There are many forms of trauma from psychological to emotional to physical. One cannot outweigh or place a different set of values from one to another. In this story, I will describe a horrible accident my husband sustained about 21 months ago, what we know about it and how very lucky we are that he…
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There are many forms of trauma from psychological to emotional to physical. One cannot outweigh or place a different set of values from one to another. In this story, I will describe a horrible accident my husband sustained about 21 months ago, what we know about it and how very lucky we are that he…
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Though Michigan is thought of as an industrial state due to its automative industry, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, it has a long agricultural history as well, with dairy farms in the middle of the state, and lots of cherry orchards around the Grand Traverse peninsula on Lake Michigan, more than…
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Among the many things we liked about Brown for Jeffrey were the accommodations made for him. (Jeffrey transitioned to Vicki about eight years ago. The trans community does not want to be called by their previous name, called their “dead name”, so I know I am being disrespectful to my child when I refer to…
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Where to begin? MyRetrospect.com has been a huge part of my life since the autumn of 2015. Patti and John Zussman, dear friends since high school, began discussing their idea with me for a baby-boomer community of writers who would share their memories and thoughts by writing stories to prompts provided by the Zussmans. They…
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My husband was always a tech guy; first a programmer, then a systems guy, then a thinker – a management consultant. I came out of college with a Theater Arts degree and a teaching certificate. As he began grad school, I begged for a job in his office and they took the bait, thinking they…
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During my years selling software and related services, from 1977-1985, I had various territories through the midwest and New England. Sometimes I drove my own car to see clients, other times I flew into cities and picked up rental cars (I always asked for small cars; I couldn’t see over the steering wheels of those…
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My pediatric dentist was a tall man, so of course, he was called “Tiny”. As my second teeth came in, it was clear, even before braces were discussed, there was not enough room in my small mouth for those large teeth, so he spoke with my mother about extracting two, possibly four (top and bottom)…
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I helped Mom lick S&H Green stamps and put them in many, many books, but I have no memory of what she traded them in for. As I scanned the Internet, some thermoses looked familiar, so perhaps she traded them for those and the matching cooler, which would be used at Memorial Day picnics at…
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My maternal grandmother, Belle Perlis (Anglicized from Potocksy) Stein, was the oldest of nine siblings, all of whom came to the Unites States from Bialystock, Russia (territorial Lithuanian). My grandparents came in 1906, as I’ve written about several times in the past. They landed on Ellis Island and made their way to Toledo, lived in…
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We moved from Detroit to our newly-built home in Huntington Woods (about 2 1/2 miles northwest of our Detroit location) on October 1, 1963. Rick and I had already started in the Royal Oak school system and we were in shock. We were both young in our classes, having needed to skip grades due to…
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I was eligible to vote in my first presidential election in November, 1972. At that time, I was a Junior at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, but had registered to vote in Michigan before coming back to school in the fall, so voted absentee, sending my ballot back to Huntington Woods. I proudly cast my…
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We continue to get lots of catalogs these days, enticing us to buy everything from fancy cruises to kitchenware to clothing. The deforestation caused by these is disheartening. Being so small, it is difficult for me to shop from a catalog, but I do have tried-and-true brands that suit me well. Through the years, I’ve…
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My grandmother had given up cooking by the time my mother lived at home with her parents after her year studying dance in New York in 1935, so she didn’t learn to cook from her own mother. After she married at age 32, she learned a few basic recipes from her oldest sister’s housekeeper. That…
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Until December of 1969, I had never been on an airplane. When it became clear to my father that I’d go away to college (the choice came down to Northwestern in suburban Chicago, or Brandeis in suburban Boston) and I would fly to either location, Dad agreed to let me go to a mini-camp reunion…
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I loved fairy tales as a young girl. I remember that I was reading “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” when I fell ill during the summer of 1964 and spent a week in the infirmary. I was 11 years old, had thrown up during Sunday morning services, (Our Father, who art in Heaven…blechhh…). The whole camp used…
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Dan and I have always had specific design ideas. They have changed as our tastes have grown more sophisticated and our financial means also grown and changed through the years, but we always knew what we liked. We married young and started our life together with very limited resources. My father gave us some money…
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We decided to take our first-ever trip to Italy and began planning in 2010. The trip took place in October, 2011. We reached out to our wonderful and well-traveled Vineyard neighbor, who delights in offering travel suggestions. We told him our thoughts about destinations and price points for accommodations, he came back with a variety…
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Does anyone remember the days when it was acceptable, even encouraged, to drink at lunch? This story takes place on June 4, 1976. It will later become evident how I remember the exact date. Dan and I both worked at our first jobs at SofTech – he as a programmer; I, a Program Librarian (glorified…
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David visited from London at the end of the summer, 2017. A large storm brewed off sea. It didn’t affect our weather, but churned up violent waves and such high tides that we had no beach, which forced its closure. We went over, just to look at the odd sight. So we trundled over to…
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Because of the peculiarities of the Detroit school system, I had Mrs. Zeve for 2A and 3B, but a whole school year, which was unusual for the Pasteur Elementary School. (I think of her as my second grade teacher, though that wasn’t technically true.) She was a 32 year old divorcée with a young daughter…
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Though he is five years my elder, my brother and I have always been close. He is super-smart and he did help me with some homework when I was a kid and looked to him for guidance. He left for Brandeis as I began 8th grade. My mother’s sisters predicted that I would flunk out…
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Shortly after we married, in the mid-70s, we had a lot of friends living in New York City and we’d visit often, driving in, staying on the pullout sofa with Paul and Beth. Jeffrey and Susan, residents to this day, always had a pulse on what was au courant. In 1975 they told us about this…
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Years ago, we attended a fundraiser for affordable housing (an ongoing dilemma) on Martha’s Vineyard. The evening began with a reception on a large property where the Clintons had stayed while he was still in office, then fanned out to smaller parties across the island for special dinners and entertainment. We attended a “magic” party…we…
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I must have been around 7 or 8 when I got my first bike, a Schwinn 3 speed with silver fenders and a head light similar to the Featured photo. My father dutifully ran along side me as I learned to pick up speed while gaining my balance. I had to know how to start…
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I needed a car my senior year at Brandeis, as I would be student teaching at a local public high school first semester. My parents arranged to “sell” me (for one dollar) my mother’s seven year old Valiant (similar to the car in the above photo). Dan, my steady beau, flew out to Detroit to…
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Belle Potocsky Beckenstein was married in Bialystock, Lithuania (part of Imperial Russia) in 1902. She was quite lovely, though I have no photos of her from that exact date. I do have the fan she carried at her wedding. She brought it with her when she, my grandfather Samuel and their two small children fled…
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Being a somewhat sickly kid, I had been out with the flu the day my class took the Iowa Achievement Test in 4th grade, so on February 20, 1962, along with all the others from my Detroit elementary school who had missed that test, I sat in the small, upstairs art room all afternoon taking…
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I don’t know when she came to this country from Kovno, Lithuania. She married Sam Sarason in 1895 in St. Louis, MO at the age of 19. Her name was Freya Leah Prensky, but she was called Lizzie in this country. She was very beautiful with dark hair and eyes. Sam loved her the moment…
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It is fair to ask “why do I write”? I ponder that myself. I thought about this question for some time before beginning to write this particular prompt. I never wrote much before being approached by my childhood friends to be a beta tester for their new baby boomer website MyRetrospect. I wrote when an…
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My devotion to my cousin Alan Jackson, and great sorrow when he died young, in 1981 was documented in Action Jackson. I was equally devoted to his young wife, Sissi, with whom I tried to stay in touch after Alan’s death, lost for a while, but reconnected for good in 2000. She and her family visited…
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My father had a challenging childhood, the youngest of eight children. His mother was bipolar, long before there was effective treatment. She had her last two children to “cure” her because she seemed better when pregnant (something about the hormones that was not understood). She was in and out of mental institutions by the time…
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My dad was the youngest of eight children, my mother the youngest of four. They were 39 years old when they had me. I have first cousins whose children are older than me. There is a huge offset in the ages of the generations in my family, so the notion of “generations” is somewhat tricky.…
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I was a voracious reader in my day and read many books that had been banned at one some point. I read most of them just for fun, or to satisfy a quota to read “so many” books per card-marking period. I read “Huck Finn” in 5th grade. Perhaps I was too young to understand…
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My father taught me to say prayers at bedtime: “Now I lay me down to sleep/ Bless my Lord, My soul to keep. If I should die before I wake/ Bless the Lord, My soul to take. God bless Mommy and Daddy and Ricky.” It was years before I realized that was not a Jewish…
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I began wearing glasses at the age of 8. I couldn’t read the board clearly and knew something was amiss. I had become near-sighted. But my beloved teacher, Mrs. Zeve, wore glasses and she made it seem OK. I got pink, metal frames that weren’t too ugly. My second teeth; big and crooked, came in…
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Mother was very insecure and depressed. She didn’t like to cook, had a maid for much her of life, didn’t know how to do laundry or iron, wasn’t good at domestic chores. She got by. Her entire life, she never drove on a highway. She didn’t like her own looks and projected that displeasure and…
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This week we are asked to write about our forebears’ refugee/immigrant experience. I wrote what I know about how my maternal grandparents came to this country several years ago and will link to that story at the end of this essay. I wanted to tell a more urgent story, given that this story will go…
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Through our years as active art collectors, we attended many art auctions, but rarely bought anything. An exception were the two works we bought from the Mass College of Art in 1994 done by celebrities that we hang in our bathroom, just for fun. We both love Gregory Peck and Steve Martin, so these were…
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I consider March to be the beginning of year three of the pandemic. It was in March, 2020 when the virus began to affect my life. My last in-person event at the Rose was a lecture by acclaimed artist Fred Wilson, followed by a select group going to dinner in Waltham on March 3, 2020.…
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David was a very shy youngster, so shy that his nursery school teachers wanted him to do a transition year. We thought that was not in the best interests of a child who was already interested in reading and math, so instead, we found a small private school for his kindergarten year. There, his best…
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Russian athletes have systematically cheated for years. The Wikipedia page is too long and complicated to try to condense and enumerate the many faults, going back decades for this story, but let me give you some “highlights”. For years there was state sponsored systematic doping. They have been stripped of 46 Olympic medals. The most…
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When I was a child, we traveled mostly to visit relatives and stayed with them. Starting in 1959, we did spend one week in August for five summers up in Charlevoix, a very nice resort on Lake Michigan in northern Michigan. We stayed in The Schutts Guest House, a large house with a broad lawn…
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We have a large, one-story house with a basement under most of it. About 800 square feet is finished space. The rest is broken into a series of storage and utility rooms; lots of good space, including direct entry into the garage through the laundry room. When we purchased the house in December, 1986, the…
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I am a punctual person. I insist on being on time. It is part of my makeup and it bothers me if I am late or others I deal with (including family members) are not as punctual. I have always had nice time pieces, dating back to my youth, when my grandfather (who owned a…
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In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed The Endurance to the Antarctic. It was crushed in the ice pack and sank in the Weddell Sea but all of her crew survived. Frank Hurley, the photographer onboard, captured incredible photographs of the entire experience. My husband is fascinated by this story and has read…
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When I was young, my older brother was a Cub Scout (wearing a uniform like the image I found online) during two elementary school years. Our mother was a den mother. I remembered neighborhood boys trooping into our basement for meetings and activities. Earlier this month, Rick told me the meetings were at school and…
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Really? Says every cultured person I know. You watch THAT show…or, you STILL watch that show? Short answer: yes. My father-in-law (who has been gone more than 20 years) introduced us at the end of the first season. Kelly and Justin. Kelly Clarkson won. She did OK for herself. As have Jennifer Hudson and Carrie…
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The unusual opening interval is a minor, ascending 7th. It fills one with aching, longing and sets up the dreamy quality of this hauntingly beautiful song. It resolves quickly and those few opening notes are instantly recognizable. Tony has just confessed to accidentally killing Maria’s brother in the heat of the rumble, but they are…
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On Sunday nights in Detroit, it was good Jewish deli food for our family. Darby’s was the destination, either eat-in or take-out. Built by Sam Boesky (whose brother Ivan was the disgraced financier of the insider trading scandal of the mid-1980s), it could hold 375 people and served 5,000 hungry people daily. My parents and…
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When first married, we lived across the street from a supermarket. Sunday mornings, Dan would run across the street and buy a Sunday Boston Globe. We whiled away the day reading it, relaxing before going to dinner at his parents’ home. We moved and the paper wasn’t as readily available. I always subscribed to Newsweek…
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I come from a long line of family photographers. I love my family history and the information that is embedded in these old photos. I am fortunate to have some dating back many generations. I like to keep the tradition alive. The photo below is the oldest photo in my collection. It is undated, but…
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To get to Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, one must drive on various types of roads and take a scheduled ferry. It has been a tourist destination since the mid-1800s when people arrived by horse carts. Now there are highways for much of the drive.…
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Does everyone want to lose weight in the new year? My resolution began after seeing photos of myself from our first trip to Italy in 2011. I had never been so heavy. I looked puffy and not like myself. I didn’t want to turn 60 on December 10, 2012 looking like that. I had never…
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I sent seasons greetings to everyone in my cabin, my friends and special teachers when I was in the High School Division at the National Music Camp from 1967-1969. It took me a long time to get through my list. I’d be done right around the new year. I gave that up for years, but…
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Over the years I’ve come to appreciate that having a good sense of humor is an essential trait. Several years ago I copied down this quote which I recently found in the notes section of my phone: “Those who lack humor are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.” Clive James said, “A sense…
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It seems to me that gossip exists on a sliding scale from harmless to malicious. It can be fun to talk with friends about what’s going on…who is dating whom, who’s engaged, recently married, who’s pregnant, who’s breaking up. The gossip moves on to more catty subjects: has she had work done? Is she Botoxing?…
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I didn’t like chain letters but didn’t want to wimp out either. I always held out hope that something good would come from them. If I got one, I sent it on to girls from my cabin from the previous summer. Interlochen provided us with addresses of all who had attended each year. But, like…
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My parents had very different attitudes towards gratitude; at least that was my perception as I grew up, after we moved from Detroit to the suburbs in 1963 and my mother’s mental health issues surfaced. She was a “glass half empty” sort of person. Nothing ever pleased her or made her happy. Despite all sorts…
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After our Brandeis graduation in May, 1974, Christie relocated from Chicago to Boston that autumn. She stayed a year before her father summoned her to work for him at Playboy. She worked as a freelance writer, doing pieces for Boston After Dark and a long piece on Robert Pirsig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle…
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I always burst into tears when we turned the corner and I could see the big Tudor house in a nice section of Detroit where Dr. Himelhoch also had his office. I was sure it meant I would get a shot in my rear end, a painful and humiliating experience. Joseph Himelhoch was a large…
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“Katie the kitten, a small tiger cat, Is asleep in the hall, all curled in a hat.” Thus began the little Golden Book seen in the Featured photo that David already owned when our neighbor’s cat had a litter of five kittens and we were gifted a cute little female. David was nearly two and…
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My dad was a genuinely nice guy. He worked a lot when I was young, but we became very close when I went off to Brandeis and he left the auto industry. Ironically, we had more time to talk then. As many in my family knew, there was nothing one couldn’t say to him. He…
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So-so actress; better stage manager. Didn’t have the drive or thick enough skin to go to New York and try for Broadway; married at 21. Took a crummy job doing data entry. Sang while I key-punched. While eavesdropping on the salesman in the office next door I had an epiphany – I could do this! Took…
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I have already written about losing my parked BMW in 2003 (Finding the Car). Therefore, I will go in a different direction today. During the summer of 1971, I worked as a counselor at the Jewish Community Center Day Camp, situated next to my temple in Oak Park, MI, not too far from my home.…
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Before my children were born, they each received the classic Boston tale, “Make Way For Ducklings” as a gift. The book is so popular that in May, there is a Ducking Parade, (children dress up as ducklings) and retrace part of the duckling’s route through Beacon Hill to the safety of the Public Garden. Years…
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I have always been able to pay attention for long periods of time, though checking my phone does cause something of a distraction these days. I do think devices have given my husband a much shorter attention span. He can’t just sit and wait. He must always be occupied. He plays games on his phone…
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My dad co-owned a car dealership during the early years of my life. He worked six days and two nights a week, so wasn’t home to eat dinner with the family a few nights a week. My mother had a housekeeper who cooked meals in those early years. Those women cycled through, staying a few…
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We didn’t know Victor 20 years ago. His wife is in a book group with several of our friends. They live in Newton and Martha’s Vineyard and now we, too, are good friends. Victor is Dan’s frequent golf partner and we go to dinner with the couple. One evening, he revealed why he retired early.…
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With the exception of walking when working downtown, briefly, when I lived in the Boston (while pregnant with David), and taking the bus in Chicago, I always drove to work. During my many years in sales, I either flew to out-of-town appointments and rented a car, or drove to see clients, using my own car.…
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December, 2003, my first time volunteering for the huge “December Sale” at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. My friend Barbara Cole Lee chaired this sale which ran over several days during the first week of December. She is a force of nature, brought in significant buyers from the art world and beyond…
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Now why did I come into the room? The word was just on the tip of my tongue. What was the name of that actress in the movie we just saw? How about the one where your husband INSISTS he is correct when I can prove he isn’t, or that he’s told you something when…
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The winter of 2014-15 was the snowiest we remember in the Boston area with large storm followed by large storm. Then the sun came out, causing some melting of the snow on roof tops, giving way to terrible ice dams from the build up of snow on roofs. We learned the hard way how damaging…
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I hung out with a group of guys who lived in an apartment in Waltham during my first semester at Brandeis. I liked one in particular, but he was only mildly interested. While hanging in his room one evening, a tall redhead, friendly with many of them, wandered in; a junior named Gordon. He was…
