Cherokee Names

In the economic circumstances of my childhood, I might have envied many things. I suppose I did, but there was nothing I wanted as much as a family. After my grandfather died, I had a conversation with my grandmother in which she warned me that she was unlikely to live to see me graduate high school. I could not break the news that I did not expect to graduate high school, but I took her point.

My elderly grandparents did the best they could with their limited resources and the years they had left, but I lived in the shadow of the cold fact that they would be gone before I was educated and I would be…