Eldon’s parents came to visit.  They’re divorced.  He’s remarried; she lives with her boyfriend.  So he felt a bit strange when he made hotel reservations for the two of them.  Made sure to get separate beds.  They came to surprise his brother.  Apparently his family lives to surprise each other.  I asked how the weekend went:

I couldn’t get them to do anything.  All my family wants to do is sit around and watch each other grow old.

For some reason I found that last line both hilarious and profoundly moving.  It made me think that sitting around watching people grow old is perhaps the ultimate example of famil/friendy love and perhaps not. I don’t know whether to apologize to the people who came here last summer and I made them run around both Carolina’s in 100 degree weather.  They did come to see me, not for me to prove culture exists here.  So I’m pondering Eldon’s line .

Dissertations have been written on lesser lines.

And maybe that’s why I enjoyed this article in The Atlantic a little too much. And am still left with the question: what makes us happy? Does it turn out to be the story we invent for ourselves about our lives as we age?  The rationale for having lived the lives we lead.  So often spent sent sitting around watching each other grow old. I needed a more closed-ended answer but I understood.

Though I would like to think that the girl I was at 20–idealistic, fun (at least to me), inquisitive is the woman I am today–but hopefully I’m a better version

I’ve been working on a two or three part post for Psychology Today.  It’s not completed yet and I’m spent.

Like Cooper, who apparently I once called a germophobic slut–must have been under the influence of the moon or something, I’m archiving some old posts.  Only mine all have coding errors in the contractions and at the beginning and ending of sentences, so they take hours and I lack patience but if I’m going to leave a blog it’s going to be easy to read.

Here are 49 posts from Courting Destiny: the early days

Childhood dreams is a prompt from Studio 30 plus.

Because the 3WW prompt went I added it!

I stop talking and concentrate on putting fireflies into a bottle.  It’s going to be dark soon and the trapped fireflies will light up the skies.  We’re between ten and six years old and none of us have to be in until the adults unplug the TV’s from the extension cords hanging from the garden apartments in the courts to TV tables.  Some of the men smoke cigars.   They drink Coke and lemon soda, spilling the soda so that bees and flys flock around the tables and TV’s.  I stay far away from the TV tables.  There’s nothing dainty about them.  Plus I’m scared soda will spill into the extension cords and there will be a huge explosion.

It’s summer before my little sister and I go to camp for six weeks soon after my birthday.  Our parents encourage us to stay out late and play so we’ll be tired and sleep a bit later in the morning. Though I try to get up at six every morning of the year to read the encyclopedia.  I’m a word nerd that the other kids like because they can’t remember not knowing me.  My best friend, Ava Altman, is at a hotel for the summer.  My family goes to hotels but most of the families spend two to four weeks in bungalow colonies.

I don’t tell the kids that my family spent summers in bungalow colonies when we lived in Sunnyside.  Maybe my parents laugh at memories of the bungalow colonies when we stay at hotels near Monticello to visit parts of my father’s family.  His sister and her family live in Miami.  Poor me. Doomed to vacations in the Catskills, Miami Beach, and “educational places” such as The Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

We study the region for months before we go. I can’t wait for our first vacation to DC where we’ll see the FBI building which is about the most exciting building in the world to me.  The day we’re going to go we stop at my father’s client’s supermarket first and I throw up all over the entrance way to the store.  We go back to the court instead where I get over the measles in two days.

I like going on vacation. I especially like Florida because I get to spend the morning in the pool and the afternoon in the ocean.  My parents get two rooms and our cousins come and stay with us. We all get along.  My sister and I can still recite our father’s refrain: “relax, we’re going to be here for two weeks.  You don’t need to do everything today.”  Yes. We. Do.  We run through the hotel lobbies and downstairs store arcade.  If we’re in the 40′s at Collins Avenue we run to some houseboats that are on TV.  We’re going to meet some TV stars.  My sister who is two years younger doesn’t really care but she knows I only like the coolest of things.  That we never meet a TV star doesn’t phase me.  There’s always tomorrow.  Or next year.

I like being in the court. I like camp. I’m an indiscriminate life liker. I can’t wait to be a teenager and have a real boyfriend but I spend much time dreaming.  Ava and I have our whole lives plotted out.  Ava looks like a child movie star.  She has long dark wavy perfect hair, and is the prettiest girl I know.

