When I was about 6, my grandma decided to take my older sister, several of my cousins and me to work with her.

For other kids, that might have meant heading into some office building. For us, it meant spending the night in a house bigger than any of us had ever stepped inside before.

To this day, I vividly remember aspects of that house: rooms decorated with museum-worthy paintings, a patio crowded with more toys than anyone I knew owned, and so many bathrooms it seemed no one would ever have to knock on a door and plead with the person on the other side to hurry up.

My Mexican American grandma, who worked as a housekeeper there for decades, was responsible for cleaning all of that: the floors of those art-adorned rooms, the sliding glass doors leading to that patio, those many toilets.

I have no idea, and she is no longer alive for me to ask, whether she took us on that overnight trip just to keep her company while her employer was away or for some larger purpose, but it was a pivotal moment in my life. It was the first time I realized that a divide existed between the wealthy and the working-hard-to-get-by.