My grandfather was a Methodist preacher, and my father was an unsuccessful businessman. We didn't have status or wealth.
I was raised Catholic, but my father's people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.
My father is maestro at the Metropolitan church, which gives me an opportunity to write for the church as much as I please.
My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.
I was born in Mexico because my father was teaching at a school in Mexico City. I was born during the third year he was there. And when I was 16, I returned to Mexico to learn Spanish.
I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me because mice was running on me while I was asleep.
My mom and dad are second-generation Greek-Americans who instilled in our middle-class family the values of hard work, self-reliance, and service, exemplified by my father's tenure as a U.S. Marine who was stationed at Camp David under President Truman.
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
I don't want my kids to grow up with no father like I did. I came to the conclusion a while ago that you can work until midnight and not be finished or you can work until 6 or 7 and not be finished. I decided I'd rather work until 6 or 7.
Our Heavenly Father is far more merciful, infinitely more charitable, than even the best of his servants, and the Everlasting Gospel is mightier in power to save than our narrow finite minds can comprehend.
As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.
Like my father, I believe that nonviolence is the antidote to what he called 'the triple evils of racism, poverty and militarism.' These three evils were consuming our hopes for community in 1964, and, fifty years later, we remain divided because of their festering effects.
My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.
I have visited classrooms near military bases to learn more about what schools were doing to support their military kids. I met with teachers overseas to learn about the particular needs they face thousands of miles from America. And I listened to my own granddaughter, who dealt with her father's yearlong deployment to Iraq.
Because my father was an army officer, I was told to enter the military school during the war. Luckily or unluckily, one month before the entrance examination, I got polio, which made my right arm numb. It's still numb.
I had a very artistic bohemian childhood. My father was an actor and a mime.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
