A few months ago, I experienced the joy of celebrating my thirtieth birthday with several friends and loved ones. It was an occasion that brought forth tremendous gratitude from deep inside my heart: for my parents, for my sister, for all the lessons learned with plain luck or hard work or blunt failure. Soon enough, I realized, I will have lived more of my life away from my hometown than I have in it. As I progressed through high school during those final years at home, my grandmother fell into irreversible cognitive and physical decline. On occasion, my mother enlisted Read more