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There is a certain time in one’s life when she knows she is ready; she is in her prime. That happened for me the summer of 1969, my sixth and final at the National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp). Talent matters, but seniority does too. I had put in my time and blossomed…
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The third week of August on Martha’s Vineyard always brings the much-anticipated Agricultural Fair or “Ag Fair”, as it is called. The Vineyard has a huge farming community and everyone gets to show off their season’s accomplishments, from the best pies and jams, to livestock and largest vegetables. There is a whole display hall for…
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I love art, music (mostly singing, but listening as well) and now spend much of my time writing for Retrospect; a cultural triple threat. I have written over 250 stories on everything from my first job; Posing in 3-D, to the harrowing story of my grandparents’ escape from the 1906 Russian pogroms to their trip across the…
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As an officer of our temple, Dad set my wedding day as June 16, 1974. “Really?” I queried, ” That will be your 28th anniversary. Do you want to share yours with me?” He responded affirmatively and the date was set. My parents were a post-war couple. They barely knew one another and married in…
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In June of 2007, David graduated from Stanford and Jeffrey moved up from 8th to 9th grade; a full-fledged high schooler. We felt a family trip was an appropriate way to celebrate and asked Jeffrey where he’d like to go. “Japan”. “Where else?”, we queried, just in case that didn’t work out. “No where; just…
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The Second Amendment to our Constitution allowed for a well-regulated militia to keep and bear arms to protect the State. In 2008, a court case ruled that individuals could keep guns at home for self protection. They were no longer just to be used for hunting or protection against an enemy of the government. Of…
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Some thirty years ago, I searched for a signature fragrance. My mother wore Chanel No. 5. I wanted something more modern, subtle. I tried Ungaro, Issey Miyake, Creed (the scent of Jackie O and Princess Grace). All seemed too strong for me. I smelled something wonderful on a friend and inquired what she wore. Of…
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We enjoyed watching gameshows in our household: “What’s My Line?”, “Truth or Consequences”, “Password”, and a few others, but none captured my heart like “Jeopardy”, the original one with Art Fleming as the host. I’d watch when I was home sick, which wasn’t too often. Still, I really enjoyed that show. My senior year at…
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Moving from Detroit to neighboring Huntington Woods in October, 1963 was a traumatic event for me. Due to the quirks of the Detroit school system, I skipped the second half of 5th grade. This made me the youngest in my 6th grade class at the Washington Elementary School, a K-6 school, where everyone had been…
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I am lucky to live in Newton, which is a very progressive city of about 200,000 people. They have good schools and services. They began a curbside recycling program of newsprint in 1971, just a year after the first Earth Day, followed in 1975 by adding glass and cans to their bi-monthly curbside pick-ups. That…
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My mother was terrified of dogs. Dogs had been used during the 1906 pogroms against my grandparents in Russia. My grandmother would cross to the other side of the street to avoid coming close to a dog. She instilled that fear in my mother as well. I guess I understood, but I LOVED them and…
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I’ve always loved to dance and grew up in and with Motown and the Jackson 5. Little Michael was a phenom. Great voice, dancing whiz; he could do everything and captivated us. We loved to sing along to those early songs and imitate the dance moves. He outgrew his brothers and became the biggest show…
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Like any self-respecting teenage girl, I listened to Top 40 radio incessantly. As someone growing up in the shadow of Motown, of course, I loved that music, but listened to it all, and think the mid-60s were a remarkable moment in time; Motown and British invasion music flourished side by side. They couldn’t be more…
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At his mid-afternoon press briefing on Wednesday, February 17, Governor Baker announced that anyone over the age of 65 would be eligible for vaccination the next day. The roll-out had gone badly so far, with only health care workers, first responders and those over the age of 75 being eligible to receive vaccinations and many…
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My mother graduated from The Ohio State University in 1935. She wanted to study modern dance in New York City and was forever grateful that her father cashed in his life insurance so she could have a year to do that. She studied with Doris Humphrey, whose most famous student was José Limón. Before heading…
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I might have been a top software sales rep in my former life, but I never understood how to code or the underlying workings of the software. EVER! I could always call on a smart professional from my division for help going from the general to the specifics of how my company could help the…
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Growing up in Detroit, I attended an integrated, large elementary school which encompassed grades K-8. At that time, the curriculum was excellent, but even during the years I attended, 1958-1963, it was already over-crowed and I began kindergarten the February after turning 5, as they had split sessions to accommodate the large numbers of students.…
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My mother and her two sisters had excellent manners. They always knew what to wear for any occasion, how to behave, how to write a lovely thank you note. Very proper women. And these they taught to their children as well. I used to call them the “white glove ladies”, as you can see from…
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I appreciate the classic movies and my husband is an avid watcher of Turner Classic Movies. But when I am home and unencumbered, my eyes no longer able to focus on the printed page and I choose to relax alone at night, I have my go-to favorites that I watch over and over. I…
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Where did I go wrong? Now the breakfast dish is left on the counter, The ice cream bowl from the night before put in the sink with no water. The peanut butter knife put in the dishwasher, but not rinsed. I tell him – he needs to rinse dishes before placing them in the dishwasher.…
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I was born bald. My brother called me Boop-de-Boy because he thought I was a boy, but of course, I wasn’t. By my first birthday I had some fuzz. My mother always styled my hair into a Dutch Boy cut. I always wanted it long. Here is my third birthday. Mother ruled. By the age…
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I shouldn’t be surprised that I now have such problematic arthritis in my toes that I’ve needed two surgeries in six years. It began when I was a child. My chiropodist had me wear arch supports in my shoes and walk up and down the hallway of my Detroit house, doing special exercises to try…
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March 15, 2020. We were having a socially distant dinner at close friends. An annual winter event of mac and cheese usually followed by watching a Masterpiece Theater episode. This year, nothing suitable was on, so we watched a movie on a DVD. COVID-19 was already surging in parts of the West Coast and we…
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I often get comments about the treasure vault of old photos I provide in these stories. My father was the family record-keeper, both in still and moving pictures. When my parents divorced in 1981, my brother and I insured in the divorce decree that he got custody of those precious home movies (on real 8mm…
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I was a child of 8 on January 20, 1961. We came home from our Detroit elementary school for lunch each day. I knew the Kennedy Inauguration was special. The couple had magnetism and charisma to spare and I was caught up in the magic of the moment. I wolfed down my tuna sandwich leaning…
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I am an inveterate romantic. Dan teases that I weep at Hallmark commercials. He’s not wrong. I am sentimental. I save everything. I have a dried sprig of flowers from my wedding bouquet, pressed into my Bride’s Book. I have a long memory, for good and bad. Dan can make grand gestures when he chooses…
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In 1946 George Orwell wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” He went on to complain of the ways political speech had largely become “the defense of the indefensible”. After 75 years his words seem more appropriate than…
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I met Christie and Emily in 1965 in Intermediate Girls at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. We’ve been friends ever since. I moved up to High School Girls in 1967. They both remained in the Intermediate Division, knowing that they would be leads in the Operetta; and so they were. I wanted the…
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As a child, we wouldn’t do anything resembling Christmas decorations, but, for some reason, I always had a nice, new straw hat for spring. You might even call it an Easter bonnet. We didn’t celebrate Easter, of course. I remember one such hat was navy blue with an up-turned brim and a velvet ribbon band…
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Before David had to devote his Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to Hebrew School, the Boston MFA offered a free art program for elementary school children several afternoons a week, open to all comers. We tried to go on Tuesdays as often as we could. It was funded by a foundation grant and was truly a…
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Since a young child, visiting art museums has always brought me to a place of peace and beauty. I, myself, can’t make art, but I have appreciated it my entire life. My mother, aunt and cousin often took me to the Detroit Institute of Art. It has an encyclopedic collection, supported by the vast riches…
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I took a course on Northern Renaissance painting with Professor Ludovico Borgo in my last semester at Brandeis. For our final project, we had to write a research paper on a painting from that era that we could visit in person. We had to analyze the provenance of the work, history of restorations, and research…
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Dear 21 Year Old Betsy, You pride yourself on high achievement. That is fine and working hard will serve you well throughout your life, but I assure you, life will have its twists and turns. You will not have a career in the arts, but will find enjoyment through them. Go with the flow. Learn…
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I am a relic of a by-gone era. I believe handwritten thank you notes should still be written in response to gifts (except from immediate family members, when a verbal thank you will suffice). As you see, I still have monogrammed stationery (the Featured photo) for writing such notes (as well as condolence notes). It…
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In no particular order: Schitt’s Creek (laugh riot) Sanditon (disappointing) The Life Ahead Defending Jacob (shot locally around Boston) The Morning Show Never Have I Ever (hats off to Suzy’s son) Hamilton (better than live) The Queen’s Gambit (totally engaging, a true binge) The Crown (4th season, bulimia reigns supreme) Broadchurch (Olivia Coleman, before she’s…
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I have been surrounded by depression (not just Seasonal Affect Disorder, but true depression) my whole life. My paternal grandmother, dead before I was born, was bipolar. With a depressed mother, I worried in high school, in a melodramatic sort of way, that I was doomed to follow in their footsteps, though there was no…
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I worked for ASI for 3 1/2 years, selling video training and associated products to the tech industry. I was a top sales person, but being a professional woman in sales in 1981 was still a novelty. I had no background in software or business. A headhunter introduced me to the team at Management Decision…
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Okay, I admit it. I’ve always been a lousy speller. Though one might not expect this from a straight A student, it is true. I can’t account for it. Perhaps it has to do with lack of ability to visualize abstractions in my head. I don’t know; it just is true. In fifth grade (the…
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I have done a lot of volunteer work in the last 32 years, since retiring from paid employment. I divide that work into two categories: working on behalf of places that benefit my children and giving back to places that helped me become the person I am. I grew up in a household where my…
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The candles in my Featured photo were my mother’s. There are two pairs. I don’t even know how old they are; just a bit younger than I am. They’ve graced countless Thanksgiving tables through the years. Their sweet faces are rather the worse for wear, but they must come out every year and be…
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My mother set tight limits on me when I was young. I was not trendy. I did not wear go-go boots, Mondrian dresses, Twiggy eyelashes. She didn’t let me pierce my ears when all my friends did. I did not have a blunt cut “Sassoon” hairstyle. I didn’t go ga-ga over the boy bands of…
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Dan needed his Brigham’s vanilla ice cream! I had finished all the grocery shopping for Thanksgiving days earlier. The last place I wanted to be at 4pm on the day before Thanksgiving last year was a big supermarket, but Dan wanted his Brigham’s! So I dutifully trekked the mile to the Star Market, grabbed up…
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While visiting David in London in February, 2016, we took a train out to see Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and the “code breakers” developed the system to decipher the German codes during World War II, as depicted in “The Imitation Game”. Turing is considered one of the founders of modern computer science and we…
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I have never worn my “heart on my sleeve”. We’ve given a LOT of money in this campaign cycle, more than at any time in the past. We truly believe this IS the most important election of our lifetime. I have the date early voting starts for Massachusetts marked in my calendar, though my…
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A show-stopping number from “Bye-Bye Birdie”, in which I played Randi in 10th grade, is “The Telephone Hour”. Staged better in the theater than in the truly awful movie, it shows all the teenagers, posing in a multi-level platform-cubicle, gossiping on their princess telephones: “Hi Margie, Hi Helen, What’s the story, morning glory? What’s the…
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I’ve always had lousy feet. As a child I had to wear “orthopedic shoes” with arch support in them (saddle shoes in the summer, some black velveteen things in the winter, but always heavy, laced up shoes). Never sneakers, never sandals. Not enough support. I rebelled in 6th grade, while my mother was in…
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Mother died three days before her 97th birthday. I described my relationship with her, and her last six days of life in much detail in What I Didn’t Tell You Then. I knew the people at the funeral home in Detroit quite well. The owner, Herb Kaufman, lived around the corner from us in Huntington Woods.…
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Jeffrey (now Vicki, but not in 2002, so, for purposes of this story, I will refer to my younger child as Jeffrey) was a non-believer. He told us at the age of 3 he didn’t believe in God. I still wanted him to go through with religious education to understand his background, his place in…
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I know the perception is that I have excellent recall of events long-past, but trust me when I tell you, this is a mere shadow of how I used to be. I already know I am losing it. Part of this is due to a migraine prevention medication I’ve long taken called Topamax. It is…
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From about 1539 BC to around 1075 BC, the Valley of the Kings, in ancient Thebes, was the burial site for the rulers and some nobility of ancient Egypt. Though known about, the exact whereabouts had been lost through the ages, until archaeological excavations led by Europeans during the time of Napoleon began in the…
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As I wrote about two years ago in Checkbook Gardener, we have a beautiful little garden oasis on a busy street in the heart of Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard. This summer, between the pandemic, four months of drought and a less-than-diligent landscaper (not to be confused with Teresa, who continues to take wonderful care of…
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Until her death ten years ago, we lived a few blocks away from Patricia Neal in downtown Edgartown, where she had been been a fixture for years. She often sat on her front porch and was pleased to say “good morning” to all who passed by. But the “Martha’s Vineyard way” was to not impose…
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I joined the Newton Community Chorus is September, 2003. NCC is run as a non-profit, and we incur a lot of expenses. We pay dues, which covers the cost of our own music (surprisingly expensive, for those who have never purchased published scores of masterworks before). We pay our conductor and accompanist a fair wage…
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I am going to turn this prompt on its head. Rather than discuss something I saw a parent do that I swore I’d never do, then did, I’d like to give two examples of behaviors from the older generation that I found offensive and I DID NOT do, guided by advise from my father, which…
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Ken Sarason and Connie Stein were introduced by their oldest sisters, who were good friends, fellow members (and past presidents) of the National Council of Jewish Women in Detroit. The couple had their first date in February, 1946 and married four months later, in a small ceremony, attended only by immediate family, in Toledo, Ohio…
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My brother was married in the chapel of Hebrew Union College on his 35th birthday. It was not a big, elaborate ceremony, but included close family members on both sides and the many friends they happy couple had made along the way. Rick had already taught at HUC for several years, was well-liked and respected…
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We are five months into the pandemic. Massachusetts was one of the hardest-hit states and took a long time to reopen. That’s fine with us. Dan ends conversations saying,”Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane”. In a normal summer, we would have moved to Martha’s Vineyard for the season the week before Memorial Day, but nothing…
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I was always a good student, a striver, a high achiever, I got straight A’s. Until it came to penmanship. There I fell apart and got C’s. My second grade teacher, responsible for teaching cursive, called my mother in, bemoaning my lack of manual dexterity and told my mother to teach me knitting as a…
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I grew up in Detroit, Michigan; Motown, USA, in a family deeply involved in the automotive industry. My dad, with a partner, owned a Chrysler dealership and there was always a new car in the driveway (he’s the one just to the right of the car door holding his pith helmet with his arm out…
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I have watched the coverage over the past several weeks with fury and outrage. I don’t take to the streets for many reasons; arthritic toes, virus in the air, tendinitis in a hip flexor. Those sorts of long walks and demonstrations do not suit me. But I read and watch everything closely and think deeply…
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(This story may seem familiar in part, as the beginning was used for the prompt: Chance Encounter; but the last quarter has been significantly rewritten). As described in Over-Educated, Under-Qualified, I did a lot of data entry on my first job out of college. My title was “Program Librarian”. After entering the handwritten code from the…
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Second semester, senior year in high school. I walked into the first day of my last Social Studies class to be greeted by Norman Bienstock, a brand new teacher. This was his first job. He seated us according to a seating chart and called out our names, to put them with our faces and begin…
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I first subscribed to Newsweek as an undergrad at Brandeis. It arrived in my mailbox on Tuesdays. Though I often took literature courses with heavy reading loads, I looked forward to Tuesday afternoons. Those I devoted to reading Newsweek. I’d come back to my dorm room after lunch, get comfy on my bed and settle…
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Hannah and Sam Prensky, my great-grandparents, had five children in Kovno, Lithuania. Lizzie, their eldest, was my grandmother. They were prosperous and well-educated. Sam spoke five languages and had a cigarette rolling factory that employed 500 people. Hannah was literate, played piano and passed her quick mind and love of learning on to her children.…
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I was raised by a proud FDR Democrat, so it was only natural that I would become a liberal Democrat myself. Even at a young age, before I entirely understood politics, I was a Kennedy fan and supporter. (The title was his campaign slogan.) In elementary school, we came home for lunch. I remember watching…
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Imagine my surprise when my dear mother-in-law called, saying she wanted me to host Thanksgiving in 1982. I had never cooked a meal like that before and at the time we lived in a 5th floor walk-up, rented condo, left partially furnished by the owner, with some of our own furniture strewn about. It had…
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Spill some salt, throw it over your left shoulder. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, Break a mirror, seven years of bad luck. Don’t walk under a ladder. Don’t cross paths with a black cat. Cross your fingers for good luck (or if you were telling a little lie, but didn’t want it…
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(The title is a nod to a quintent from The Mikado, for all you G&S fans out there. Having been in at least three productions, that song popped into my head as I thought about this prompt; it seemed so appropriate.) We had a lovely, fragrant garden in my first house in Detroit providing fond…
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Yes, life has changed for all of us. Statement of fact and gross understatement. Many doctor appointments scheduled for late March or mid-April, now rescheduled for June (who knows if they will even happen then). The few that happen are now via FaceTime or just phone calls. Important questions answered via email (of course one…
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During my 16 months in Chicago in the late ’70s, I lived in a structure known as a “4+1”, as it had parking under the building, then four floors of apartments above, on the north side of Chicago, off of Sheridan near Lake Michigan. The building was H-shaped and I lived all the way at…
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I was a little kid, maybe 4 years old, so my brother was probably 9 at the time, significantly larger than me. We had the kind of roller skates described by Melanie in her 1971 song “Brand New Key”; the kind that attached to our own shoes, then tightened with a key. We were skating…
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“Behold it is the Springtide of the year. Over and past is Winter’s gloomy reign. The happy time of singing birds is near, And clad in bud and blooms are hill and plain.” That is the first verse of my favorite Passover song. I sang it in Junior Choir at my Temple. I even sang…
