YOU GET DIFFERENT gifts in life, and one of my great gifts is my mom and dad.

My highest admiration goes to those people—we all know some of them; I know I do—who had terrible parents but so admirably broke that cycle, pulled out of it, and made it all work. I did not have that situation. I was always loved. My parents loved me unconditionally, and, by the way, it was pretty tough for them. My mom doesn’t talk about it much, but she had me when she was seventeen years old. She was a high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You could ask her, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t cool in 1964 to be a pregnant mom in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, my grandfather, another incredibly important figure in my life, went to bat for her because the high school wanted to kick her out. You weren’t allowed to be pregnant in high school there, and my grandfather said, “You can’t kick her out. It’s a public school. She gets to go to school.” They negotiated for a while, and the principal finally said, “Okay, she can stay and finish high school, but she can’t do any extracurricular activities, and she can’t have a locker.” And then my grandfather, being a very wise man, said, “We’ll take that deal,” and so she finished high school.

My mom had me, and then she married my dad. My dad is my real dad, not my biological dad. His name is Mike. He’s a Cuban immigrant. He came here as part of Operation Pedro Pan and, in fact, was put up by a Catholic mission in Wilmington, Delaware, and then got a scholarship to attend college in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom. So I have a kind of a fairy tale story. My grandfather, possibly because my parents were so young, would take me every summer to his spectacular ranch. From age four to sixteen, I basically spent every summer working alongside him on the ranch. He was the most resourceful man. He did all his own veterinarian work. He would even make his own needles: pound the wire with an oxyacetylene torch, drill a little hole in it, sharpen it, and make a needle that he could suture up the cattle with. Some of the cattle even survived. He was a remarkable man and a huge part of all of our lives. My grandfather was like a second set of parents for me.