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and it’s a life lived at home. Public life is “out there” somewhere, distinct from private life. But some of our most important and powerful activities as a family took place in the public sphere of hospitals and doctors’ offices, as my parents tried to protect and provide for my brother, and I tried to protect and shepherd them all. Once the usual boundaries separating private life from public life had been, for me, removed—or at least redrawn—the political had become the personal (which isn’t quite the same thing as saying the personal had become the political, though it’s close). Given how I’d been wired and affected by the life I had lived, I became someone for whom a dry position paper on health policy didn’t seem dry. If it shed light on the care of a brother I loved, it was personal and it could move me, maybe not quite as much as a love letter could—but almost as much.
    The public and private were mingled for me in yet another way, too. Just as my family lived much of our most compelling private life in public arenas, so the public world came into our home through television. Almost as soon as I came to this country, I fell in love with ABC’s
World News Tonight
. I watched it every single night, with the same zeal other people reserve for their favorite soap opera. Our family’s first anniversary in America coincided with the country’s bicentennial, and on the news that night, when we watched the tall ships sail up the Hudson River, we took their journey personally. That year there was a Fourth of July parade on Ferry Street, the only such neighborhood parade I can recall. By then I knew all about the Boston Tea Party, the history of the American Revolution, and the colonists’ struggle for freedom.
    In Portugal, I had first felt this inchoate hunger for rights and freedoms, but I was so young that it was a hunger I hardly noticed and didn’t even think to name. But here, in my new country, that desire for freedom
was
named, and the historic moment—satisfied by revolution—was commemorated and celebrated. In recognizing this American passion, I simultaneously recognized something in myself. So a connection between me and my new country was somehow strengthening.
    Gerald Ford was president when I came here, then Jimmy Carter. My brothers said I was a bookworm, and I was. I read biographies and history. I read everything I could find about the Kennedys and about Eleanor Roosevelt. Then there was the Iran hostage crisis, which led to the program
Nightline
, to which I became quickly addicted. But what I was really becoming addicted to—and now, at last, aware of being addicted to—was America and the idea of being an American in a way that’s perhaps impossible to understand for someone who is born here. I found it thrilling—that is truly the word—that Americans could effect change in their country and in the whole world just by virtue of whom they voted for.
    In high school I joined the Civics Club and the History Club, and I took part in voter-registration drives, even though I wasn’t an American citizen myself because I wasn’t yet eighteen. So I bided my time until I turned eighteen, and then, as soon as I could, I filed the paperwork to become a citizen. I made sure my parents did too. One spring day in 1985, I received a notice informing me that my citizenship exam was scheduled for the following week at the federal building on Walnut Street in Newark. Even though I’d been helping people to become citizens for years and knew the answers to any of the hundred questions the examiner might ask, I studied the night before.
    The following week, at the appointed time, I showed up, accompanied by my father, who was taking his test that day too. We sat in the waiting room until we were called, not speaking much. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father wipe his palms on his trouser legs. After about an hour, the examiner, a tired-looking man in his fifties wearing a white