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My car radio is always tuned to an NPR station, so I stay informed as I drive around, though in my daily life, my driving tends to be limited. On the day we left Martha’s Vineyard in 2018, the US was embroiled in the Brett Kavanaugh debacle. I packed everything as quickly as I could.…
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This morning (March 23) I awoke to a wisp; it was there, just out beyond my reach, on the outer limits of my brain. I want to write it down before I forget it. Dreams rarely make sense, but they can give some insight into what’s on my mind. In this one, I was going…
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Chorus is canceled. Trips to California and Europe, which would include visits with our children – gone. Gym shuttered. Restaurants open for take-out only. “First-world problems”, a friend teases. He is right. We have our health, we have food and plenty of toilet paper (what gives with the run on toilet paper?). I did grocery…
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Shakespeare usually has something brilliant to say on a topic like this one: “What’s in a name?/A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Like my cousin Mimi (actually Mary Elizabeth), I was named Elizabeth Ann for our paternal grandmother, who was “Elizabeth Prensky Sarason” (so her headstone says), but I never heard…
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By 1972 I was half-way through Brandeis and had not seen my brother in two years. He was studying to become a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, but was spending two years in Israel, one as part of the regular curriculum, the second at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, digging more deeply into…
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As I wrote in Gotta Sing, I have loved to sing my whole life and did so in some fashion during my first 18 years of life. After marrying, going to work full-time, then having children, I no longer had opportunities, beyond the occasional lullaby or shower singing to exercise that love. I sang with a…
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After Mother’s sister Ann died in Detroit, it became clear she needed to live close to one of her children. Rick and I each showed her a few continuing care communities close to us (my brother lives in Cincinnati) and she chose to come to the Boston area in 1995 at the age of 82.…
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Leap Day is a once-every-four-years astronomical anomaly in the calendar, meant to sweep up the few extra minutes accumulated over the intervening years and set the calendar straight again. It happens to coincide with our presidential election years and I’m sure is a pain for people born on this particular day. When do they celebrate?…
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My second grade teacher, Elaine Zeve, first engenderd and fostered my desire to act as she read “Charlotte’s Web” aloud, doing all the voices and soon discovered that I had a flair for imitation and imagination myself. She came to see me in my high school plays and we were in touch until her death,…
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Roger and my husband grew up in Newton, MA. They knew each other slightly in high school, playing on opposing local after-school sports teams and through mutual friends, but became very close friends at Brandeis. This is their senior yearbook photo. Dan is on the left, Roger with the mustache in the middle on the…
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Moving is a pain. No one enjoys it. That’s one of many reasons I am happy that I’ve been settled in my home for more than 33 years now. Prior to this home however, it seemed we were on the move every year and a half or two years, either to upgrade locations, or for…
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My mother always had a wonderful sense of rhythm and a great ability to move her body to the beat of the music. I inherited that and my love of the arts from her. As a close friend, also with a depressed mother, said to me when I called to tell her of my mother’s…
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I loved getting mail. While email is immediate, there was something gratifying, even sensual to HOLDING mail in your hand. You could see someone’s penmanship (mine was horrid; I was a straight A student, but C’s in handwriting. It has only grown worse over the years and I still write letters). There was the anticipation…
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I have learned that all “tweens” go through tough adolescent years; it seems to be a universal truth. Mine seemed particularly brutal, as we moved from Detroit to a near-suburb, I skipped a grade at this crucial period, the new girls were far more sophisticated and I had a particularly ugly adolescence with buck teeth,…
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I am a born organizer and record-keeper. That is just who I am. My degree is in Theatre Arts and I wanted to be an actress, but learned over my four years of college that I was more adept at being a stage manager, writing down all the cues, running the show while in production.…
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We learned long ago that going out on New Year’s Eve was just something we didn’t want to do. Everything was overpriced and you always ran the risk of drunk drivers on the road. So we stayed in with friends and cooked. When David was a baby, I had a few couples over and…
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We see lots of movies throughout the year; this year we even attended three film festivals, though many of those films tend to be foreign and never find distribution. We eagerly await this time of year when the “prestige” movies roll out. When I saw the Golden Globe nominees, I was reminded of some good…
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My grandfather was born in December in Russia. He didn’t know his actual birth date (no records were kept), so chose Christmas as his birthday. Why not. The world came to a halt and the family would always come to Toledo to celebrate with him. We gathered at a nice hotel and aunts, uncles and…
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My father was the youngest of eight children, my mother, the youngest of four and I am their youngest. That makes me the youngest in a large generation of cousins, some old enough to be my own parent. We are a diverse group of people, yet we all get along, have each others’ backs and…
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Among the bedrock principles of Judaism are “repairing the world” and “doing righteous deeds”. These inform the imperatives for social justice and charitable activities, so practicing Jews heed these and find ways to do meaningful work. My family became more involved in temple life as my brother, five years my elder, approached his bar mitzvah.…
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I had a somewhat tortured gynecological history (never regular periods, an ectoptic pregnancy in 1981, leaving me with one working Fallopian tube, followed nine months later, with the same IUD in place – the doctor never told me to remove it – by another pregnancy which Dan and I chose to abort for health reasons),…
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Dan didn’t like surprise parties. He didn’t want one for his 30th, so a bunch of his work buddies convinced me to hire a belly dancer to come to the office for his 32nd. He still hasn’t forgiven me. As his 40th approached, our lives had changed. We had two young children, I no longer…
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What happened to Melania’s anti-bullying campaign? Perhaps her husband bullied her into shelving it. He seems to have the market cornered as the biggest bully in the country right now. He certainly has the loudest megaphone. A friend told me that he read a story written by an elementary school classmate of the Orange One’s.…
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Trump, Warren, Biden and Sanders are all in their 70s. Bernie just had a heart attack but “feels fine”. My father did too after his first one, until the big one came that killed him at age 76. Jimmy Carter, still swinging a hammer for Habitat for Humanity while battling cancer, aged 95, says they…
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David took a job with Google DeepMind and moved to London in January, 2015. Google put him up in a two bedroom apartment for two months while he looked for a place of his own. Not wanting to let the second bedroom go a-begging, we went to visit the next month. It had been a…
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I joined Advanced Systems, Inc. in mid-April, 1978. It began with a two week training program in Elk Grove Village, IL, where the company was headquartered. I sold follow-on contracts for video training and ancillary products to the data processing industry to existing clients (this was so long ago, it wasn’t called IT yet). Some…
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I stayed home after David was born for 18 months. We had moved twice and were now in our “forever” house. In fact, 33 years later, we still live there. Two months after moving in, we began extensive renovations and I began to think it was time to go back to work. I had been…
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I awoke to a distressing email from my beloved mentor, former Rose Director, Carl Belz. It said something to the effect: “I left quickly for Spain and today my pocket was picked. I have no money. Could you please wire some money to…such and such a number”. The email was sent to a large number…
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When we were little, my brother and I loved to play Sorry! by the hour. We’d set up the board on the carpeted floor in our living room in Detroit and hop the pieces around the board, squealing with delight if we could send the other’s pieces back to the start, yelling at each other,…
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I have never personally experienced road rage. I tend to steer clear of drivers who seem to be in too much of a hurry, or are weaving in and out of traffic. I give them wide berth and get away as quickly as I can. Therefore, I will tell two stories from friends during my…
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Because the Detroit public schools were already overcrowded in 1958, I began kindergarten in February of 1959, as did everyone whose birthday fell between December 1 and February 28. Semesters were separate entities and I was always half way through with a grade when summer came until we moved to the suburbs, when I was…
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The sky was dark when I came out of Pilates at 11:30am on Tuesday, July 22. Two of the young women who work at the club were standing outside, looking at the sky with dread. “What’s up?” “There’s a tornado warning for Vineyard Haven”. “Oh dear, I had planned to go there to grocery shop.…
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I heard about Woodstock after it happened. It took place during the last weekend of my last summer at the National Music Camp. I was in the northern woods of Michigan with almost no access to the outside world. I was busy performing the final concert of Operetta: we sang songs of Irving Berlin and…
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I met her “Becky Thatcher-style”; she was painting the white post fence that separated our properties and I introduced myself. We quickly learned that we were both involved in the art world, she as Director/Curator of the Brattleboro Art Museum, I as a board member of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. She gave…
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Last November, my brother copied me on an email which shared the results of a 23andMe DNA analysis (since we have the same parents, we share the same DNA; yes, I know, we are not identical twins, so we do not have exactly the same DNA, but would have similar threads, so the results are…
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Who has time to be bored? I get lost in my thoughts, day dream, or fantasize; no time to be bored. My mind wanders back to a happy time that I want to re-live and cement in my memory. I will live it over and over. I will write something to a special friend, sometimes…
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Truth be told, I do very little reading these days. I used to love to read and long ago, I read a book a week, but my eyes have betrayed me. I developed severe dry eye 30 years ago and did all I could to maintain my vision. I cauterized my lower tear ducts shut…
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Summers on Martha’s Vineyard start slow, pick up steam, then fly by. The third week in August has a particularly frantic pace, as the Agricultural Fair runs Thursday-Sunday of that week, with a carnival side-show, all sorts of animal displays, judging other displays within the Agricultural Hall; photos, crafts, giant pumpkins, everything from across the…
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I cringe when I hear jokes putting down used car sales people. My father began with a used car lot, built it into a Chrysler Dealership. When that ended, sold Buicks for a time, then became the first Director of the Endowment Fund for The Detroit Jewish Welfare Federation, starting in 1970. He was known…
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First a word about “honeymoon”. We were at a fabulous wedding in England last October. The father of the bride began his toast holding up a bottle of mead. He commented that it was the custom in old Saxon English days to offer newlyweds bottles of mead, also known as honey wine, since it is…
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Off of West Tisbury Road, in Katama, the beachy section of Edgartown, just a few minutes away from my home on Martha’s Vineyard, is this glorious farm stand; Morning Glory Farm. They have their own fields and sell their own produce throughout the season, open from just before Memorial Day until the day before Thanksgiving,…
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I was hot and heavy with Bob my sophomore year, but he had a bad habit of wandering off with other girls. This did not make me happy at all! I was really into him, but would entertain offers from other guys when he misbehaved. I loved going to our school basketball games and particularly…
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I was determined to be a Theatre Major. I picked Brandeis because it had an excellent theatre department and plunged right in, auditioning and landing a small role in the first Main Stage show my freshman year. I took acting classes, speech classes, movement. I also stage managed many plays throughout my four years at…
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While watching TV last week, I was absent-mindedly scrolling though Instagram, “liking” random photos of British royalty and Patriots, equally. Somehow, I must have liked and followed something called “julianedelmanofficialfanpage”. If it really was his fan page, it would have been marked with a blue checked circle, as is every account of a famous person,…
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When I entered Brandeis, it still had a General Education requirement, so I had to take courses across varying disciplines, not only in my major of Theatre Arts. I wanted to get all those requirements done quickly, so freshman year, I took French 10 (all literature, read in French), Humanities 1 (all literature), Theatre Arts…
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We had mutual friends from our high school class on Facebook, so when she sent the request, I accepted. I honestly didn’t remember her from Dondero. She has told me that she was very shy (as was I, but I was busy with choir and the plays). We were never in any of the same…
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Let me be clear. I am not an athlete and never enjoyed any sort of organized team sport. Just built that way. So PE was definitely not my thing. I am barely 5′ tall, small-boned, terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Great sense of rhythm, good dancer. Yes, dancing is good exercise. Anyone done a Zumba class? So…
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All of us of a certain age remember the “duck and cover” drill, as if ducking under our desks would shield us from nuclear fall-out. We labeled it the “kiss your ass goodbye” move. After World War II, as more countries, particularly our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, obtained nuclear capability, some built their own…
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We took Driver’s Ed during a free period in high school. Since I was in choir, took PE for two years, then a semester of typing, I didn’t have any free periods until second semester of my junior year in high school. I was already 16, so I was 16 1/2 by the time I…
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Climate change is real, pervasive, and all but overwhelms me when I think about it. Every day there is some new, shocking story about devastating storms in the south, floods in the midwest, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting of the polar ice cap, warming of the ocean, bleaching of the coral reefs. The list of disasters caused…
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I went straight from being my father’s dependent to being a married lady, so I have only signed a tax return. I have never done my own. I wouldn’t know where to begin. When we were first married, our taxes were simple. We had no investments, very little savings and made very little money. As…
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I read Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s obituary with great sadness and keen interest. She passed away in 2006, aged 52 from breast cancer. She was a leading mezzo-soprano of her day and, though I’d never heard her perform, our lives intersected at a few points. She had also attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in her youth,…
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The epitome of grace, class, and intelligence, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was, from the time I was very young, my idol. She married John F. Kennedy when I was a baby and she set about having babies too. She was married to JFK a mere 10 years and was pregnant five times, resulting in only…
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My mother was still in a deep depression, too tranqed out on Miltowns to take care of me, much less plan a birthday party. Dad owned a car dealership; worked six days and two nights a week. He cared but just wasn’t there. We had been in the neighborhood 2 1/2 months and I didn’t…
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I had the IUD inserted just before coming home for spring break my junior year at Brandeis. It was a Dalkon Shield and not really meant for young women like myself. I lay in bed for the rest of that day, bleeding and in pain. In fact, I bled for a long time after. I…
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We married after I graduated from Brandeis in Waltham, MA in 1974. I went home to Huntington Woods, MI to prepare for the wedding. Dan lived in the Boston area with his parents, so found our first apartment at 1105 Lexington Street, in Waltham, almost in Lexington. He worked in Waltham and within two months,…
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She was bereft at the thought that we wouldn’t write weekly. We were a close-knit group and loved reading and commenting on each other’s stories. We had become long-distance friends and in one case, even met and spent a lovely day together. But when Suzy reached out, I told her I needed some time off.…
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Patti and John Zussman are among my oldest and dearest friends. So I was pleased and honored when they contacted me, nearly three years ago, to be a beta tester for their new website “MyRetrospect.com”. They explained it was a story-sharing medium for baby-boomers to tell their tales, based on prompts the site would provide.…
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He gave me all kinds of intangible gifts. As I wrote in Dude – A Message of Love, I knew Dude Stephenson virtually my whole life as he was my operetta teacher for five glorious summers at the National Music Camp, Interlochen, MI from 1965-1969. He taught me the value of being an important member of…
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We looked for two years. Did we want in-town, or in Katama, closer to the beach? Finally, we bid on and had an accepted offer on a house on Main Street across from the Old Whaling Church; a small cape, but we knew our architect, Patrick, with whom we’d worked since our first Back Bay…
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Before I gave Gladys and Erv Pfau their first grandchild, of unknown sex (I was 32 years old, had been married to their oldest son for 11 years but was too young to have amniocentesis, so we didn’t know if we were having a boy or girl until the moment of delivery), they gave the…
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I LOVE TO SING. I have sung as long as I can remember. My mother sang Broadway show tunes to me while she bathed me when I was a little baby. I learned all those songs, mostly Rogers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe and could sing then on command, on pitch and well. One…
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The last time I wrote to this prompt was November 7, 2016, the day before our world turned upside down. In that essay, Born Blue, I described what a proud liberal Democrat I was. And I remain so, though these last two years have sorely tried my faith in humanity. My husband went to bed at…
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I have never been much of a prankster. I don’t like having them played on me, usually don’t find them funny and am not creative in thinking them up. So this is a difficult prompt for me. I never created mischief on Halloween, or any other night, for that matter. The closest I came was…
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The night after my father died I received a call from an older first cousin, trying to console me. He remembered that I was a serious little girl who LOVED jewelry. Funny, but not a surprising combination, since my maternal grandfather owned a jewelry store in Toledo, OH and when we visited, I would press…
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Yes, I know, “Yesterday” isn’t on “Rubber Soul”, but this is the only original Beatles album I own. My mother didn’t approve of me listening to that sort of music, so I had to sneak it, by plugging my ear phones into my transistor radio. How could you not love the infectious upbeat, cute guys…
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I went to work for Management Decision Systems in May of 1981. It was a young, vibrant company founded by John D. C. Little and Glen Urban of MIT Sloan School, Len Lodish of Wharton and two of their brightest students, Jay Wurts and Rick Karash, to do marketing models. It expanded to do all…
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The memories are still painful. A close friend once wished I could have a selective lobotomy to block them out. My family moved from Detroit to a near suburb when I was just shy of 11. In Detroit, if your birthday fell between December 1 and the end of February, you started school in the…
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If you think you know this story, read the addendum, added to bring the reader up-to-date two years after this story was written. It will only be public for a week, then will be made private again. August, 1996. Committee reports were given before the National Alumni Board meeting at the Interlochen Center for the…
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I have a notorious black thumb. I killed a philodendron in my college dorm room and those things are indestructible. I killed all my house plants, so replaced them with good-looking silk ones. No fuss, no muss. But that is indoors. The great outdoors is less and more capricious. Back home in Newton, MA, my…
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I recently heard Nicco Mele, head of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, speak. He doesn’t use the term “Fake News” to describe the hi-jacking of truth by our president, Russian hackers, trolls and bots who spread lies or disinformation via Facebook and Twitter, or the abundance of verifiably false…
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The radio alarm woke me the morning of June 6, 1968. I listened to the news, silently wept and pulled the covers over my head. I couldn’t get out of bed. After some time, my mother came in to see why I wasn’t up yet. “They got Bobby”, was all I could get out between…
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Charlie leered at me, “Hey doll, did you pop out tonight?” Charlie was Charles Werner Moore, a much-respected director, actor, and acting teaching at Brandeis (though I wouldn’t take a course with him until the following year) and director of the first Main Stage show my freshman year at Brandeis. He never learned young womens’…