Ava thinks I’m so lucky to be my mother’s daughter.  Unlike Ava’s mother who I secretly think is a witch who will get her coven together for a court haunting, my mother’s friendly and fun.

My mother has dark hair, large eyes, a huge smile, and is I know prettier than most of the other mothers. Before I was adopted my mother owned a fancy dress store in Forest Hills.  Her mother makes our good clothes.  Ava, my sister and I are the best dressed girls in the court.  Ava’s family has a housekeeper.  I take that for granted until I’m older and realize how tiny the garden apartments, built for returning vets are.  Everybody lives in Beech Hills because it’s on top of the largest hill in Queens, cut off from the rest of the borough, and has a lot of outdoor space for kids to play in.

There are 40 mothers in the court alone.  I’m vaguely aware that my mother’s older because I was adopted but I know this is something that can never ever be discussed.  Most parents and kids think she’s younger.  Everybody looks up to my parents.  My father’s a professional who always has time to talk to the other parents and answer any questions.  He began the first credit union for coop apartments.  I know that’s a big deal only because parents stop me and tell me how great my father is.

I don’t try to memorize summers in the court.  The TV’s, the rock & roll I love that the older kids play; the games we kids play.  It’s boys against girls, run to the trees.  One two three ring a leveo.  I’m not very good at the games but it doesn’t matter and I laugh so hard when I get to the trees.  I’m tantalized by the garden apartments.  The court is a perfect place to live.

Years later Ava and I will find our memories haunting.  No childhood could possibly live up to it.  We tantalize kids with our stories.

Then I never stop to think how good life is.  Why should I?  It’s all I know.  But I will always remember how beautiful the fireflies were when they lit up the sky like fireworks.  Then I opened the bottle and let them fly away into the night.  The other kids didn’t like that.  They liked the fireflies living for a few days in the glass jars with air holes on the jar cap.  But I liked to think of them flying to their true love.

Part One

About seven years before I met my birth mother I went to a meeting of one of the adoption groups that were big in the city then.  A young woman walked up to the podium with her very obviously  challenged brother:

Hi, I’m Casey.  This is my brother, Michael. I found him after I found my birth mother who lives in a mental hospital.  She had seven children by seven men.  It doesn’t matter.  I never felt part of my family.  Now my life is complete.”

Standing ovation except from me and a few other laggards. Read more…

I met my birth mother in the 80′s.  I have many great things to say about that decade.  Meeting her isn’t one of them.  It took me years, until I wrote a newspaper article about the experience to remember what she called me the entire weekend.  I was “my mistake.”  “Why hi.  How nice to meet you.  Just call me her mistake.”

The word guilt was invented specifically for me yet I felt no, OK very little guilt when I stopped corresponding with my birth mother.  She had told me how sorry she was she didn’t marry my birth father (I wasn’t as I wouldn’t have had my family) yet she would write me letters listing cities where I could meet Jewish men.

Hello.  I lived in Manhattan.  It was a bit hard not to meet Jewish men but I was looking, half-heartedly, for love and religion played no part in that.  Actually I was in the midst of a two year, get together for sex and fun–friends with benefits, before the name, with an Italian-American character actor.  But I had no desire to talk about it.

We had met at the Iggy Pop concert where I was carried in a rave, and somehow got my friend a job with Iggy who I had never met before the after party.  Being friends with doormen, managers and/or club owners all over downtown had certain advantages.

I’m not proud of a lot of things I did but I’m not ashamed either.  I didn’t expect my birth mother to approve of everything I did nor did I feel the need to tell her.  As I didn’t tell my parents everything.  I was a self-supporting adult who didn’t need a new mother.  Mine, adoptive, was everything I wanted in a mother.

So I let the relationship die a natural death.  I’ve googled her maybe a total of four times in the entire time I have had access to the Internet.   I was shocked to see a picture of her still alive and sharp looking.  She looked very different than she had 22 years ago.  Old but better.  Nothing at all like me–we have totally different noses, eyes, and mouths.  But the face shape, yes.  When I saw her she had a round face.  Mine hasn’t been round since teen years.

If I met her now I would handle the reunion very differently.  But I don’t know how.  It’s something I think you’re never prepared for no matter how “prepared” you go.

The picture stirred up feelings in me.

Feelings of needing family.  Feelings of being somebody’s child.  Unfortunately I can never be her child.  I had two of the best parents, and this year I know I will think of them often.  My Mom’s tenth anniversary and my Dad’s 20th.  Bookends I called them and they were.

