A full blooded American, she was. She took me to baseball games and held her hand on her heart to sing the anthem, while I stood next to her, humming along. She used the national We when talking about the U.S. of A. “We should never have gone into Iraq,” she would say. “We are a nation of immigrants.” She often craved cheeseburgers. George and Rachel had bought her a car for her sixteenth birthday. She had the bright, open face that always reminded me of the vast midwestern welkin. She was routinely kind to other people, assumed they had good intentions; she smiled at strangers; it mattered to her what they thought and felt. She was often embarrassed; she dreamt of learning a foreign language; she wanted to make a difference. She believed in God and seldom went to church.