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We are lucky to spend our summers in the historic town of Edgartown on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, seven miles off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. We own an old home right in the old village, a few steps away from Main Street, abuzz with activity all day on the nation’s birthday.…
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Truth be told, I was always slender, but my weight varied by a few pounds in college. Then, along with my friends, I’d go on the Atkins Diet…no carbs, only protein and 8 big glasses of water a day. The weight would fall off me. I’d eat eggs, hamburger (you couldn’t get good meat at…
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I met him when I was 9 years old. My older brother was Nanki Poo in the Intermediate production of MIKADO at camp that summer. Clarence “Dude” Stephenson directed the Intermediate and High School productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, as well as other plays and musicals at the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts…
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In the eternal “nature vs nurture” debate, I can assure you that both play a big factor in how one’s child turns out, but babies are born with certain traits that cannot be denied. David was born 10 days after his due date; I labored for 37 1/2 uncomfortable hours and he was whisked off…
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March 5, 1895. That is the caption in my photo album. These are my grandparents, Samuel Sarason and “Lizzie” (Fruma Leah) Prensky (changed to Prentis by her younger brother Meyer in 1925) on their wedding day in St. Louis, MO, as referenced on the bottom of the photo. I love everything about this photo. I…
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We live in a large, one story, L-shaped house. Though 70 years old, we are only the third owners. It is a contemporary, and was built as a retirement home by “Mom” and “Pop” Schwartz, who made their fortune in corrugated boxes. It sits on a corner lot, one block west of Boston College. The…
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I drifted through high school, worried about my grades, seeking good roles in the school plays, yearning until I could be in the top choir (I didn’t like being in the all-girl’s Glee Club and Girl’s Choir…we sang simple songs and at one point, I was made an alto simply because I had a strong…
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Lizzie and Sam Sarason had eight children over the course of 17 years. Lizzie (for whom cousin Mimi and I were named) was seriously ill with bipolar disorder. No one knew how to treat this at the turn of the 20th century. She had the last two children, including my father, the baby of the…
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I grew up eating simple, 1950s food. On Sundays we went to, or brought in from, deli food from Detroit delis, either Billy’s or Darby’s. My favorite was getting a large bowl of mushroom barley soup. Like Proust’s madeleine, I still search for soup as delicious as the one from my childhood. I have found…
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My older brother and I were Disney nuts. We loved all things Disney. I skipped piano practice so I could watch the afternoon TV show as a kid. My first movie, as a four year old was Fantasia, some lovely stuff there, but some pretty scary stuff too. I don’t remember my reaction, but I’m sure…
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Watergate. The word is redolent with history, even more so now with an imperiled special prosecutor, a sitting president trying to malign real news sources, looking more corrupt by the day. We are reminded of Santayana’s quote…those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We seem poised at another Watergate moment; just…
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I had already told the “powers-that-be” that I was pregnant, would work several more months, but not return after I had my baby, when the rumors of lay-offs began swirling in October, 1988. I sauntered into Barry’s office. I had worked for him some years earlier at a great sales job (he had fought to…
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There was no Facebook or Instagram in 1970. I sent a postcard to Brandeis with my preferences: neat, non-smoker. Over the summer I received one back: Carol from Brooklyn. She received a similar one with my name and address. I later learned that she thought I would arrive in over-alls (the East Coast kids called…
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If I may steal from Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. 2017 had a lot of both, beginning with the still surreal inauguration of the Orange Monster. I keep thinking he has struck a new low, but he keeps surprising me. I made sure to stay occupied and…
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I like history. When I read (now I have eye problems that limits my ability), I read biography. So my husband and I always wanted to tour Normandy and better understand what happened during the beginning of the liberation of Europe. The Americanization of Emily is one of my favorite movies and we agree that the…
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I walked into my college alumni party on my birthday last month; a cold day in December, which also happened to be my 65th birthday. I was greeted by many from the Brandeis administration whom I knew. While chatting with one, she said, “Do you recognize him from your class, Betsy? He’s doing an interesting…
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When I arrived on the Brandeis campus in the autumn of 1970, it did not have a student union, though one was under construction. We were the last class to use the old mail room. Our new student union, “Usdan” officially opened on November 1, 1970. The night before, with barely any furniture to get…
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I love my iPhone (even the earliest iteration, pictured above), but even before cellular technology, just having a cordless phone was a huge leap forward for me. I remember that first big brick with the antenna. We got it when my first baby was born; it was on a little table beside the chair I…
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I came to college incredibly naive about all things sexual and gender-related. As a theater major, I was certainly surrounded by gays; I was totally unaware. Perhaps they were too, as many were still closeted in the early 1970s. My junior year, I won the role of Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls”. The show…
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Founded in 1948, Brandeis is a young university with a small, largely uninvolved alumni base, though the university is getting better at grooming their younger alumni. The Alumni Office knew they had a winner in me right from the start. I used to stop in and visit, particularly after my kids were born. I’d take…
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Every female mammal has some form of them. They are functional. Yet for centuries, (mostly) men have dictated style and ferver about female breasts, both how much was decent to expose in fashion and how large was fashionable at any given moment. From the annals of art history and “Rubenesque” women in the 1600s to the…
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Costumes and candy, trick-or-treating, pumpkin carving and leaves rustling under foot, parades at school. All made up happy times when my kids were young and Halloween rolled around. Autumn in New England is so beautiful with the brightly colored leaves on display. We always hoped it wouldn’t be too cold or too wet when we’d…
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I was rushing to pack for Boston, but took the phone call. It was my client at the Farm Bureau Insurance in Indianapolis, calling to say the signed contract was being FedExed to my office. Perfect way to start my birthday weekend. Dan and I had lived apart for almost 8 months by this point,…
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“Don’t trust anyone over 30!” I remember the phrase well, but somehow, though I did some eye-rolling back in the day at things my parents said, I never embraced the philosophy. My parents were the babies of their respective families and were 39 when I was born. I am the youngest in a large generation…
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Shy people often come alive through acting. I was no exception. Though a skirt-hugger as a little girl, I started singing publicly as a 7 year old, and acting at about the same time. Everyone thought I had some talent and I was encouraged to pursue it. I was passionate about it. With the stage…
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I didn’t know Maria well. She was a senior and I, a freshman, in the autumn of 1970. She was thin with a puff of blonde curls surrounding her pleasant face. We had mutual friends and we were driving to one’s house at the western end of the Mass Pike late one Saturday evening, exactly…
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We always knew he was brilliant, but as we gathered around the computer on December 17, 2006 to press the button for early decision acceptance into Brown and read “CONGRATULATIONS”, we screamed and I cried a bit, then I called his special ed school, where they all screamed with joy too. Jeffrey was their first…
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We came off the Vineyard just before Labor Day, 2001 to a house in renovation chaos and our family in chaos. My in-laws had always spent the parting days of summer with us on the Vineyard, then the beginning of the fall with us in Newton, but Erv passed away the previous May. Gladys still…
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I graduated from Brandeis in 1974 with a degree in Theatre Arts and a Massachusetts Secondary Teaching Certificate. I also got married a month after graduating. Dan, my new husband, worked at a small software company in Waltham, MA called SofTech, but would start graduate school in the fall, though he continued to work part…
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The Democratic Party has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but lost the office of the President due to the Electoral College. The Electoral College has GOT to go! The framers of the Constitution had a population made up heavily of farmers, many of whom were illiterate and lived…
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It came on with no warning in mid-March of 2003…unrelenting diarrhea, sometimes several times a day. After a few weeks, I visited my doctor who ordered tests of my upper and lower GI tract. All unpleasant, but proved normal. Not meaning to be too graphic, but I had never been “regular”, and would have occasional…
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Gathering in the den with my family to watch variety shows was a weekly treat, from The Ed Sullivan Show to Carol Burnett; we ran the gamut. My dad loved sports, but that love wasn’t shared by my mother, so he watched alone…though I often was in the room and now can follow any sport that…
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One might think that drive-ins would be a big thing in the Motor City, since Detroit was the birthplace of the car culture, but I have only one memory of going to a drive-in movie. As a youngster, the whole family piled into my dad’s Imperial. He owned a Chrysler dealership and always had the…
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My older brother and I were both artsy kids. We both still sing and I was a Theatre major in college. As children in Detroit, we loved to listen to classical music and I followed him around like his shadow. We both loved the same movies and shows on TV. We looked forward to the…
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14 years old, out of braces, in contact lenses…I had arrived! The ugly duckling had blossomed. 1967, my first summer in High School Division at the National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp) and I thought I was BIG STUFF! I got to wear powder blue knee socks, designating HSG, no longer red socks…
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The summer before my senior year in college I worked as a counselor at a Jewish overnight camp near Ann Arbor, MI called Camp Tamarack. I was assigned to a cabin in the Pioneer Girls, the oldest girls at the camp. The group was situated a little away from the main camp. There was no…
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It was a secret. We only knew about it because a good friend on the Brandeis Student Senate contacted us. We had already graduated, but he got us tickets and we lined up outside the gym on that cold November night in 1975, waiting for legends of our musical lives: Dylan and Baez (performing together…
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Belle Potocsky and Zalman Beckenstein were married in the “old country”; Bialystock, Lithuania in 1902. I have a dress that Grandma wore to a ball when they were courting. These were not “shtetl” Jews like in “Fiddler on the Roof”. They were educated and erudite. My grandmother’s dress is a beauty, with a train and…
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I always loved to dance, but was a sickly kid, so my mother withdrew me from dance lessons. I came back as an adult beginner to ballet class in my early 20s. Though never great, I truly enjoyed it. I have a wonderful sense of rhythm, can dance modern and “pop” very well, but enjoyed…
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We are lucky to own a home on Martha’s Vineyard. This paradise island, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, has been settled since the early 1600s, and been a vacation destination since the 1800s. Comprised of six distinct towns, we own a historic colonial, the Holmes Coffin House, built in 1829 in the village…
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I recently witnessed a highly successful businessman query a 20-something about her background, her upbringing and her 5-year plan. I remember a mentor telling me to make a 5-year plan. I can assure you, things never worked out as I anticipated. I always loved the arts, my degree is in Theatre Arts and I have…
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My 10th grade Geometry teacher was William Sturley. He had just graduated from college and received a one-year deferment to teach us. He had gone through school on an ROTC scholarship and was due to ship out to Vietnam as soon as this teaching year was over. He was small and sturdy with glasses, an…
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I lost my father, suddenly, more than 27 years ago. I miss him every day; his gentle spirit and home-spun wisdom. At the time of his death I had a 4 year old and an 8 month old child. I realized there was so much I wanted to ask him, to know about him. He…
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The Venice Biennale began in 1895, making it the oldest and most important art fair in the world. It showcases contemporary art from across the globe for six months every other year. Twenty nine countries like the U.S., France, Germany and Canada have Pavilions that have stood in the Giardini, once a large park, since…
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A women I didn’t recognize came up to me after class in the gym last year. “Are you Betsy from Brandeis?” Guess so. Turns out we were classmates, sort of. She had transferred into my class our sophomore year, but graduated a year after me, so I really did not know her. But somehow, she…
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My mother had great style and a certain elegance, but no self-confidence. In fact, she actively disliked her looks. She used to say she had the map of Jerusalem on her face. As a grown-up, I tried to disabuse her of this notion, but to no avail. She was a self-hating Jew. Nevertheless, she always…
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In 1987, the neighbor’s cat roamed around and got knocked up. They gave us the last of the litter, a sweet little female. David was two at the time and had a few children’s books about kittens; in each the protagonist was named Kate so bestowed the name on her. I’d had a dog growing…
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My dearest camp counselor wrote this to me in 1966: You call me friend, but do you realize how much the name implies? It means that down through the years, through sunshine and tears, There’s always someone standing by your heart. And I would have you know, where ever you may go, There’s always someone,…
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Though always a good student, the arts and literature were my bailiwick. I had to work hard at math and science to get good grades. Thus, when Mr. Perkins, who I had for 7th and 8th grade science, announced that we all had to do a project for the Science Fair, I struggled for an…
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Haters gonna hate, but I gotta tell you, it is fun to root for a winning team. Over the last couple of years, I have become quite the Patriots fan, political bedfellows aside. I grew up in a household with a father who watched football, baseball and golf constantly, then I married a huge sports…
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The general store in Charlevoix of 1959 seems so quaint when I think back on it now; the wide floorboards, the glass display cases and large open shelving. I wonder if my Sarason grandfather’s store in turn-of-the-century St. Louis was similar. We vacationed in this northern Michigan resort destination for five summers and the morning…
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E asked what I was doing for birth control. In February of 1971 we were both freshmen in college and had both just lost our virginity. I visited her in New York City over Intersession, after my exams, before the start of second semester. At Brandeis, all freshmen were issued a Birth Control Handbook, published…
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As we prepared for bar mitzvah parties in 1964, my mother put me in a local dance class, which met in someone’s basement one day a week. All the “cool” kids were in the group. I was not cool, but took the class anyway. We learned to waltz, two-step and fox trot. Basic dance steps…
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My brother, five years my elder, and I, were remarkably well-behaved children. He was quite passive, liked to read, listen to classical music and watch “The Mickey Mouse Club” on TV. I was a little more obstreperous, but still knew how to mind my manners. I just wanted attention. Our mother was always frazzled, our…
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Freshman year in high school, the musical was “The Fantastics”, which it really was. I got called back for the female lead of Luisa, but the role went to a junior, which was fine. I was thrilled to be called back. With such a small cast, I worked on make-up. It was a great, friendly…
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Perhaps because he was the youngest of eight, raised by an older sister once his mother was institutionalized when he was 12, or maybe because he didn’t marry until he was 32; for whatever reason, my father liked to cook and was good at it. If we had Thanksgiving at home, he did all the…
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Being a Boomer, I have lived through all the style changes through the years. I wore pretty organdy dresses with patent leather Mary Janes to birthday parties in my youth. I had a dress coat with matching hat each season as I grew. I remember the introduction of velcro into the wardrobe (it made a…
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With minor modifications, this story was originally written for the prompt Snow, in 2017, but it will be new for most of the current readers. ———————————————————————————————————————————– The weather report called for snow, but none had come yet, so we all went to work; no call for alarm. It started snowing around noon on Monday. I…
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In “Slaughter House Five” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I’ve come unstuck in time”. I am not sure if that is the appropriate phrase, or if we are through the looking glass, but we are definitely not bending toward Dr. King’s moral universe this election cycle; far from it. Every day brings some new, disgusting revelation, whether…
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I LOVE chocolate – fudge cake, fudge, frosting, M&Ms, 3 Musketeer Bars. You name it. Each has a particular association for me. As a youngster, my family vacationed in Charlevoix, MI, a lovely resort spot on Lake Michigan. In their downtown was a fudge shop named Murdick’s. We would wander over, watch them make the…
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The blog was called “Today, I feel…” and began on Feburary 3, 2014. He sent us the link many months later, called and told us he had “gender dysphoria”. We didn’t know what that meant. Our blue-eyed second born, who had so many issues growing up, seemed to be doing pretty well. After years of…
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I love movies. But I had never loved a movie star; not until Daniel Day-Lewis swept me away in The Last of the Mohicans. Actually, it is my husband Dan who claimed that I was in love. An old friend referred to my condition as obsession. She would know. She’s a therapist. That didn’t stop her…
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My own family has no traditions to speak of, but when I arrived at the National Music Camp in 1964 (now the Interlochen Arts Camp), it was full of traditions. Some I would add. Camp had been around since 1928 and became an integral part of my life for decades. Now I just send a…
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Stroke, stroke, bail…bail..bail…bail! If only you could hear my accent. Moose and Squirrel, Boris and Natasha (did anyone else see her resemblance to the original Barbie?), Dudley Do-Right, Mr Peabody and his boy Sherman. My brother and I loved them all, and reveled in the silliness of the Cold War cartoons with our heroes always…
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It is that time of the year when we take stock of our blessings and enumerate what we are grateful for. It feels trite and yet appropriate to feel gratitude that my children are well and have good values; that I feel love and respect from my family and friends, that I have health and…
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My maternal grandparents came to this country from Bialystock, Russia in 1906 to escape the pogroms. They raised four children, my grandfather ran a successful jewelry business in Toledo, OH, were free to worship as they pleased and found prosperity in the heartland of America. One could say they lived the American Dream. Two of…
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My mother was a proud FDR Democrat and preached it at home. My father’s family grew up quiet Republicans, transplanted to Detroit from St. Louis. We never got him to admit who he voted for in 1960, but he became more liberal as he aged. I was not quite four years old during the 1956…
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My maternal grandparents met, married and had their first two children in Bialystock, Russia at the turn of the 20th century. They survived the pogroms (race riots promulgated against Jews) in 1906, hidden by Christian neighbors and fled to the United States with their babies in 1906…yes, immigrants. My grandfather had been a prosperous watch maker,…
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Growing up in a neighborhood in Detroit full of kids, Halloween was a big deal. My dad would carve the pumpkin in the scrub sink in the basement. We also lived a few blocks from two large cemeteries, so it really was spooky. We ran in packs from house to house, holding our breath. Houses…
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As workers, we used what tools we had easily at our disposal to save: IRAs. But other than that, we enjoyed being DINKs (dual income, no kids). We didn’t have children until we’d been married 11 years. At that time, we set up a college fund and started to set aside serious money each month.…
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I have two children. David came out ten days late, with a full head of dark hair after a long, difficult labor. Jeffrey burst into the world on his due date in just four hours with blue eyes and blond curls. I used to joke that their personalities were set then and there. David overcame…
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David came home for Christmas break from Stanford freshman year and announced he was going to join the band. I scoffed. He had played piano in elementary school, so perhaps remembered how to read music, but knew no other instrument that would help in a marching band. “What will you play,” I queried, “the triangle”?…
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We spent the day before in Ogunquit, ME. I walked the beach with my dad and got a bit sunburnt. We had to drive 1,000 miles to get me from Huntington Woods, MI to Waltham, MA for the start of my freshman year at Brandeis University. It was September, 1970. Campuses across the US were…
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We looked at Jupiter and its moons just before it set.