I have incredible family and friends.  But I don’t think you ever stop wanting to be somebody’s child.  Even when they’re old, frail and maybe dependent, they diapered you.  They love you for the flaws, not in spite of them.  Well, a bit of everything.  It’s their job to love you!  They even pay you for the privilege.  Room, board, toys, clothes, vacations, college if you’re lucky.  And all the things you take so for granted.

This is an article making the FB rounds on quitting blogging.  Seven to ten hours a week on blogging?  At my height when friends mentioned above called me “lost to blogging,” rather melodramatically I might add, I was spending 70-100 hours a week on two or more blogs.  And paid for mine!!!!!!!!

Once in Junior High I was supposed to give a speech.  No words came out.  I spent the rest of Junior High and all of High School waiting to lose my voice again.  Never happened in the literal sense.  But few if any people in Jericho outside of my family really knew me until Senior Year when the class intellectual/hippie girl and I began hanging out basically because we were the only girls we knew who liked to go into the city and be part of the counter-culture. Read more…

As always Thom thanks for the words. I truly love 3WW
My father would patiently teach me to cut paper dolls. I would be so excited until, of course, I cut the head off or part of the legs and arms.  The torso, forget, it would look dismembered.  I would have made a good serial killer and I was–of paper dolls or anything that required the least bit of coordination.
I still can’t open an envelope that has a perforated edge without screwing up whatever is in it, and as it’s usually a check, uh!!!!!!!!!!
“Try harder,” my father would eventually scream.  “Just try da da darn it.”

My father was a CPA.  Accountants by profession and nature are perfectionists.  He would lose his temper.  I would scream.  A good time was had by all.  The evening would end with me dissolving into tears, and my father hugging, kissing me and apologizing.  But still I knew if I only tried harder….My father knew everything.  He must have been right.
I was a bad girl intent on making my parents life miserable.  They never told me this but I knew.  If I hadn’t thought this myself the child psychologist my parents sent me to when I was nine, beginning to bud, and throw temper tantrums.  But only at home and only to my parents.  OK my little sister too.  Never in school.  Never in public.  I was considered a model child.
My father and I would drive to the psychologist.  The car radio would be on.  One week New York had a parade for Fidel Castro.  The next week, it seemed, he was the enemy.  I asked my father why.
He turned off the radio and looked at me sort of stunned.  “You know that’s a brilliant question.  I have no idea.”
it was the first and probably only time my father didn’t have an answer to a question.  He talked whether he knew anything about the subject or not.  He could have told me that Castro had been fighting Batista who was a dictator and America was glad.  But then the American government decided to fixate on Castro being a Communist.  Or he could have said that the American government just learned that Castro was a Communist, which I believe was the official story.
But he didn’t.  He gave me a great gift that night. I think my father, then a “progressive,” later a lover of all things Nixon and then Reagan wanted me to understand that we lived in a crazy world where things didn’t always make sense.  Or maybe he just didn’t know.
The child psychologist was an ugly short man with nose hairs and tobacco stained teeth.  He was the professional and I was just a child who never yelled at adults or kids or anybody not in my immediate family.  Like my father he didn’t believe in silence.
I loved doll houses, furniture and dolls but not in his office.  Dr. Wiener would make me play with the dolls–a mother, father, sister and of course me.  The dolls didn’t look like us.  They were objects not people, and I thought it was a stupid waste of time.  I was a girl who loved dolls almost too much.  But these dolls made me sick.
It’s OK,” he would say, “this is your safe area.  You can talk to the dolls and tell them how much you don’t like being adopted.”
“But I like being adopted.  I love my family very much.”
“Pia, you have big problems and they’re caused by being adopted.  In our sessions we’re going to make you see how much being adopted hurts you.”
Even when I was nine I didn’t understand how being clumsy, not being able to learn grammar, having temper tantrums and so much more was caused by being adopted. It didn’t make any sense to me.  I didn’t remember life in a foster home.  This was my family and I loved them very much.
My father would buy us O’Henry bars, and we would eat them on the drive home.  He would play rock & roll then because I liked it.
I began to buy into the things Dr. Wiener said.  I would tell my best friend, Ava, as we lay in the grass in back of the garden apartments we lived in that being adopted was very complicated and very difficult.  I was so glad that it was me who was adopted and not my little sister because I didn’t want her life to be hard.  Then we would lie in silence looking at the blue sky until one of us had something important to say. Usually about rock & roll stars or books we were reading together or separately.
•••••••••••••
Later I would understand that many therapists and others looked at being adopted as a disease.  They were convinced that many parents only adopted to have a “complete” family, and that ADHD and other problems were considered problems of the adoptee.  All that time, money, and effort wasted on trying to solve problems that didn’t exist and not trying to solve the problems that were real!!!!!
For the record I miss my parents everyday and can’t imagine life without my sister.

