Being healthy. Sometimes we don’t know that we’re not healthy because we’re not going to the doctor—like me, when I first discovered I had diabetes years ago.

Cuddling in bed on a Sunday morning with the man I love. Also, applause and standing ovations.

Clarity when I am writing.

The very short instant right after accomplishing something very challenging.

It’s a tie between Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr., Wole Soyinka, and Oprah Winfrey. All are fearless, all know themselves, all have examined themselves, and all are comfortable with what they have seen.

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.”

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.