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I interviewed for a year, but it was a start-up and they weren’t ready to hire salespeople. I was looking to leave the software company I worked for and come to this one, as the product was a good fit with what I already knew. In fact, it could serve as a friendlier front-end to…
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The call came very early that August morning in 2007. We were both still in bed on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I heard the voice of my Brazilian cleaning lady from my house in Newton. She was very upset, talking quickly, “The toilet in Jeffrey’s bathroom broke. There’s water everywhere. I’m trying to mop…
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“You know I almost didn’t ask you out”, said Bob. We had been dating six days, were in bed, post-coitus. “A guy named Dan Pfau told me you were a tease.” “Who is this guy to call me a tease (since I, obviously, am NOT!), and how do you spell PFAU?” I queried, quite upset…
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I am so glad I am not in middle school and no longer have to deal with cliques and mean girls. Thank goodness I grew up and survived that phase of life.
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How could I respond “I love you”? You always ended every conversation “I love you…”, waiting for me to respond in kind. I always heard your criticism in my head: “stand up straight”, “don’t wear your hair behind your ears”, “you missed that note” (screamed from another room as I practiced my singing while taking…
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My dad lost his Chrysler dealership, due to bad business deals and the UAW going on strike, leaving him with no inventory, in 1967. My mother’s 1967 Plymouth Valiant was the last car to come from that dealership. I student taught my senior year at Brandeis and needed a car, so I bought it from…
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I spent six glorious, formative summers at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Founded in 1928 on an old logging camp, in a pine forest, between two lakes, it is the granddaddy of arts camps and was heaven on earth for me and like-minded friends. We waited all year to get there and not…
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I had a Scottish nurse when I was a baby. She called me her “wee little treasure” and gave me dolls that said, “Frae Bonnie Scotland” on them. Her name was Jean James but I called her Jean-Jean. I loved the way she spoke and the way she cared for me and my brother. Because…
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Rick was alone with our mother for almost 5 years. I was not welcome when I came along. I was a hairless creature. He thought girls should have hair, so I must be a boy, right? He called me boop-de-boy and tripped me as I learned to walk. But as I became more fun to…
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The Honorable James L. Oakes and his wife Mara lived next to me on Martha’s Vineyard until his death in 2007. He was kind, patient, brilliant and I adored him. Mara, with whom I remain close, shared this article on citizenhood, reprinted from the Brattleboro Reformer, on July 4, 2010. She gave me permission to…
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Dan and I started dating during my Junior year at Brandeis. He graduated that year, but lived locally, and would come by after dinner to spend the night. He always began phrases, “When we are married…” Finally I said, “Do you really think we’ll get married?” He responded affirmatively, so I said, “Why don’t you…
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I moved to Chicago in 1978 to take a sales position with a company willing to hire me. My husband stayed in Boston and we commuted for 16 months, seeing each other every second or third weekend. The photo is me, “dressed for success” in August of 1978. I have no photos of “AL”. My…
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1970 was a turbulent year. Four of us graduated with perfect grade-point averages, but we were not asked to give remarks at graduation. I think the school feared what we might say. It was just a few weeks after protesting students at Kent State were shot by National Guardsmen. So I had to be content…
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I was an exuberant reader, often reading by flashlight under the covers when I was supposed to be sleeping. I heard my 3rd grade teacher telling someone in the school hallway that I tested at a 10th grade level at that tender age. I loved “girl” books and there were plenty in my household, hand-me-downs…
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(I keep updating this story as I learn new information about my long-lost, but still fascinating cousin.) The last time I saw him was in October of 1980. He’d called my office a day earlier. “You’ve got to come up over the weekend. It’s fantastic here.” Trying to get a room in Woodstock, VT over…
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“Over-educated and under qualified”. That’s what the folks at SofTech said to me when I was desperate for a job in August of 1974. I had graduated the previous May from Brandeis University, magna cum lauda with a BA in Theatre Arts with honors and a Massachusetts teaching certificate in Secondary Speech and English. Married a…
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I was not a “cool” kid in high school, and, though I had run through a fair number of dates, I never had a long-term boyfriend. As prom time approached my senior year, I desperately wanted to attend that rite of passage, but things were not looking good. My two best friends had been in…
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I keep memories. The photo is me in 1972 wearing a cherished dress brought from Russia by my maternal grandmother in 1906. It was part of her trousseau, four years earlier. My mother and I were the only women in the family small enough to fit into it. When it became too fragile to wear,…
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My parents were very different. We were never quite sure why they married in the first place, or how they stayed together as long as they did. Dad was a home-spun philosopher, having come from a difficult family situation. His mother was bipolar, started in and out of mental institutions when my dad was 8…
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I was a goodie-two-shoes, as straight as they come. I never tried drugs during high school, though I dated a “druggie” Junior year. He came over on my birthday, high as a kite and sang “Happy Birthday” while hopping on one foot. I was amused; my mother didn’t get it. He visited once when I…
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I have never been an athlete – no hand-to-eye coordination; never enjoyed participating, always enjoyed watching. Lately I’ve become a gym rat and workout six days a week, staying fit with Pilates and other forms of working out. My husband always was a sports enthusiast, on intramural football and softball teams in college, but…
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My mother only allowed me to listen to classical music for a long time. I was a serious singer, took voice lessons, attended a music camp in summer, but wanted to be like the other kids and listen to rock and roll too. I got a transistor radio with an ear piece and broke the…
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The Brandeis Theatre Department hired a new scenic painter in 1973. In addition to painting all the backdrops, he also taught a life drawing course and advertised for models. I had done a little modeling during my time at Brandeis, but nothing note-worthy. This was a real class, taught by a master, so I signed…
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My father and I were crazy about dogs. My mother was terrified of them. All my lobbying fell on deaf ears for years. Finally, my brother was off to college and I was a lonely 14 year old. Evidently, my mother had had an interesting discussion with an aunt while I was at school one…
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What is faith? I struggle with the concept. We were minimally Jewish, attending services sporadically, though my brother and I were faithful Sunday school attendees, until my brother was 12. He was not being prepped for a bar mitzvah, unlike every other boy in his class. Girls still weren’t able to be “called to the Torah”…
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My mother’s parents came from Bialystock, still part of Russia when they met in 1902. I have a fancy dress from Grandma’s trousseau that she brought over on the ship. My mother was always proud that her family came over second-class, not steerage. My grandparents married in 1902 and were successful. She had a maid…
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Charlevoix. For five glorious summers my family stayed at the Scutt Guest House in the resort town on Lake Michigan for a few weeks in August, beginning in 1959. I believe it became quite a well-heeled resort, but at the time it felt cozy and lots of our friends and family from Detroit also made…
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I was so shy, I was a skirt-hugger. I loved to play with my dolls, the kids in my neighborhood and was dazzled by the performing arts. My first love was ballet and I started lessons at the age of seven. With flat feet and a sickly constitution, I wasn’t very good, and often missed…
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I tend to love romantic movies; big sweeping costume dramas, though occasionally go for thoughtful dramas. It is difficult for me to pick just five that have rocked my world, as I love to come back to favorites and watch them over and over again, just for pure pleasure. So I will share my top…
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Camp was a strict place and we were not supposed to fraternize with the staff, but my best friend and I were fascinated by Donn. 1969 was the second summer that he and his sister had come to work as part of the back-stage theater crew, she on costumes, he on scenery. They were several…
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Lanny was SO cute. We were in 10th grade Geometry class together and our lockers were close to each other. I barely spoke to him throughout all of high school, but he sat next to me in that one class. He was a wrestler; at that point, the lightest on the team, though eventually he’d…
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I guess girls are supposed to have hair. I was born bald so my brother, five years my elder, called me “Boop-dy Boy”. He was confused. Eventually I grew hair, nice, shiny, straight, almost black hair. I always wanted to grow it long. My mother, for some reason which she never shared with me, wouldn’t…
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The moon has a spell-binding hold on our collective imagination and never more-so than the summer of 1969. That summer was my sixth and last summer as a camper at the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts Camp) in Interlochen, MI, the granddaddy of fine arts camps, set in a pine forest between two lakes…
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My mother was insecure in life and insecure in the kitchen. Having me around made her nervous, so I was forbidden to watch. I didn’t learn to cook in her kitchen…a story for a different day. With her limited cooking skills, she cooked the same menu every week: Swiss Steak on Monday (barely edible –…
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Dan’s Bad Summer
Prompted By Trauma
/ Stories
There are many forms of trauma from psychological to emotional to physical. One cannot outweigh or place a different set of values from one to another. In this story, I will describe a horrible accident my husband sustained about 21 months ago, what we know about it and how very lucky we are that he…
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Messed-Up Michigan
Prompted By Changing Times
/ Stories
Though Michigan is thought of as an industrial state due to its automative industry, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, it has a long agricultural history as well, with dairy farms in the middle of the state, and lots of cherry orchards around the Grand Traverse peninsula on Lake Michigan, more than…
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Jeffrey Graduates
Prompted By Ceremony
/ Stories
Among the many things we liked about Brown for Jeffrey were the accommodations made for him. (Jeffrey transitioned to Vicki about eight years ago. The trans community does not want to be called by their previous name, called their “dead name”, so I know I am being disrespectful to my child when I refer to…
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Auld Lang Syne
Prompted By Retrospect Retrospective
/ Stories
Where to begin? MyRetrospect.com has been a huge part of my life since the autumn of 2015. Patti and John Zussman, dear friends since high school, began discussing their idea with me for a baby-boomer community of writers who would share their memories and thoughts by writing stories to prompts provided by the Zussmans. They…
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PDP-8
Prompted By My First Computer
/ Stories
My husband was always a tech guy; first a programmer, then a systems guy, then a thinker – a management consultant. I came out of college with a Theater Arts degree and a teaching certificate. As he began grad school, I begged for a job in his office and they took the bait, thinking they…
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Landmarks, Please
Prompted By Directionally Challenged
/ Stories
During my years selling software and related services, from 1977-1985, I had various territories through the midwest and New England. Sometimes I drove my own car to see clients, other times I flew into cities and picked up rental cars (I always asked for small cars; I couldn’t see over the steering wheels of those…
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Tiny
Prompted By The Dentist
/ Stories
My pediatric dentist was a tall man, so of course, he was called “Tiny”. As my second teeth came in, it was clear, even before braces were discussed, there was not enough room in my small mouth for those large teeth, so he spoke with my mother about extracting two, possibly four (top and bottom)…
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Points
Prompted By Retail Rewards
/ Stories
I helped Mom lick S&H Green stamps and put them in many, many books, but I have no memory of what she traded them in for. As I scanned the Internet, some thermoses looked familiar, so perhaps she traded them for those and the matching cooler, which would be used at Memorial Day picnics at…
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Passed Down Feud
Prompted By Family Feud
/ Stories
My maternal grandmother, Belle Perlis (Anglicized from Potocksy) Stein, was the oldest of nine siblings, all of whom came to the Unites States from Bialystock, Russia (territorial Lithuanian). My grandparents came in 1906, as I’ve written about several times in the past. They landed on Ellis Island and made their way to Toledo, lived in…
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Dad’s 50th Birthday
Prompted By Assassination
/ Stories
We moved from Detroit to our newly-built home in Huntington Woods (about 2 1/2 miles northwest of our Detroit location) on October 1, 1963. Rick and I had already started in the Royal Oak school system and we were in shock. We were both young in our classes, having needed to skip grades due to…
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McGovern, 1972
Prompted By First Time Voting
/ Stories
I was eligible to vote in my first presidential election in November, 1972. At that time, I was a Junior at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, but had registered to vote in Michigan before coming back to school in the fall, so voted absentee, sending my ballot back to Huntington Woods. I proudly cast my…
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Anthro to Wayfair
Prompted By From Catalogs to Amazon
/ Stories
We continue to get lots of catalogs these days, enticing us to buy everything from fancy cruises to kitchenware to clothing. The deforestation caused by these is disheartening. Being so small, it is difficult for me to shop from a catalog, but I do have tried-and-true brands that suit me well. Through the years, I’ve…
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I Get by With a Little Help From My Friends
Prompted By Learning To Cook
/ Stories
My grandmother had given up cooking by the time my mother lived at home with her parents after her year studying dance in New York in 1935, so she didn’t learn to cook from her own mother. After she married at age 32, she learned a few basic recipes from her oldest sister’s housekeeper. That…
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Learning to Fly
Prompted By Planes and Trains
/ Stories
Until December of 1969, I had never been on an airplane. When it became clear to my father that I’d go away to college (the choice came down to Northwestern in suburban Chicago, or Brandeis in suburban Boston) and I would fly to either location, Dad agreed to let me go to a mini-camp reunion…
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Prinderella and the Cince
Prompted By Favorite Fairy Tale
/ Stories
I loved fairy tales as a young girl. I remember that I was reading “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” when I fell ill during the summer of 1964 and spent a week in the infirmary. I was 11 years old, had thrown up during Sunday morning services, (Our Father, who art in Heaven…blechhh…). The whole camp used…
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412 Beacon Street
Prompted By Feathering Our Nests
/ Stories
Dan and I have always had specific design ideas. They have changed as our tastes have grown more sophisticated and our financial means also grown and changed through the years, but we always knew what we liked. We married young and started our life together with very limited resources. My father gave us some money…
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From Florence to Boston
Prompted By Customer Service
/ Stories
We decided to take our first-ever trip to Italy and began planning in 2010. The trip took place in October, 2011. We reached out to our wonderful and well-traveled Vineyard neighbor, who delights in offering travel suggestions. We told him our thoughts about destinations and price points for accommodations, he came back with a variety…
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S**t Faced
Prompted By Drugs and Alcohol
/ Stories
Does anyone remember the days when it was acceptable, even encouraged, to drink at lunch? This story takes place on June 4, 1976. It will later become evident how I remember the exact date. Dan and I both worked at our first jobs at SofTech – he as a programmer; I, a Program Librarian (glorified…
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Derby Evening, 2017
Prompted By Priciest Purchase
/ Stories
David visited from London at the end of the summer, 2017. A large storm brewed off sea. It didn’t affect our weather, but churned up violent waves and such high tides that we had no beach, which forced its closure. We went over, just to look at the odd sight. So we trundled over to…
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Elaine Zeve
Prompted By Favorite Teacher
/ Stories
Because of the peculiarities of the Detroit school system, I had Mrs. Zeve for 2A and 3B, but a whole school year, which was unusual for the Pasteur Elementary School. (I think of her as my second grade teacher, though that wasn’t technically true.) She was a 32 year old divorcée with a young daughter…
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Writing That Paper
Prompted By Procrastination
/ Stories
Though he is five years my elder, my brother and I have always been close. He is super-smart and he did help me with some homework when I was a kid and looked to him for guidance. He left for Brandeis as I began 8th grade. My mother’s sisters predicted that I would flunk out…
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One Singular Sensation
Prompted By Memorable Performances
/ Stories
Shortly after we married, in the mid-70s, we had a lot of friends living in New York City and we’d visit often, driving in, staying on the pullout sofa with Paul and Beth. Jeffrey and Susan, residents to this day, always had a pulse on what was au courant. In 1975 they told us about this…
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Letterman’s Favorite Magician
Prompted By Do You Believe in Magic?
