My childhood dreams: Being in zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Authoring an article in the World Book encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Winning stuffed animals. Being a Disney Imagineer. 4 The Parent Lottery I won the parent lottery. I was born with the winning ticket, a major reason I was able to live out my childhood dreams. My mother was a tough old-school English teacher with nerves of titanium. She worked her students hard, enduring those parents who complained that she expected too much from kids. As her son, I knew a thing or two about her high expectations, and that became my good fortune. My dad was a World War II medic who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He founded a nonprofit group to help immigrants' kids learn English. And for his livelihood, he ran a small business which sold auto insurance in inner-city Baltimore. His clients were mostly poor people with bad credit histories or few resources, and he'd find a way to get them insured and on the road. For a million reasons, my dad was my hero. I grew up comfortably middle class in Columbia, Maryland. Money was never an issue in our house, mostly because my parents never saw a need to spend much. They were frugal to a fault. We rarely went out to dinner. We'd see a movie maybe once or twice a year. "Watch TV," my parents would say. "It's free. Or better yet, go to the library. Get a book."