Maggie, my wife – for putting up with me.

No one I can think of offhand.

My mum – she's in her 90s, lives on her own, is lucid, wise and funny. And knows what a selfie is.

Michelle Obama (not that Barack wouldn’t be right up there). She seems genuinely to enjoy her life and do the best with all the tasks that she sets her mind to.

Well, I’m happiest on Martha’s Vineyard, between July 1 and Labor Day, riding my tricycle with Larry Bobo every afternoon and fishing with Buddy Vanderhoop. But I was happiest from my childhood through high school in Piedmont, West Virginia; it was magical. I was sorry when it was time to go off to college.

Late one Sunday afternoon, my three-year-old granddaughter, out of the blue, took my hand and said she wanted to whisper something to me. Could we go for a ride around the block before we all sat down for dinner? Just the two of us? Holding hands as we walked to and from the car in the driveway: Bliss.

That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”