/ Stories
Years ago, we attended a fundraiser for affordable housing (an ongoing dilemma) on Martha’s Vineyard. The evening began with a reception on a large property where the Clintons had stayed while he was still in office, then fanned out to smaller parties across the island for special dinners and entertainment. We attended a “magic” party…we…
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Star
Prompted By Riding a Bicycle
/ Stories
I must have been around 7 or 8 when I got my first bike, a Schwinn 3 speed with silver fenders and a head light similar to the Featured photo. My father dutifully ran along side me as I learned to pick up speed while gaining my balance. I had to know how to start…
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My Old Valiant
Prompted By Car Trouble
/ Stories
I needed a car my senior year at Brandeis, as I would be student teaching at a local public high school first semester. My parents arranged to “sell” me (for one dollar) my mother’s seven year old Valiant (similar to the car in the above photo). Dan, my steady beau, flew out to Detroit to…
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Grandma’s Fan
Prompted By What I Own That's Older Than I Am
/ Stories
Belle Potocsky Beckenstein was married in Bialystock, Lithuania (part of Imperial Russia) in 1902. She was quite lovely, though I have no photos of her from that exact date. I do have the fan she carried at her wedding. She brought it with her when she, my grandfather Samuel and their two small children fled…
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God Speed, John Glenn
Prompted By Broadcast News
/ Stories
Being a somewhat sickly kid, I had been out with the flu the day my class took the Iowa Achievement Test in 4th grade, so on February 20, 1962, along with all the others from my Detroit elementary school who had missed that test, I sat in the small, upstairs art room all afternoon taking…
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Lizzie Prensky
Prompted By What's in a Name
/ Stories
I don’t know when she came to this country from Kovno, Lithuania. She married Sam Sarason in 1895 in St. Louis, MO at the age of 19. Her name was Freya Leah Prensky, but she was called Lizzie in this country. She was very beautiful with dark hair and eyes. Sam loved her the moment…
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Finding My Voice
Prompted By Why We Write
/ Stories
It is fair to ask “why do I write”? I ponder that myself. I thought about this question for some time before beginning to write this particular prompt. I never wrote much before being approached by my childhood friends to be a beta tester for their new baby boomer website MyRetrospect. I wrote when an…
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Sissi’s 60th
Prompted By Lost in Translation
/ Stories
My devotion to my cousin Alan Jackson, and great sorrow when he died young, in 1981 was documented in Action Jackson. I was equally devoted to his young wife, Sissi, with whom I tried to stay in touch after Alan’s death, lost for a while, but reconnected for good in 2000. She and her family visited…
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Homespun Hero
Prompted By What My Father Told Me
/ Stories
My father had a challenging childhood, the youngest of eight children. His mother was bipolar, long before there was effective treatment. She had her last two children to “cure” her because she seemed better when pregnant (something about the hormones that was not understood). She was in and out of mental institutions by the time…
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Blended Generations
Prompted By Mind the Gap
/ Stories
My dad was the youngest of eight children, my mother the youngest of four. They were 39 years old when they had me. I have first cousins whose children are older than me. There is a huge offset in the ages of the generations in my family, so the notion of “generations” is somewhat tricky.…
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Prompted By Banned Books
/ Stories
I was a voracious reader in my day and read many books that had been banned at one some point. I read most of them just for fun, or to satisfy a quota to read “so many” books per card-marking period. I read “Huck Finn” in 5th grade. Perhaps I was too young to understand…
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Bedtime Books
Prompted By Sleepy Time
/ Stories
My father taught me to say prayers at bedtime: “Now I lay me down to sleep/ Bless my Lord, My soul to keep. If I should die before I wake/ Bless the Lord, My soul to take. God bless Mommy and Daddy and Ricky.” It was years before I realized that was not a Jewish…
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Myopic With a Side of Astigmatism
Prompted By The Eyes Have It
/ Stories
I began wearing glasses at the age of 8. I couldn’t read the board clearly and knew something was amiss. I had become near-sighted. But my beloved teacher, Mrs. Zeve, wore glasses and she made it seem OK. I got pink, metal frames that weren’t too ugly. My second teeth; big and crooked, came in…
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Songs My Mother Taught Me
Prompted By What My Mother Told Me
/ Stories
Mother was very insecure and depressed. She didn’t like to cook, had a maid for much her of life, didn’t know how to do laundry or iron, wasn’t good at domestic chores. She got by. Her entire life, she never drove on a highway. She didn’t like her own looks and projected that displeasure and…
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Cecile and Roman
Prompted By Refugees
/ Stories
This week we are asked to write about our forebears’ refugee/immigrant experience. I wrote what I know about how my maternal grandparents came to this country several years ago and will link to that story at the end of this essay. I wanted to tell a more urgent story, given that this story will go…
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Out of the Box
Prompted By Auctions and Raffles
/ Stories
Through our years as active art collectors, we attended many art auctions, but rarely bought anything. An exception were the two works we bought from the Mass College of Art in 1994 done by celebrities that we hang in our bathroom, just for fun. We both love Gregory Peck and Steve Martin, so these were…
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Back to Living
Prompted By Pandemic, Year Three
/ Stories
I consider March to be the beginning of year three of the pandemic. It was in March, 2020 when the virus began to affect my life. My last in-person event at the Rose was a lecture by acclaimed artist Fred Wilson, followed by a select group going to dinner in Waltham on March 3, 2020.…
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Ollie
Prompted By Photo Booths
/ Stories
David was a very shy youngster, so shy that his nursery school teachers wanted him to do a transition year. We thought that was not in the best interests of a child who was already interested in reading and math, so instead, we found a small private school for his kindergarten year. There, his best…
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Ban Them All
Prompted By Cheating
/ Stories
Russian athletes have systematically cheated for years. The Wikipedia page is too long and complicated to try to condense and enumerate the many faults, going back decades for this story, but let me give you some “highlights”. For years there was state sponsored systematic doping. They have been stripped of 46 Olympic medals. The most…
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Villa d’Esta
Prompted By Hotels, Motels, Inns, and Hostels
/ Stories
When I was a child, we traveled mostly to visit relatives and stayed with them. Starting in 1959, we did spend one week in August for five summers up in Charlevoix, a very nice resort on Lake Michigan in northern Michigan. We stayed in The Schutts Guest House, a large house with a broad lawn…
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Who Slept Here?
Prompted By Basements and Attics
/ Stories
We have a large, one-story house with a basement under most of it. About 800 square feet is finished space. The rest is broken into a series of storage and utility rooms; lots of good space, including direct entry into the garage through the laundry room. When we purchased the house in December, 1986, the…
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Apple Watch
Prompted By Time
/ Stories
I am a punctual person. I insist on being on time. It is part of my makeup and it bothers me if I am late or others I deal with (including family members) are not as punctual. I have always had nice time pieces, dating back to my youth, when my grandfather (who owned a…
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Endurance
Prompted By Some Assembly Required
/ Stories
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed The Endurance to the Antarctic. It was crushed in the ice pack and sank in the Weddell Sea but all of her crew survived. Frank Hurley, the photographer onboard, captured incredible photographs of the entire experience. My husband is fascinated by this story and has read…
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False Memories
Prompted By Scouting
/ Stories
When I was young, my older brother was a Cub Scout (wearing a uniform like the image I found online) during two elementary school years. Our mother was a den mother. I remembered neighborhood boys trooping into our basement for meetings and activities. Earlier this month, Rick told me the meetings were at school and…
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American Idol
Prompted By Guilty Pleasures
/ Stories
Really? Says every cultured person I know. You watch THAT show…or, you STILL watch that show? Short answer: yes. My father-in-law (who has been gone more than 20 years) introduced us at the end of the first season. Kelly and Justin. Kelly Clarkson won. She did OK for herself. As have Jennifer Hudson and Carrie…
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Somewhere
Prompted By One Song That Moves Me
/ Stories
The unusual opening interval is a minor, ascending 7th. It fills one with aching, longing and sets up the dreamy quality of this hauntingly beautiful song. It resolves quickly and those few opening notes are instantly recognizable. Tony has just confessed to accidentally killing Maria’s brother in the heat of the rumble, but they are…
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Mushroom Barley Soup on Sunday
Prompted By Comfort Food
/ Stories
On Sunday nights in Detroit, it was good Jewish deli food for our family. Darby’s was the destination, either eat-in or take-out. Built by Sam Boesky (whose brother Ivan was the disgraced financier of the insider trading scandal of the mid-1980s), it could hold 375 people and served 5,000 hungry people daily. My parents and…
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Love the Form Factor
Prompted By Newspapers
/ Stories
When first married, we lived across the street from a supermarket. Sunday mornings, Dan would run across the street and buy a Sunday Boston Globe. We whiled away the day reading it, relaxing before going to dinner at his parents’ home. We moved and the paper wasn’t as readily available. I always subscribed to Newsweek…
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Family History
Prompted By Group Photos
/ Stories
I come from a long line of family photographers. I love my family history and the information that is embedded in these old photos. I am fortunate to have some dating back many generations. I like to keep the tradition alive. The photo below is the oldest photo in my collection. It is undated, but…
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Getting to Martha’s Vineyard
Prompted By Highways and Byways
/ Stories
To get to Martha’s Vineyard, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, one must drive on various types of roads and take a scheduled ferry. It has been a tourist destination since the mid-1800s when people arrived by horse carts. Now there are highways for much of the drive.…
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Back to the Gym, but When?
Prompted By Resolutions
/ Stories
Does everyone want to lose weight in the new year? My resolution began after seeing photos of myself from our first trip to Italy in 2011. I had never been so heavy. I looked puffy and not like myself. I didn’t want to turn 60 on December 10, 2012 looking like that. I had never…
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Holiday Tradition
Prompted By Holiday Letters
/ Stories
I sent seasons greetings to everyone in my cabin, my friends and special teachers when I was in the High School Division at the National Music Camp from 1967-1969. It took me a long time to get through my list. I’d be done right around the new year. I gave that up for years, but…
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Make ‘Em Laugh
Prompted By Comic Relief
/ Stories
Over the years I’ve come to appreciate that having a good sense of humor is an essential trait. Several years ago I copied down this quote which I recently found in the notes section of my phone: “Those who lack humor are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.” Clive James said, “A sense…
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Is She Really Going Out With Him?
Prompted By Gossip
/ Stories
It seems to me that gossip exists on a sliding scale from harmless to malicious. It can be fun to talk with friends about what’s going on…who is dating whom, who’s engaged, recently married, who’s pregnant, who’s breaking up. The gossip moves on to more catty subjects: has she had work done? Is she Botoxing?…
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Junk Mail
Prompted By Chain Letters
/ Stories
I didn’t like chain letters but didn’t want to wimp out either. I always held out hope that something good would come from them. If I got one, I sent it on to girls from my cabin from the previous summer. Interlochen provided us with addresses of all who had attended each year. But, like…
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The Art of Living
Prompted By An Attitude of Gratitude
/ Stories
My parents had very different attitudes towards gratitude; at least that was my perception as I grew up, after we moved from Detroit to the suburbs in 1963 and my mother’s mental health issues surfaced. She was a “glass half empty” sort of person. Nothing ever pleased her or made her happy. Despite all sorts…
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Backgammon, 1975
Prompted By Dice
/ Stories
After our Brandeis graduation in May, 1974, Christie relocated from Chicago to Boston that autumn. She stayed a year before her father summoned her to work for him at Playboy. She worked as a freelance writer, doing pieces for Boston After Dark and a long piece on Robert Pirsig and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle…
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Joe Himelhoch
Prompted By Family Medicine
/ Stories
I always burst into tears when we turned the corner and I could see the big Tudor house in a nice section of Detroit where Dr. Himelhoch also had his office. I was sure it meant I would get a shot in my rear end, a painful and humiliating experience. Joseph Himelhoch was a large…
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Katie the Kitten
Prompted By Children's Books
/ Stories
“Katie the kitten, a small tiger cat, Is asleep in the hall, all curled in a hat.” Thus began the little Golden Book seen in the Featured photo that David already owned when our neighbor’s cat had a litter of five kittens and we were gifted a cute little female. David was nearly two and…
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Asking the Right Questions
Prompted By Regrets
/ Stories
My dad was a genuinely nice guy. He worked a lot when I was young, but we became very close when I went off to Brandeis and he left the auto industry. Ironically, we had more time to talk then. As many in my family knew, there was nothing one couldn’t say to him. He…
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Using My Talents
Prompted By Lemons to Lemonade
/ Stories
So-so actress; better stage manager. Didn’t have the drive or thick enough skin to go to New York and try for Broadway; married at 21. Took a crummy job doing data entry. Sang while I key-punched. While eavesdropping on the salesman in the office next door I had an epiphany – I could do this! Took…
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Mel
Prompted By Parking
/ Stories
I have already written about losing my parked BMW in 2003 (Finding the Car). Therefore, I will go in a different direction today. During the summer of 1971, I worked as a counselor at the Jewish Community Center Day Camp, situated next to my temple in Oak Park, MI, not too far from my home.…
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With a Baby on the Way
Prompted By Children's Books
/ Stories
Before my children were born, they each received the classic Boston tale, “Make Way For Ducklings” as a gift. The book is so popular that in May, there is a Ducking Parade, (children dress up as ducklings) and retrace part of the duckling’s route through Beacon Hill to the safety of the Public Garden. Years…
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ADHD
Prompted By Attention Span
/ Stories
I have always been able to pay attention for long periods of time, though checking my phone does cause something of a distraction these days. I do think devices have given my husband a much shorter attention span. He can’t just sit and wait. He must always be occupied. He plays games on his phone…
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Dinner With a Working Dad
Prompted By Mealtime
/ Stories
My dad co-owned a car dealership during the early years of my life. He worked six days and two nights a week, so wasn’t home to eat dinner with the family a few nights a week. My mother had a housekeeper who cooked meals in those early years. Those women cycled through, staying a few…
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Paying Respect
Prompted By 9/11 Twenty Years Later
/ Stories
We didn’t know Victor 20 years ago. His wife is in a book group with several of our friends. They live in Newton and Martha’s Vineyard and now we, too, are good friends. Victor is Dan’s frequent golf partner and we go to dinner with the couple. One evening, he revealed why he retired early.…
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Drive
Prompted By Going to Work
/ Stories
With the exception of walking when working downtown, briefly, when I lived in the Boston (while pregnant with David), and taking the bus in Chicago, I always drove to work. During my many years in sales, I either flew to out-of-town appointments and rented a car, or drove to see clients, using my own car.…
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Finding the Car
Prompted By Senior Moments
/ Stories
December, 2003, my first time volunteering for the huge “December Sale” at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. My friend Barbara Cole Lee chaired this sale which ran over several days during the first week of December. She is a force of nature, brought in significant buyers from the art world and beyond…
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The Thought Was Just There
Prompted By Senior Moments
/ Stories
Now why did I come into the room? The word was just on the tip of my tongue. What was the name of that actress in the movie we just saw? How about the one where your husband INSISTS he is correct when I can prove he isn’t, or that he’s told you something when…
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Ice Dams, Feb, 2015
Prompted By Home Repair
/ Stories
The winter of 2014-15 was the snowiest we remember in the Boston area with large storm followed by large storm. Then the sun came out, causing some melting of the snow on roof tops, giving way to terrible ice dams from the build up of snow on roofs. We learned the hard way how damaging…
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Heartbreak Hotel
Prompted By Dating
/ Stories
I hung out with a group of guys who lived in an apartment in Waltham during my first semester at Brandeis. I liked one in particular, but he was only mildly interested. While hanging in his room one evening, a tall redhead, friendly with many of them, wandered in; a junior named Gordon. He was…
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It All Came Together
Prompted By That Summer
/ Stories
There is a certain time in one’s life when she knows she is ready; she is in her prime. That happened for me the summer of 1969, my sixth and final at the National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp). Talent matters, but seniority does too. I had put in my time and blossomed…
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Ag Fair
Prompted By State or County Fair
/ Stories
The third week of August on Martha’s Vineyard always brings the much-anticipated Agricultural Fair or “Ag Fair”, as it is called. The Vineyard has a huge farming community and everyone gets to show off their season’s accomplishments, from the best pies and jams, to livestock and largest vegetables. There is a whole display hall for…
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Cultural Triple Threat
Prompted By Hobbies
/ Stories
I love art, music (mostly singing, but listening as well) and now spend much of my time writing for Retrospect; a cultural triple threat. I have written over 250 stories on everything from my first job; Posing in 3-D, to the harrowing story of my grandparents’ escape from the 1906 Russian pogroms to their trip across the…
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Wedding Memories
Prompted By Anniversaries
/ Stories
As an officer of our temple, Dad set my wedding day as June 16, 1974. “Really?” I queried, ” That will be your 28th anniversary. Do you want to share yours with me?” He responded affirmatively and the date was set. My parents were a post-war couple. They barely knew one another and married in…
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Nippon
Prompted By Family Trips
/ Stories
In June of 2007, David graduated from Stanford and Jeffrey moved up from 8th to 9th grade; a full-fledged high schooler. We felt a family trip was an appropriate way to celebrate and asked Jeffrey where he’d like to go. “Japan”. “Where else?”, we queried, just in case that didn’t work out. “No where; just…
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Bearing Arms
Prompted By Guns Then and Now
/ Stories
The Second Amendment to our Constitution allowed for a well-regulated militia to keep and bear arms to protect the State. In 2008, a court case ruled that individuals could keep guns at home for self protection. They were no longer just to be used for hunting or protection against an enemy of the government. Of…
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Carolina Herrera
Prompted By Can't Leave Home Without It
/ Stories
Some thirty years ago, I searched for a signature fragrance. My mother wore Chanel No. 5. I wanted something more modern, subtle. I tried Ungaro, Issey Miyake, Creed (the scent of Jackie O and Princess Grace). All seemed too strong for me. I smelled something wonderful on a friend and inquired what she wore. Of…
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Jeopardy
Prompted By Quiz and Game Shows
/ Stories
We enjoyed watching gameshows in our household: “What’s My Line?”, “Truth or Consequences”, “Password”, and a few others, but none captured my heart like “Jeopardy”, the original one with Art Fleming as the host. I’d watch when I was home sick, which wasn’t too often. Still, I really enjoyed that show. My senior year at…
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Full Plate
Prompted By Cliques and Clubs
/ Stories
Moving from Detroit to neighboring Huntington Woods in October, 1963 was a traumatic event for me. Due to the quirks of the Detroit school system, I skipped the second half of 5th grade. This made me the youngest in my 6th grade class at the Washington Elementary School, a K-6 school, where everyone had been…
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Recycle as a Way of Life
Prompted By Recycling
/ Stories
I am lucky to live in Newton, which is a very progressive city of about 200,000 people. They have good schools and services. They began a curbside recycling program of newsprint in 1971, just a year after the first Earth Day, followed in 1975 by adding glass and cans to their bi-monthly curbside pick-ups. That…
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Penny’s Puppy
Prompted By Naming Pets
/ Stories
My mother was terrified of dogs. Dogs had been used during the 1906 pogroms against my grandparents in Russia. My grandmother would cross to the other side of the street to avoid coming close to a dog. She instilled that fear in my mother as well. I guess I understood, but I LOVED them and…
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Billie Jean
Prompted By Separating the Art from the Artist
/ Stories
I’ve always loved to dance and grew up in and with Motown and the Jackson 5. Little Michael was a phenom. Great voice, dancing whiz; he could do everything and captivated us. We loved to sing along to those early songs and imitate the dance moves. He outgrew his brothers and became the biggest show…
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How We Listened
Prompted By Remembering Radios
/ Stories
Like any self-respecting teenage girl, I listened to Top 40 radio incessantly. As someone growing up in the shadow of Motown, of course, I loved that music, but listened to it all, and think the mid-60s were a remarkable moment in time; Motown and British invasion music flourished side by side. They couldn’t be more…
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Vax Thrill
Prompted By Vaccination
/ Stories
At his mid-afternoon press briefing on Wednesday, February 17, Governor Baker announced that anyone over the age of 65 would be eligible for vaccination the next day. The roll-out had gone badly so far, with only health care workers, first responders and those over the age of 75 being eligible to receive vaccinations and many…
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Working Mother And Not
Prompted By Stay-at-Home Parent
/ Stories
My mother graduated from The Ohio State University in 1935. She wanted to study modern dance in New York City and was forever grateful that her father cashed in his life insurance so she could have a year to do that. She studied with Doris Humphrey, whose most famous student was José Limón. Before heading…
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Baffled By Technology
Prompted By Technology Tribulations
/ Stories
I might have been a top software sales rep in my former life, but I never understood how to code or the underlying workings of the software. EVER! I could always call on a smart professional from my division for help going from the general to the specifics of how my company could help the…
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Jonathan Kozol
Prompted By Inequality
/ Stories
Growing up in Detroit, I attended an integrated, large elementary school which encompassed grades K-8. At that time, the curriculum was excellent, but even during the years I attended, 1958-1963, it was already over-crowed and I began kindergarten the February after turning 5, as they had split sessions to accommodate the large numbers of students.…
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White Gloves
Prompted By Manners
/ Stories
My mother and her two sisters had excellent manners. They always knew what to wear for any occasion, how to behave, how to write a lovely thank you note. Very proper women. And these they taught to their children as well. I used to call them the “white glove ladies”, as you can see from…
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A True Romantic
Prompted By Rewatchable Movies
/ Stories
I appreciate the classic movies and my husband is an avid watcher of Turner Classic Movies. But when I am home and unencumbered, my eyes no longer able to focus on the printed page and I choose to relax alone at night, I have my go-to favorites that I watch over and over. I…
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Dishes in the Dishwasher, Please!
