I was speaking to a friend of mine one time – a Jewish father of a grown boy. I asked him if he would mind if his son married a non-Jew and his response was, “He knows who he is.” It had this omnipresent tone to it, even though in reality the man I was speaking to was pretty hip and although he was Jewish (almost obviously), his Jewishness never seemed to be top of…
A friend of mine said he has an early memory of a flood in Cincinnati, where he was standing by the front door and watching a boat go by on the street. He was two years old. Most people can’t remember anything from before four or five years of age. At least I can’t. I can barely remember anything these days. My mind has become a sieve. When we were at the zoo, Tin was…
There is a saying in Croatia that you stepped out of bed on your left foot, it is the equivalent of saying you woke on the wrong side of the bed. Last night we went to two parties – and put Tin to sleep in a pack and play at the second, but by 11:00, we had already all turned into pumpkins so we came home and all went to bed to the sounds of…
When my mom was young, she had four little boys and two little girls and how she kept from going stark raving mad is impossible to know. But she did have a creative streak. We lived in an apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway and there was a big rotund water heater in our kitchen. My mom took a magic marker and drew a benign face and wrapped a frilly apron around it and called her…
I remember when mom was in the hospital she kept making a circular motion in the bed and telling the nurses she was making room for the baby. And she was. She left a big space in my life that a baby is filling up. In the meantime, everyone at the LaLa stopped their swirling motion of making room for a baby when the baby actually showed up – Gadzooks! It is quite amazing how…