(I have been doing a word exercise–750 words.  As always thanks Thom for the words.  All the 3WW’s below this are fragments or outline type chapters from Space Chick) This is my article on Non Verbal Learning Disorder (NLD) that sort of inspired my memoir.

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
It was summer orientation before my freshman year at that bucolic campus on the North Shore of Long Island.  Post wasn’t known for its academics.  if it had been I wouldn’t have gotten in.
Five curvy miles from my parents house, almost in the same public school district, they let me have a dorm room so I could have the “full college experience.”  My cousin had graduated the year before and he had talked my parents into letting me live in the dorms.
I had been corresponding with the girl who was to be my roommate.  She was a cheerleader.  I was a hippie freak.  She had long dark brown hair she ironed every night.  I had longish chestnut hair that frizzed everywhere it seemed.  Still people, to my constant amazement, loved my hair.
I knew because hordes of men in the city, construction workers and average guys would scream things out about my hair, face, clothes, body.  In 1968, you didn’t have to wonder if you were pretty or not.  Guys would just tell you.  I hated it yet couldn’t imagine being one of the girls nobody said anything to.
I’m sure Melanie was shouted out to.  If she ever went to the city without the protective arms of her quarterback boyfriend.
I’m sure I was the last person Melanie wanted for a roommate.  We had bought matching blue bedspreads, curtains and other things for the room.  The bathrooms were large and communal.
Freshman girls had a 10:30 curfew on weekdays and a 1:00AM curfew on weekends.  It was supposed to be for our safety.  At orientation they explained the rules.  There was a Resident Assistant (RA) on each floor.  She and she alone would determine if we were doing everything right.
There was a demerit system.  You could get demerits for not making your bed by 9AM, for not wearing shoes in your room, for not wearing a skirt to dinner, for being sloppy, and it would turn out just for being me.
She was judge, jury and it turned out, wannabe executioner.  Lois the RA was German.
She took an immediate like to Melanie.  Everything about Melanie screamed “affluent, good girl, fun, easy.”  Everything about me screamed “rule breaker, bad, maybe stupid, possibly poor but those clothes she wears….”  I wanted to be like Melanie, god did I want to be.
Orientation was more fun than I expected it to be.  When I was buying my books an older boy, much older stared then smiled at me.  I was scared to smile back but I did.
Melanie and I made some sort of truce during orientation.  I wanted her to like me and did everything in my power to make myself likable.
But the truth was most girls didn’t like me.  I had a few girlfriends but most people who talked to me were boys.
We went home for the rest of the summer.  It was the summer of the Chicago Convention.  Vile.  Horrible.  My parents had practically locked me in the house so I wouldn’t go with friends I had made earlier that summer.  It was for my own safety my parents assured me.  I was angry at them but secretly glad I wasn’t there.  Yet I should have been.  It was so conflicting.  For the rest of her life, my mother a non-crier, would cry whenever she saw anything about the Chicago Convention.  “You could have been killed.  Or worse.”  Worse meaning brain damage.  If they had only known how damaged my seemingly good brain really was.
I don’t know how to talk about non verbal learning disorder in this memoir. I can only show what I was like and maybe at the end of the book put in a chapter that explains how my behavior, in each chapter,  was infuenced by NLD.  I don’t know.
The rest of the summer was spent getting ready for school.  My mother and I went to Floyd’s a discount store near our house and spent $40 on health and beauty aids as they were just beginning to be called.  It seemed like a fortune to me then.  We filled up two giant shopping bags.
We went to Loehmanns and bought clothes my mother liked.  Fortunately my mother had good taste, and was proud of my figure.  I knew most girls I would like would basically wear bell bottoms with cotton peasant blouses.  I could get the bell bottoms from my parents store along with an endless variety of tee shirts.  But I was into dressing up.  I wasn’t the bell bottom kind of hippie but the Indian print dress type.  I managed to make all the clothes my mother bought at Loehmann’s into some sort of hippie atire by pairing dresses with pants and/or putting a Mexican rope belt on.
I managed to make myself stand out.
Finally school began.  My parents drove me and I couldn’t wait until they left. They stayed and stayed.  Finally just before nightfall they left.  I kissed them good bye.  Walked out of the room and began to make myself a life.