Prompted By Pet Peeves
/ Stories
Where did I go wrong? Now the breakfast dish is left on the counter, The ice cream bowl from the night before put in the sink with no water. The peanut butter knife put in the dishwasher, but not rinsed. I tell him – he needs to rinse dishes before placing them in the dishwasher.…
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It’s All About the Hair
Prompted By Haircuts
/ Stories
I was born bald. My brother called me Boop-de-Boy because he thought I was a boy, but of course, I wasn’t. By my first birthday I had some fuzz. My mother always styled my hair into a Dutch Boy cut. I always wanted it long. Here is my third birthday. Mother ruled. By the age…
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Mad Men Era
Prompted By Advertising Jingles and Slogans
/ Stories
I shouldn’t be surprised that I now have such problematic arthritis in my toes that I’ve needed two surgeries in six years. It began when I was a child. My chiropodist had me wear arch supports in my shoes and walk up and down the hallway of my Detroit house, doing special exercises to try…
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It’s a Zoom World
Prompted By One Year of the Pandemic
/ Stories
March 15, 2020. We were having a socially distant dinner at close friends. An annual winter event of mac and cheese usually followed by watching a Masterpiece Theater episode. This year, nothing suitable was on, so we watched a movie on a DVD. COVID-19 was already surging in parts of the West Coast and we…
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Memories or Home Movies?
Prompted By First Memory
/ Stories
I often get comments about the treasure vault of old photos I provide in these stories. My father was the family record-keeper, both in still and moving pictures. When my parents divorced in 1981, my brother and I insured in the divorce decree that he got custody of those precious home movies (on real 8mm…
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Inauguration Memories
Prompted By Inaugurations
/ Stories
I was a child of 8 on January 20, 1961. We came home from our Detroit elementary school for lunch each day. I knew the Kennedy Inauguration was special. The couple had magnetism and charisma to spare and I was caught up in the magic of the moment. I wolfed down my tuna sandwich leaning…
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Moments of Glory
Prompted By Valentine's Day
/ Stories
I am an inveterate romantic. Dan teases that I weep at Hallmark commercials. He’s not wrong. I am sentimental. I save everything. I have a dried sprig of flowers from my wedding bouquet, pressed into my Bride’s Book. I have a long memory, for good and bad. Dan can make grand gestures when he chooses…
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Insurrection;Outrage
Prompted By Good Trouble
/ Stories
In 1946 George Orwell wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” He went on to complain of the ways political speech had largely become “the defense of the indefensible”. After 75 years his words seem more appropriate than…
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Valerie
Prompted By Reconnecting
/ Stories
I met Christie and Emily in 1965 in Intermediate Girls at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. We’ve been friends ever since. I moved up to High School Girls in 1967. They both remained in the Intermediate Division, knowing that they would be leads in the Operetta; and so they were. I wanted the…
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Mad Hatter
Prompted By Hats
/ Stories
As a child, we wouldn’t do anything resembling Christmas decorations, but, for some reason, I always had a nice, new straw hat for spring. You might even call it an Easter bonnet. We didn’t celebrate Easter, of course. I remember one such hat was navy blue with an up-turned brim and a velvet ribbon band…
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Days at the MFA
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
Before David had to devote his Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to Hebrew School, the Boston MFA offered a free art program for elementary school children several afternoons a week, open to all comers. We tried to go on Tuesdays as often as we could. It was funded by a foundation grant and was truly a…
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Dedicated Art Lover
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
Since a young child, visiting art museums has always brought me to a place of peace and beauty. I, myself, can’t make art, but I have appreciated it my entire life. My mother, aunt and cousin often took me to the Detroit Institute of Art. It has an encyclopedic collection, supported by the vast riches…
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An Afternoon With Mrs. Jack
Prompted By Art and Art Museums
/ Stories
I took a course on Northern Renaissance painting with Professor Ludovico Borgo in my last semester at Brandeis. For our final project, we had to write a research paper on a painting from that era that we could visit in person. We had to analyze the provenance of the work, history of restorations, and research…
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Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Prompted By Letter to My Younger Self
/ Stories
Dear 21 Year Old Betsy, You pride yourself on high achievement. That is fine and working hard will serve you well throughout your life, but I assure you, life will have its twists and turns. You will not have a career in the arts, but will find enjoyment through them. Go with the flow. Learn…
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Good Manners
Prompted By Thank You
/ Stories
I am a relic of a by-gone era. I believe handwritten thank you notes should still be written in response to gifts (except from immediate family members, when a verbal thank you will suffice). As you see, I still have monogrammed stationery (the Featured photo) for writing such notes (as well as condolence notes). It…
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Across the Years and Channels
Prompted By What Are You Bingeing?
/ Stories
In no particular order: Schitt’s Creek (laugh riot) Sanditon (disappointing) The Life Ahead Defending Jacob (shot locally around Boston) The Morning Show Never Have I Ever (hats off to Suzy’s son) Hamilton (better than live) The Queen’s Gambit (totally engaging, a true binge) The Crown (4th season, bulimia reigns supreme) Broadchurch (Olivia Coleman, before she’s…
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Slipping Away
Prompted By Hello Darkness
/ Stories
I have been surrounded by depression (not just Seasonal Affect Disorder, but true depression) my whole life. My paternal grandmother, dead before I was born, was bipolar. With a depressed mother, I worried in high school, in a melodramatic sort of way, that I was doomed to follow in their footsteps, though there was no…
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Walt at MDS
Prompted By Interviews
/ Stories
I worked for ASI for 3 1/2 years, selling video training and associated products to the tech industry. I was a top sales person, but being a professional woman in sales in 1981 was still a novelty. I had no background in software or business. A headhunter introduced me to the team at Management Decision…
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Can You Spell Hello?
Prompted By Spelling
/ Stories
Okay, I admit it. I’ve always been a lousy speller. Though one might not expect this from a straight A student, it is true. I can’t account for it. Perhaps it has to do with lack of ability to visualize abstractions in my head. I don’t know; it just is true. In fifth grade (the…
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Giving Back
Prompted By Volunteering
/ Stories
I have done a lot of volunteer work in the last 32 years, since retiring from paid employment. I divide that work into two categories: working on behalf of places that benefit my children and giving back to places that helped me become the person I am. I grew up in a household where my…
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We Gather Together (Not)
Prompted By Pandemic Holidays
/ Stories
The candles in my Featured photo were my mother’s. There are two pairs. I don’t even know how old they are; just a bit younger than I am. They’ve graced countless Thanksgiving tables through the years. Their sweet faces are rather the worse for wear, but they must come out every year and be…
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Channeling Ali
Prompted By Fads and Trends
/ Stories
My mother set tight limits on me when I was young. I was not trendy. I did not wear go-go boots, Mondrian dresses, Twiggy eyelashes. She didn’t let me pierce my ears when all my friends did. I did not have a blunt cut “Sassoon” hairstyle. I didn’t go ga-ga over the boy bands of…
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Thanksgiving Eve
Prompted By Random Acts of Kindness
/ Stories
Dan needed his Brigham’s vanilla ice cream! I had finished all the grocery shopping for Thanksgiving days earlier. The last place I wanted to be at 4pm on the day before Thanksgiving last year was a big supermarket, but Dan wanted his Brigham’s! So I dutifully trekked the mile to the Star Market, grabbed up…
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The Apocalypse
Prompted By Ghosts of Elections Past
/ Stories
While visiting David in London in February, 2016, we took a train out to see Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and the “code breakers” developed the system to decipher the German codes during World War II, as depicted in “The Imitation Game”. Turing is considered one of the founders of modern computer science and we…
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Reflections of the Times
Prompted By Buttons, Pins, and Badges
/ Stories
I have never worn my “heart on my sleeve”. We’ve given a LOT of money in this campaign cycle, more than at any time in the past. We truly believe this IS the most important election of our lifetime. I have the date early voting starts for Massachusetts marked in my calendar, though my…
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Telephone Hour
Prompted By Life Before Computers
/ Stories
A show-stopping number from “Bye-Bye Birdie”, in which I played Randi in 10th grade, is “The Telephone Hour”. Staged better in the theater than in the truly awful movie, it shows all the teenagers, posing in a multi-level platform-cubicle, gossiping on their princess telephones: “Hi Margie, Hi Helen, What’s the story, morning glory? What’s the…
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Not Carrie Bradshaw
Prompted By Shoes
/ Stories
I’ve always had lousy feet. As a child I had to wear “orthopedic shoes” with arch support in them (saddle shoes in the summer, some black velveteen things in the winter, but always heavy, laced up shoes). Never sneakers, never sandals. Not enough support. I rebelled in 6th grade, while my mother was in…
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Making Peace With Mother
Prompted By Final Farewell
/ Stories
Mother died three days before her 97th birthday. I described my relationship with her, and her last six days of life in much detail in What I Didn’t Tell You Then. I knew the people at the funeral home in Detroit quite well. The owner, Herb Kaufman, lived around the corner from us in Huntington Woods.…
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He Changed His Mazel
Prompted By Rites of Passage
/ Stories
Jeffrey (now Vicki, but not in 2002, so, for purposes of this story, I will refer to my younger child as Jeffrey) was a non-believer. He told us at the age of 3 he didn’t believe in God. I still wanted him to go through with religious education to understand his background, his place in…
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My Husband’s Game
Prompted By Brain Games
/ Stories
I know the perception is that I have excellent recall of events long-past, but trust me when I tell you, this is a mere shadow of how I used to be. I already know I am losing it. Part of this is due to a migraine prevention medication I’ve long taken called Topamax. It is…
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King Tut
Prompted By Lost and Found
/ Stories
From about 1539 BC to around 1075 BC, the Valley of the Kings, in ancient Thebes, was the burial site for the rulers and some nobility of ancient Egypt. Though known about, the exact whereabouts had been lost through the ages, until archaeological excavations led by Europeans during the time of Napoleon began in the…
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Time for Change
Prompted By The Garden
/ Stories
As I wrote about two years ago in Checkbook Gardener, we have a beautiful little garden oasis on a busy street in the heart of Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard. This summer, between the pandemic, four months of drought and a less-than-diligent landscaper (not to be confused with Teresa, who continues to take wonderful care of…
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In Harm’s Way
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
Until her death ten years ago, we lived a few blocks away from Patricia Neal in downtown Edgartown, where she had been been a fixture for years. She often sat on her front porch and was pleased to say “good morning” to all who passed by. But the “Martha’s Vineyard way” was to not impose…
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NCC Fundraiser
Prompted By Yard Sales
/ Stories
I joined the Newton Community Chorus is September, 2003. NCC is run as a non-profit, and we incur a lot of expenses. We pay dues, which covers the cost of our own music (surprisingly expensive, for those who have never purchased published scores of masterworks before). We pay our conductor and accompanist a fair wage…
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Just Love Them
Prompted By I Swore I'd Never
/ Stories
I am going to turn this prompt on its head. Rather than discuss something I saw a parent do that I swore I’d never do, then did, I’d like to give two examples of behaviors from the older generation that I found offensive and I DID NOT do, guided by advise from my father, which…
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Baby of the Family
Prompted By Birth Order
/ Stories
Ken Sarason and Connie Stein were introduced by their oldest sisters, who were good friends, fellow members (and past presidents) of the National Council of Jewish Women in Detroit. The couple had their first date in February, 1946 and married four months later, in a small ceremony, attended only by immediate family, in Toledo, Ohio…
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Weddings Are Complicated
Prompted By Forgiveness
/ Stories
My brother was married in the chapel of Hebrew Union College on his 35th birthday. It was not a big, elaborate ceremony, but included close family members on both sides and the many friends they happy couple had made along the way. Rick had already taught at HUC for several years, was well-liked and respected…
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Summer of the Backyard
Prompted By Pandemic Summer
/ Stories
We are five months into the pandemic. Massachusetts was one of the hardest-hit states and took a long time to reopen. That’s fine with us. Dan ends conversations saying,”Stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane”. In a normal summer, we would have moved to Martha’s Vineyard for the season the week before Memorial Day, but nothing…
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Teach Her to Knit
Prompted By Cursive — Curse or Blessing?
/ Stories
I was always a good student, a striver, a high achiever, I got straight A’s. Until it came to penmanship. There I fell apart and got C’s. My second grade teacher, responsible for teaching cursive, called my mother in, bemoaning my lack of manual dexterity and told my mother to teach me knitting as a…
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Motown
Prompted By My Hometown
/ Stories
I grew up in Detroit, Michigan; Motown, USA, in a family deeply involved in the automotive industry. My dad, with a partner, owned a Chrysler dealership and there was always a new car in the driveway (he’s the one just to the right of the car door holding his pith helmet with his arm out…
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Listen, Learn, Change
Prompted By Protests
/ Stories
I have watched the coverage over the past several weeks with fury and outrage. I don’t take to the streets for many reasons; arthritic toes, virus in the air, tendinitis in a hip flexor. Those sorts of long walks and demonstrations do not suit me. But I read and watch everything closely and think deeply…
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Risky Business
Prompted By Changed My Life
/ Stories
(This story may seem familiar in part, as the beginning was used for the prompt: Chance Encounter; but the last quarter has been significantly rewritten). As described in Over-Educated, Under-Qualified, I did a lot of data entry on my first job out of college. My title was “Program Librarian”. After entering the handwritten code from the…
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Mr. Bienstock
Prompted By Embarrassment
/ Stories
Second semester, senior year in high school. I walked into the first day of my last Social Studies class to be greeted by Norman Bienstock, a brand new teacher. This was his first job. He seated us according to a seating chart and called out our names, to put them with our faces and begin…
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Tuesday Was Newsweek Day
Prompted By Magazines
/ Stories
I first subscribed to Newsweek as an undergrad at Brandeis. It arrived in my mailbox on Tuesdays. Though I often took literature courses with heavy reading loads, I looked forward to Tuesday afternoons. Those I devoted to reading Newsweek. I’d come back to my dorm room after lunch, get comfy on my bed and settle…
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Uncle Meyer
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
Hannah and Sam Prensky, my great-grandparents, had five children in Kovno, Lithuania. Lizzie, their eldest, was my grandmother. They were prosperous and well-educated. Sam spoke five languages and had a cigarette rolling factory that employed 500 people. Hannah was literate, played piano and passed her quick mind and love of learning on to her children.…
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A Time For Greatness
Prompted By Memorabilia
/ Stories
I was raised by a proud FDR Democrat, so it was only natural that I would become a liberal Democrat myself. Even at a young age, before I entirely understood politics, I was a Kennedy fan and supporter. (The title was his campaign slogan.) In elementary school, we came home for lunch. I remember watching…
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Thanksgiving Forever
Prompted By Recipes
/ Stories
Imagine my surprise when my dear mother-in-law called, saying she wanted me to host Thanksgiving in 1982. I had never cooked a meal like that before and at the time we lived in a 5th floor walk-up, rented condo, left partially furnished by the owner, with some of our own furniture strewn about. It had…
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Just a Pinch of Salt
Prompted By Superstition
/ Stories
Spill some salt, throw it over your left shoulder. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back, Break a mirror, seven years of bad luck. Don’t walk under a ladder. Don’t cross paths with a black cat. Cross your fingers for good luck (or if you were telling a little lie, but didn’t want it…
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The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring (Tra la)
Prompted By Fragrant Flashbacks
/ Stories
(The title is a nod to a quintent from The Mikado, for all you G&S fans out there. Having been in at least three productions, that song popped into my head as I thought about this prompt; it seemed so appropriate.) We had a lovely, fragrant garden in my first house in Detroit providing fond…
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The Social Distance Dance
Prompted By Pandemic - Pandemonium or Panacea?
