All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.

"That's the store that we need to go to and open the door and put our money in." (At age 3. While driving by the new Toys 'R' Us.)

'A duck!... A baby duck.' (Squealing about a birthday card on her third birthday on Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.

'Daddy, how many whoppers are there in those tall trees?' After waking up in the car while driving through Calaveras Big Trees and hearing daddy say, 'Wow, that's a whopper of a tree.'

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.