This is a writing exercise. They have a very different and interesting stat section.  I began doing this yesterday and will rework the stories for the book. I give myself 40 minutes to do the exercise. Turns out to be the perfect time.  So it’s unedited here. Sometimes I wonder why I’m doing this.  Really wonder!

Hi Leslie
Thanks for your incredible letter and gorgeous Christmas card.  It’s a fireplace keeper! I can’t wait until the Blenderbuster reunion Memorial Day Weekend and wish it were next week.
Remember the year we went to Jones Beach, rented four umbrellas because it was windy, and found that was the absolute worst thing to do in the rain?  So we got into Victoria’s car, drove in what became pouring rain, round and round, as we listened to Rod Stewart and smoked way too many joints.  Good times.  Stupid times but somehow we survived.  (Don’t try my life at home kids!)
I think North Myrtle will survive us.  They’ve survived my older Goddaughter’s visits and she’s educated Black too.  Round here that’s not usual.  They wouldn’t know what to do if they knew your family owned both a plantation and a summer house in Sag Harbor.  A summer house I miss much.  I kind of modeled my house here on the house in Azurest.  They’re not used to Jews either.  Sometimes I feel as they would like to see me in a sideshow.  Or I’m in one
Once I was at your house alone.  I was just getting back into writing–sometime in the mid 80′s and would take a beer, a tablet and pen outside and just sit and write.  Victoria was the first person to arrive for the weekend.  She got a new car–a red Saab I think.  I heard her come at least a quarter mile down the road and yelled at her for giving us Whites a bad rep.  But then I went into her car and saw the dashboard lit up.  It looked like Soho at night–then.  Now I would analogize Times Square I guess.  But maybe it had a more funky look.  (To the young uns and people who only think they know New York–Soho was built up and crowded by the early 80′s.  Tribeca was the next frontier and even it had fun bars, clubs, restaurants, and people moving into lofts that not long before had been garment factories.  Tribeca had been a schmatta capital.)
End of digression:
Once when we were staying at the house I was taking a walk.  Lucia had six month old Little Luce in a sling and they were walking the opposite way.  Lucia whispered to me to call Little Luce’s name and I did!  She looked up at me and waved!  It was the first time she recognized herself!  Now she’s a junior in college!
While everybody here seems to think most Hispanics are undocumented Mexicans (including Lucia’s very of Puerto Rican descent sister CLo) CLo, Lucia and Little Luce haven’t been run out of town or anything like that.
I have been watching  The Golden Girls to prepare for our reunion for several reasons.  I like it.  We were so young when it was first on and they seemed so old–Dorothy (Bea Arthur) keeps saying that she’s 60.  I still think they look older than we do now and Rue was only in her 40′s–but the haircut.
Once Victoria and I were staying in a motel in Cutchogue.  Exhausted from a day of swimming in the water between the North and South Forks and eating a $9.99 lobster dinner that was to die for we retired early and watched The Golden Girls.
You know Victoria’s humor?  Dry,  understated?  A wit I want to appropriate for my own.  She was the first person to say:
The Golden Girls date more than I do.
I almost choked it was so funny.  Other people claim to have made that expression up but I was there that night.
I still remember the night I met you and Victoria.  The winter of 78 was famous for its blizzards.  This wasn’t one. But it had been snowing.

Vince Alessi was my date to Lori Bernstein’s party at a loft she rented on the Bowery.  Vince brought his white Caddy and made a big production of seeing if it was still there every fifteen minutes.  It did get covered in mounds of snow at times.  He would run out to shovel it. So you could see the white car in the snow.  Not because it was a good way to get out of the parking spot later.

