根据以下资料，回答题：
        While Mother was in New Orleans, I was in the care of my grandparents．They were incredibly conscientiousabout me．They loved me very much; sadly, much better than they were able to love each other or, in mygrandmother's case, to love my mother．Of course, I was blissfully unaware of all this at the time．I just knew that Iwas loved: Later, when I became interested in children growing up in hard circumstances and learned something ofchild development from Hillary's work at the Yale Child Study Center, I came to realize how fortunate I had been．For all their own demons, my grandparents and my mother always made me feel I was the most important person inthe world to them．Most children will make it if they have just one person who makes them feel that way．I hadthree．
        My grandmother, Edith Grisham Cassidy, stood just over five feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds．Mammaw was bright, intense, and aggressive, and had obviously been pretty once．She had a great laugh, but shealso was full if anger and disappointment and obsessions she only dimly understood．She took it all out in ragingtirades against my grandfather and my mother, both before and after I was born, though I was shielded from mostof them．She had been a good student and ambitious, so after high school she took a correspondence course innursing from the Chicago Sebool of Nursing．By the time I was a toddler she was a private-duty nurse for a man notfar from our house on．Hervey Street．I can still remember running down the sidewalk to meet her when she camehome from work．
        Mammaw's main goals for me were that I would eat a lot, learn a lot, and always be neat and clean．We．ate inthe kitchen at a table next to the window．My high chair faced the window, and Mammaw tacked playing cards upon the wooden window frame at mealtimes so that I could learn to count．She also stuffed me at every meal, because conventional wisdom at the time was that a fat baby was a healthy one, as long as he bathed every day．At least once a day, she read to me from Dick and Jane books until I could read them myself and from World Book Encyclopedia volumes, which in those days were sold door-to-door by salesmen and were often the only booksbesides the Bible in working people's houses．These early instructions probably explain why I now read a lot, love card games, battle my weight, and never forget to wash my hands and brush my teeth．

The author came to know that he was most fortunate because