’t know. I also didn’t know what the cost of taking that road would be, that it would mean twenty years of missed weddings, missed birthdays, missed funerals. Twenty years of sleeping on planes and perpetual jet lag. Twenty years of praying alone in strange hotel rooms and being the lone person fasting during Ramadan at official events

She was also doing what women do a lot: being self-effacing, both because she believed it was her job to serve others and because it had the side benefit of mitigating her potential threat as a powerful, ambitious woman.

I loved living there, but I don’t know if I would look back on it so fondly if it had been the only life I’d ever known, had I not carried my American roots with me while I was there and elsewhere, had I not been certain that freedoms I couldn’t enjoy in my current reality were just a flight away.

In all these stories, the one thing that stands out to me is this: the impact of one person’s choice.

Though a lover of history, my father rarely spoke of his own past.