I got stoned.  It was easier than caring.  After the party ended I had Vince drive about seven of us to the Kiev for breakfast.  Of all the breakfast places in New York it was my favorite.  Except for maybe The Empire Diner as you never knew who was going to play the piano.
Your and Victoria were supervisors, I a mere coder.  But we started talking….Your boyfriend until he died, Rick, was there.  Everybody we were too hang with constantly for the next decade or so was at Lori’s party.  We should have kept in touch with her to thank her.  But uh she came on to all of us at different times and that was more than a bit uncomfortable.
I thought we were all going to remain a family forever, like The Golden Girls did.  Maybe we needed to reach their ages to truly appreciate one another.  Lucia, bless her, actually looks forward to my too frequent visits.
I’ll probably see you soon as Rafe is recovering from the aneurysms and I need to see him.  Will know when, when I get my new Spirit Mastercard with four free roundtrips and can make reservations.  This is in addition to my ten free trips anywhere in the continental US or five trips out of the motherland.  I see a lot of travel in my future which is good because, Leslie, I need laughter.  I need mental stimulation.  I need to finish the frigging first draft and shop it.  God yes I need that.
Love you much
~pia

winter 1972

My father was waiting up for me.  I had moved home for a few months while I decided whether or not to get married.  Some people accuse me of making rash decisions but in reality I can take forever.  Or not.  It depends on my mood and the importance of the decision.  This was an important decision but I knew divorce was a viable option.  Hey I have always tried to be honest with myself.

My father looked uncomfortable as he stood next to what we have always called “the marble” in the entry way, as it’s made of Carrara marble.  “The marble” is a sort of catch all. I have known it most of my life and can visualize it perfectly but don’t know how to describe it as I have never seen a comparable piece of furniture anywhere.

“Dave Shapiro’s father died tonight, and so did JohnnyB.”  As nice as Dave, a member of my high school class, was, I really didn’t know his father.  JohnnyB on the other hand had been the first boy I sorta dated in college.  Johnny was tall, blond, sexually confused and had been a dancer on two TV shows Hullabaloo and an up with people type show.

When I had been living in Israel I had this horrible feeling that Johnny would die but had no idea either where the feeling came from or how to tell him.  I told my boyfriend who believed me and together we tried to think of a way to warn Johnny.  It was too late.  One day his girlfriend called me–I never did understand that relationship and told me that he had passed out the night before.  His revival was quick and gratifying but he was throwing up blood.  She took him to Roosevelt Hospital where they gave him medication despite her telling them that he had hepatitis.  JohnnyB lapsed into a coma.

The nurses told us that he got more phone calls and visitors than a Mafia member who had been shot in the head during a salute to Italy parade.  I loved JohnnyB and his demise hit me hard.  My father was droning on:

I don’t understand Pia.  I lived through the depression and World War Two and you have more dead friends than I do.

Is it a contest?

I knew what he was really saying.  I knew too many hardcore druggies, and people with problems.  Though JohnnyB had given drugs up years before.  My boyfriend didn’t do any.  Me I liked the passing of the pipe or a doobie only.  That night I appreciated the effort my father made not to say more.  But those two sentences stayed with me forever.

We both started laughing and went into the kitchen where my father sat while I made us tea and made phone calls.  I wanted to ask my father why just once he couldn’t make the frigging tea himself but he did buy all his employees coffee, treated women with respect, and he was not just my father but my boss that year.  He gave me the week off to go upstate to stay with JohnnyB’s family, before during and after the funeral.  It was my first Irish wake, and I couldn’t get myself to look at Johnny’s body.  After all it was just his body, not his spirit that had gone, I thought, two months earlier when he went into the coma.  But I couldn’t look at the body.

I had forced myself to go into his hospital room where he was hooked up to many machines. I was rather horrible around sick people, even ones in comas.  Especially ones in comas   That one day I would become a geriatric social worker was unthinkable.

Johnny’s father was an engineer for IBM.  He had always been ashamed of his bright handsome sexually ambivalent son.  Other fathers would cry to me, later, but he was the first.  It didn’t make me uncomfortable. I liked the role of comforter.  Johnny’s parents left New York for the mountains of North Carolina where Johnny’s father became a carpenter. I have always hoped he found peace.

Happy Channakuah!!!!!

✡

I’m getting into this.  It’s becoming fun.

Christmas break 1961
Daddy promises to take me to the ice skating rink in Great Neck later. My little sister, Elka,  is at her best friend Debby’s apartment in our 40 family garden apartment court, on top of a hill, at the edge of North East Queens.  The crescent we live in has hundreds of families, and the development has thousands.  All have kids.  On our copy of Madeline, our father wrote the names of our friends on each bed.  Then he made a list of the remaining friends.  I have a first through 12th best friend.  Lynda is my super best friend but I can’t stand not considering all my other friends “best.” Read more…