When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

If somebody honks a horn in Cleveland, they're saying 'Hi.' It's so rare to be honked at in anger. When we have merging traffic, we just interweave. There's real courtesy.