I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.

Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.

I read everything, but particularly, growing up in a household where my mom was black and my dad was white, I remember really loving 'Ebony' and 'Essence.' Those magazines were the only place where I could see images of women who looked like me or my mom.