I never smoked a day in my life. Not even a drag on a joint in the sixties, despite the encouragement of my peers to join the party. In my young adulthood in the early 1970s, cigarette smoking prevailed as a social norm. There were no restrictions in restaurants, beauty salons, hotel rooms, stores, schools, hospitals or doctor’s offices, on the beach, even in airplanes…
My hometown friend Betty Ann (not her actual name) was a year ahead of me in school. As far as I know, all she ever wanted was to enjoy her cozy apartment, take long walks into town and back, hold a steady job, study and listen to opera, design and sew her own clothing, and pursue her favorite pastime, correspondence with friends and classmates who…
On this date in 1942, eighty years ago, the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston killed 492 poor souls in a night of horror and devastation, the deadliest nightclub fire in American history. The swanky club was filled with more than 1,000 people, over twice capacity. The nightmare scenario and loss of life could have been avoided, but for the fact that the only available exit was…
🐸 Did you ever dissect a frog? I did, in tenth grade biology, a mandatory subject in Linden High. I loved school and all my teachers, but when it came to geometry, I faltered, and shied away from taking calculus or physics in my senior year. I didn’t mind biology and could understand it well enough, starting with amoebas, but when I realized that lab…
My grandfather had a saying that has been passed down through our family lore, “Honesty isn’t the best policy—it’s the only policy.” In this holiday season, with travel and in-person gatherings in doubt, I gain strength from my family heritage and the inspiring history of my predecessors. My dear grandparents on both sides set my moral compass. One of my goals in life is to…
My Grandma Gitel was born Gussie Dickstein in Parritz, Russia in 1891. She lost her mom Jennie when she was very young, possibly at childbirth; her father Izzy (Israel) remarried soon as he could in the custom of the day, needing someone to help care for the family. She spoke ill of her stepmother, an unpleasant woman who singled her out for harsh treatment and…
In this year of the pandemic, our younger generations will miss the opportunity to attend school in the ways we took for granted—reporting to homeroom every morning, a classroom for each subject, cafeteria lunch breaks, assemblies, interscholastic sports, debate tournaments, proms, field trips, so much more. In my junior high days in the 1950s, we complained about the red romper suits required for gym. Miss…
I had a BFF, Phyllis, in my Linden, New Jersey childhood. I grew to 5’ 6” but she leveled off at five feet, if that. We went through elementary, Hebrew School, junior high, and into high school together. I often stayed over at her house, where she shared a bedroom with her younger sister. They had an energetic little brother who we considered a pain,…
My parents went to Havana for their honeymoon in 1943, a popular destination at the time. But there are no photos. That seems odd, because my dad was an accomplished amateur photographer with his own darkroom. They came home early. Something happened. They never talked about it to me or to anyone else. There was vague talk in the family about my mom having some kind…
BLOSSOMING In the spring of 1956, when I was eleven years old, my Aunt Jean took me and my younger cousin Donna to Washington, DC. I had been on a big trip before, to a vacation in Florida with my grandparents, but this was on a different level, a mission to see the capitol city of the United States. Dressed in brand new pastel-colored topper jackets,…
There is a saying, “If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.” I do not claim such extraordinary powers, literally or even figuratively. But I do know that I can summon memory to shed light, however briefly, on a person who deserves another look.
My parents lived on a block with four new brick cape houses on quarter acre lots. The kitchens of the two middle houses faced each other, about twelve feet apart, with small double casement windows above the sink. Every morning, after putting the children on the school bus, my mom Rose and her neighbor Madge washed the dishes in full view of each other. Same…
When I was five and my brother Stuart two, we lived in a top floor apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Later that year, we moved to a development in the suburbs. Our new house sat on a quarter acre plot with plenty of room for aluminum lawn chairs, a chaise lounge, rose bushes around the pink cement patio…..and the clothesline planted in the middle of…
I lost my dad Julius in 1980 when he was sixty-seven. At the time, I thought that was old. Now I’m older than he ever got to be. My father learned to play the trombone in the high school marching band. From there, he became an audiophile and developed a love for every kind of music. Dad became expert in all of the new renditions…
When my cousin Donna slept over my house in Linden for the weekend, we stayed awake through the night, giggling, telling secrets, pretending we were movie stars. When I slept over her house in Elizabeth, we did the same. Neither of us had sisters, and anyway, sometimes cousins get along better than siblings. On the other side of my family, my mom’s, I was one…
🌹 My mom Rose, in her mid-nineties, was a nursing home resident for three years. She was assigned a roommate, Ellen, who was in her fifties. Ellen was very bright and an excellent conversationalist. She had flawless porcelain skin, smooth and silky hair to her shoulders, and a wide and winning smile. I have some sense of the maladies that landed her there . .…
I picture my Aunt Jean in her iconic pose, elbow on the kitchen table with Winston cigarette in hand, sipping from a mug of strong black coffee, then listening to talk shows on her bedside clock radio far into the night. I sometimes joke with her daughter, my cousin Donna, that her mother never ate or slept, she only worked, smoked, and caffeinated. When she hosted bridge games for her friends, she offered Danish pastries to accompany the main dish, the percolating pot of Maxwell House.