She lives on every time I taste fried chicken or in little memories of how she listened to the sound of a cake baking in the oven. So she's with me all the time. That's a great gift.

I have a bitter taste in my mouth now, but the memories are sweet. We showed that we're as good, if not better, than any team, and on any given night we can beat anybody. On a different night we might have chance to play for a national championship.

Leaving a 10 percent tip is a huge insult. To me it shows more taste on your part to leave something acknowledging their effort, but telling them their service was poor.

It wasn't often that I had difficulty tasting something. Flavor was the way people like me made sense of the world.
We knew that there was a flavor that explained you-even to yourself. A flavor whose truth you recognized when you tasted it. A flavor that answered the question you didn't know you had.
Perhaps it was a voluptuous vanilla that your sharp-edged self could sink into like a pillow. Or a homesick pomegranate, each seed like a ruby slipper that would take you back to the place where you were loved and where people had missed you.

It brings out the best in you. You try your best, and hopefully you make a lot of great memories.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.