There are no bystanders in life [...] Our humanity makes us each a part of something greater than ourselves. - Sonia Sotomayor

What Nelson saw driving me arises from a different kind of aspiration: the desire to do for others, to help make things right for them. Strange ambition for a child? Some might say so, but I’ve been aware of it for as long as I can remember. Self-aggrandizing? I’ve never felt such release from the awkward hold of ego as when helping others. Reaction to early years in a house of pain? Perhaps, but at some point I let go of my compulsion to please: it’s my own standard of character that I need to meet. In any case, I’m sure of having learned it from others, my examples. And very good ones.

Few aspects of my work in the DA’s Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was. It was in effect to see that mastery of the law’s cold abstractions, which had taken such effort, was actually incomplete without an understanding of how they affected individual lives.

Ultimately, I accept that there is no perfect substitute for the claim that a parent and child have on each other’s heart. But families can be made in other ways, and I marvel at the support and inspiration I’ve derived from the ones I’ve built of interlocking circles of friends. In their constant embrace I have never felt alone.