My mother was a typical housewife, who cared for her family.

My mother was a classic homemaker. When I think of her in those days, I see a woman in perpetual motion, making the beds, washing the dishes and putting dinner on the table precisely at six o’clock. I came home from school for lunch every day. While we ate, Mom and I listened to radio programs. My mother also found lots of what people now call "quality time" for my brothers and me. She didn’t learn to drive until the early 1960s, so we walked everywhere. In the winter, she bundled us up on a sled and pulled us to the store. Then we held and balanced the groceries for the trip home. In the middle of hanging the wash on a clothesline in the backyard, she might help me practice my pitching or lie down on the grass with me to describe the cloud shapes overhead. One summer, she helped me create a fantasy world in a large cardboard box. We used mirrors for lakes and twigs for trees, and I made up fairy-tale stories for my dolls to act out. Another summer, she encouraged my younger brother Tony to pursue his dream of digging a hole all the way to China. She started reading to him about China and every day he spent time digging a hole next to our house. Occasionally, he found a chopstick or fortune cookie my mother had hidden there.