My home-cooked dinner in New Mexico

Once, on a one-week vacation to New Mexico, we were privileged to be invited into the home of a Native American family on a feast day at a reservation.

The ladies who prepared our wonderful bounty reminded me so much of my grandmother, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, living in a walkup apartment in a crowded building in the Bronx.

These were Native American women whose forebears had probably arrived here on foot 10,000 years ago.

But certain things are universal.

These ladies are the nurturers. The givers, the preservers, the protectors of lives.

You take a little old lady anywhere, give her some water, a flame, and something edible -- and through the magic of her love -- she turns it into a bounteous feast, which warms your stomach, warms your soul, gives nutrition, comforts us, keeps families alive, keep families together, steels us against the adversity and challenge the outside world heaps upon us.

And they are in every society that exists or has existed since mankind made its appearance.

No matter where you are -- in what country, what century, what religion -- no matter what your skin tone is, or your language -- we are basically all the same.

We need to think of the victims and potential victims of the bad things we do as our mother, our grandmother, our child. Because they are. We are one family.

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