The ambiguous project of telling a story of oneself is slippery and often revealed only in what is left behind or unsaid. Although my parents had little formal education, learning was valued in our home. My father read the newspaper from cover to cover everyday, and my mother taught Sunday school and studied her lesson from one week to the next. I learned to read from Little Golden Books she bought from a spindle rack in the grocery store, and because my sisters’ high school textbooks lined the bookshelf in the hall outside my bedroom (they had to buy their books in those days), I learned about the world from British and American literature anthologies. I was the youngest of four and privileged to grow up in a literacy rich environment. After high school, I took out loans for college and graduate school, and worked hard. I got a university post and paid off my loans, worked even harder and was promoted several times. After a number of years I changed my career path and continued to work hard. Growing up without excess taught me to value, appreciate, and most of all to strive. Despite having seen, from both sides of the desk, that what seems to count most and who gets to decide is often the power of knowledge exercised in wider spheres of influence, margins and centers are not static and power tends to shift. For everything is relative to situation, and in the theater of identity, who we are shifts, slides together, and overlaps.