/ Stories
Yes, life has changed for all of us. Statement of fact and gross understatement. Many doctor appointments scheduled for late March or mid-April, now rescheduled for June (who knows if they will even happen then). The few that happen are now via FaceTime or just phone calls. Important questions answered via email (of course one…
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Scared on the North Side
Prompted By Close Calls
/ Stories
During my 16 months in Chicago in the late ’70s, I lived in a structure known as a “4+1”, as it had parking under the building, then four floors of apartments above, on the north side of Chicago, off of Sheridan near Lake Michigan. The building was H-shaped and I lived all the way at…
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Jehovah’s Witness Encounter
Prompted By Door-to-Door Sales
/ Stories
I was a little kid, maybe 4 years old, so my brother was probably 9 at the time, significantly larger than me. We had the kind of roller skates described by Melanie in her 1971 song “Brand New Key”; the kind that attached to our own shoes, then tightened with a key. We were skating…
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Behold It Is the Springtide of the Year
Prompted By Spring Celebrations
/ Stories
“Behold it is the Springtide of the year. Over and past is Winter’s gloomy reign. The happy time of singing birds is near, And clad in bud and blooms are hill and plain.” That is the first verse of my favorite Passover song. I sang it in Junior Choir at my Temple. I even sang…
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Blame It On Brett
Prompted By Close Calls
/ Stories
My car radio is always tuned to an NPR station, so I stay informed as I drive around, though in my daily life, my driving tends to be limited. On the day we left Martha’s Vineyard in 2018, the US was embroiled in the Brett Kavanaugh debacle. I packed everything as quickly as I could.…
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Just Out Of Reach
Prompted By Dreams
/ Stories
This morning (March 23) I awoke to a wisp; it was there, just out beyond my reach, on the outer limits of my brain. I want to write it down before I forget it. Dreams rarely make sense, but they can give some insight into what’s on my mind. In this one, I was going…
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Life in the Age of COVID-19
Prompted By Vacation or Staycation from Hell
/ Stories
Chorus is canceled. Trips to California and Europe, which would include visits with our children – gone. Gym shuttered. Restaurants open for take-out only. “First-world problems”, a friend teases. He is right. We have our health, we have food and plenty of toilet paper (what gives with the run on toilet paper?). I did grocery…
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What’s In a Name?
Prompted By Nicknames
/ Stories
Shakespeare usually has something brilliant to say on a topic like this one: “What’s in a name?/A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Like my cousin Mimi (actually Mary Elizabeth), I was named Elizabeth Ann for our paternal grandmother, who was “Elizabeth Prensky Sarason” (so her headstone says), but I never heard…
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Holy Land, Smoly Land
Prompted By Vacation or Staycation from Hell
/ Stories
By 1972 I was half-way through Brandeis and had not seen my brother in two years. He was studying to become a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, but was spending two years in Israel, one as part of the regular curriculum, the second at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, digging more deeply into…
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Newton Community Chorus
Prompted By Finding Your Tribe
/ Stories
As I wrote in Gotta Sing, I have loved to sing my whole life and did so in some fashion during my first 18 years of life. After marrying, going to work full-time, then having children, I no longer had opportunities, beyond the occasional lullaby or shower singing to exercise that love. I sang with a…
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15 Years of Mother
Prompted By Caregiving
/ Stories
After Mother’s sister Ann died in Detroit, it became clear she needed to live close to one of her children. Rick and I each showed her a few continuing care communities close to us (my brother lives in Cincinnati) and she chose to come to the Boston area in 1995 at the age of 82.…
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Pirates of Penzance
Prompted By Leap Day
/ Stories
Leap Day is a once-every-four-years astronomical anomaly in the calendar, meant to sweep up the few extra minutes accumulated over the intervening years and set the calendar straight again. It happens to coincide with our presidential election years and I’m sure is a pain for people born on this particular day. When do they celebrate?…
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Channel 56
Prompted By Children's TV Shows
/ Stories
My second grade teacher, Elaine Zeve, first engenderd and fostered my desire to act as she read “Charlotte’s Web” aloud, doing all the voices and soon discovered that I had a flair for imitation and imagination myself. She came to see me in my high school plays and we were in touch until her death,…
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Roger
Prompted By Super Bowl
/ Stories
Roger and my husband grew up in Newton, MA. They knew each other slightly in high school, playing on opposing local after-school sports teams and through mutual friends, but became very close friends at Brandeis. This is their senior yearbook photo. Dan is on the left, Roger with the mustache in the middle on the…
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No Longer on the Move
Prompted By Moving Day
/ Stories
Moving is a pain. No one enjoys it. That’s one of many reasons I am happy that I’ve been settled in my home for more than 33 years now. Prior to this home however, it seemed we were on the move every year and a half or two years, either to upgrade locations, or for…
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Anna Pavlova
Prompted By Family Myths
/ Stories
My mother always had a wonderful sense of rhythm and a great ability to move her body to the beat of the music. I inherited that and my love of the arts from her. As a close friend, also with a depressed mother, said to me when I called to tell her of my mother’s…
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Magical Memories
Prompted By Snail Mail
/ Stories
I loved getting mail. While email is immediate, there was something gratifying, even sensual to HOLDING mail in your hand. You could see someone’s penmanship (mine was horrid; I was a straight A student, but C’s in handwriting. It has only grown worse over the years and I still write letters). There was the anticipation…
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Grundy
Prompted By Tracking People Down
/ Stories
I have learned that all “tweens” go through tough adolescent years; it seems to be a universal truth. Mine seemed particularly brutal, as we moved from Detroit to a near-suburb, I skipped a grade at this crucial period, the new girls were far more sophisticated and I had a particularly ugly adolescence with buck teeth,…
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A Place For Everything and Everything in its Place
Prompted By Get Organized
/ Stories
I am a born organizer and record-keeper. That is just who I am. My degree is in Theatre Arts and I wanted to be an actress, but learned over my four years of college that I was more adept at being a stage manager, writing down all the cues, running the show while in production.…
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New Year’s Tradition
Prompted By The New Year
/ Stories
We learned long ago that going out on New Year’s Eve was just something we didn’t want to do. Everything was overpriced and you always ran the risk of drunk drivers on the road. So we stayed in with friends and cooked. When David was a baby, I had a few couples over and…
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We Love Movies
Prompted By Quick Take: New Movies
/ Stories
We see lots of movies throughout the year; this year we even attended three film festivals, though many of those films tend to be foreign and never find distribution. We eagerly await this time of year when the “prestige” movies roll out. When I saw the Golden Globe nominees, I was reminded of some good…
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Birthday Co-Mingled
Prompted By Holidaze
/ Stories
My grandfather was born in December in Russia. He didn’t know his actual birth date (no records were kept), so chose Christmas as his birthday. Why not. The world came to a halt and the family would always come to Toledo to celebrate with him. We gathered at a nice hotel and aunts, uncles and…
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Comfort From My Cousins
Prompted By Cousins
/ Stories
My father was the youngest of eight children, my mother, the youngest of four and I am their youngest. That makes me the youngest in a large generation of cousins, some old enough to be my own parent. We are a diverse group of people, yet we all get along, have each others’ backs and…
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Charity Begins at Home
Prompted By Charity
/ Stories
Among the bedrock principles of Judaism are “repairing the world” and “doing righteous deeds”. These inform the imperatives for social justice and charitable activities, so practicing Jews heed these and find ways to do meaningful work. My family became more involved in temple life as my brother, five years my elder, approached his bar mitzvah.…
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Proud Mama
Prompted By Baby Books
/ Stories
I had a somewhat tortured gynecological history (never regular periods, an ectoptic pregnancy in 1981, leaving me with one working Fallopian tube, followed nine months later, with the same IUD in place – the doctor never told me to remove it – by another pregnancy which Dan and I chose to abort for health reasons),…
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Happy 40th!
Prompted By Surprise!
/ Stories
Dan didn’t like surprise parties. He didn’t want one for his 30th, so a bunch of his work buddies convinced me to hire a belly dancer to come to the office for his 32nd. He still hasn’t forgiven me. As his 40th approached, our lives had changed. We had two young children, I no longer…
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Bully in Chief
Prompted By Bullying
/ Stories
What happened to Melania’s anti-bullying campaign? Perhaps her husband bullied her into shelving it. He seems to have the market cornered as the biggest bully in the country right now. He certainly has the loudest megaphone. A friend told me that he read a story written by an elementary school classmate of the Orange One’s.…
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What is TOO Old?
Prompted By Ageism
/ Stories
Trump, Warren, Biden and Sanders are all in their 70s. Bernie just had a heart attack but “feels fine”. My father did too after his first one, until the big one came that killed him at age 76. Jimmy Carter, still swinging a hammer for Habitat for Humanity while battling cancer, aged 95, says they…
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Treasure Room
Prompted By Libraries
/ Stories
David took a job with Google DeepMind and moved to London in January, 2015. Google put him up in a two bedroom apartment for two months while he looked for a place of his own. Not wanting to let the second bedroom go a-begging, we went to visit the next month. It had been a…
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First Sale
Prompted By The First Time
/ Stories
I joined Advanced Systems, Inc. in mid-April, 1978. It began with a two week training program in Elk Grove Village, IL, where the company was headquartered. I sold follow-on contracts for video training and ancillary products to the data processing industry to existing clients (this was so long ago, it wasn’t called IT yet). Some…
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Jill-Sharon
Prompted By Nannies and Babysitters
/ Stories
I stayed home after David was born for 18 months. We had moved twice and were now in our “forever” house. In fact, 33 years later, we still live there. Two months after moving in, we began extensive renovations and I began to think it was time to go back to work. I had been…
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Help! My Wallet was Stolen in Spain!
Prompted By Hacks and Scams
/ Stories
I awoke to a distressing email from my beloved mentor, former Rose Director, Carl Belz. It said something to the effect: “I left quickly for Spain and today my pocket was picked. I have no money. Could you please wire some money to…such and such a number”. The email was sent to a large number…
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Sorry!
Prompted By Games People Play
/ Stories
When we were little, my brother and I loved to play Sorry! by the hour. We’d set up the board on the carpeted floor in our living room in Detroit and hop the pieces around the board, squealing with delight if we could send the other’s pieces back to the start, yelling at each other,…
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Chicago Stories
Prompted By Road Rage
/ Stories
I have never personally experienced road rage. I tend to steer clear of drivers who seem to be in too much of a hurry, or are weaving in and out of traffic. I give them wide berth and get away as quickly as I can. Therefore, I will tell two stories from friends during my…
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Shy Little Girl
Prompted By Kindergarten
/ Stories
Because the Detroit public schools were already overcrowded in 1958, I began kindergarten in February of 1959, as did everyone whose birthday fell between December 1 and February 28. Semesters were separate entities and I was always half way through with a grade when summer came until we moved to the suburbs, when I was…
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Global Weirding
Prompted By Weather
/ Stories
The sky was dark when I came out of Pilates at 11:30am on Tuesday, July 22. Two of the young women who work at the club were standing outside, looking at the sky with dread. “What’s up?” “There’s a tornado warning for Vineyard Haven”. “Oh dear, I had planned to go there to grocery shop.…
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Dance to the Music
Prompted By Woodstock
/ Stories
I heard about Woodstock after it happened. It took place during the last weekend of my last summer at the National Music Camp. I was in the northern woods of Michigan with almost no access to the outside world. I was busy performing the final concert of Operetta: we sang songs of Irving Berlin and…
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Jim and Mara
Prompted By Neighbors
/ Stories
I met her “Becky Thatcher-style”; she was painting the white post fence that separated our properties and I introduced myself. We quickly learned that we were both involved in the art world, she as Director/Curator of the Brattleboro Art Museum, I as a board member of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. She gave…
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Ancient Canaanite
Prompted By Genealogy
/ Stories
Last November, my brother copied me on an email which shared the results of a 23andMe DNA analysis (since we have the same parents, we share the same DNA; yes, I know, we are not identical twins, so we do not have exactly the same DNA, but would have similar threads, so the results are…
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Day Dreamer
Prompted By Boredom
/ Stories
Who has time to be bored? I get lost in my thoughts, day dream, or fantasize; no time to be bored. My mind wanders back to a happy time that I want to re-live and cement in my memory. I will live it over and over. I will write something to a special friend, sometimes…
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Becoming
Prompted By Beach Reads
/ Stories
Truth be told, I do very little reading these days. I used to love to read and long ago, I read a book a week, but my eyes have betrayed me. I developed severe dry eye 30 years ago and did all I could to maintain my vision. I cauterized my lower tear ducts shut…
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End of Season Glory
Prompted By Fireworks
/ Stories
Summers on Martha’s Vineyard start slow, pick up steam, then fly by. The third week in August has a particularly frantic pace, as the Agricultural Fair runs Thursday-Sunday of that week, with a carnival side-show, all sorts of animal displays, judging other displays within the Agricultural Hall; photos, crafts, giant pumpkins, everything from across the…
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A Good Name is All I Have
Prompted By Honesty
/ Stories
I cringe when I hear jokes putting down used car sales people. My father began with a used car lot, built it into a Chrysler Dealership. When that ended, sold Buicks for a time, then became the first Director of the Endowment Fund for The Detroit Jewish Welfare Federation, starting in 1970. He was known…
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Cool Deal
Prompted By Honeymoon
/ Stories
First a word about “honeymoon”. We were at a fabulous wedding in England last October. The father of the bride began his toast holding up a bottle of mead. He commented that it was the custom in old Saxon English days to offer newlyweds bottles of mead, also known as honey wine, since it is…
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Morning Glory Farm
Prompted By Shopping Local
/ Stories
Off of West Tisbury Road, in Katama, the beachy section of Edgartown, just a few minutes away from my home on Martha’s Vineyard, is this glorious farm stand; Morning Glory Farm. They have their own fields and sell their own produce throughout the season, open from just before Memorial Day until the day before Thanksgiving,…
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Basketball Jones
Prompted By First Dates
/ Stories
I was hot and heavy with Bob my sophomore year, but he had a bad habit of wandering off with other girls. This did not make me happy at all! I was really into him, but would entertain offers from other guys when he misbehaved. I loved going to our school basketball games and particularly…
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Degree in Self Confidence
Prompted By College Majors as Career Gaugers
/ Stories
I was determined to be a Theatre Major. I picked Brandeis because it had an excellent theatre department and plunged right in, auditioning and landing a small role in the first Main Stage show my freshman year. I took acting classes, speech classes, movement. I also stage managed many plays throughout my four years at…
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Be Careful Who You Follow
Prompted By Social Media Friendships
/ Stories
While watching TV last week, I was absent-mindedly scrolling though Instagram, “liking” random photos of British royalty and Patriots, equally. Somehow, I must have liked and followed something called “julianedelmanofficialfanpage”. If it really was his fan page, it would have been marked with a blue checked circle, as is every account of a famous person,…
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A Lot of Lit
Prompted By Exams
/ Stories
When I entered Brandeis, it still had a General Education requirement, so I had to take courses across varying disciplines, not only in my major of Theatre Arts. I wanted to get all those requirements done quickly, so freshman year, I took French 10 (all literature, read in French), Humanities 1 (all literature), Theatre Arts…
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Patricia
Prompted By Social Media Friendships
/ Stories
We had mutual friends from our high school class on Facebook, so when she sent the request, I accepted. I honestly didn’t remember her from Dondero. She has told me that she was very shy (as was I, but I was busy with choir and the plays). We were never in any of the same…
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More Dance, Less Volley Ball
Prompted By PE Pleasures and Perils
/ Stories
Let me be clear. I am not an athlete and never enjoyed any sort of organized team sport. Just built that way. So PE was definitely not my thing. I am barely 5′ tall, small-boned, terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Great sense of rhythm, good dancer. Yes, dancing is good exercise. Anyone done a Zumba class? So…
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Kiss Your Ass Goodbye
Prompted By Cold War Coping
/ Stories
All of us of a certain age remember the “duck and cover” drill, as if ducking under our desks would shield us from nuclear fall-out. We labeled it the “kiss your ass goodbye” move. After World War II, as more countries, particularly our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, obtained nuclear capability, some built their own…
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Pink Ribbons on my License
Prompted By Learning to Drive
/ Stories
We took Driver’s Ed during a free period in high school. Since I was in choir, took PE for two years, then a semester of typing, I didn’t have any free periods until second semester of my junior year in high school. I was already 16, so I was 16 1/2 by the time I…
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At Our Peril
Prompted By Earth Day
/ Stories
Climate change is real, pervasive, and all but overwhelms me when I think about it. Every day there is some new, shocking story about devastating storms in the south, floods in the midwest, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting of the polar ice cap, warming of the ocean, bleaching of the coral reefs. The list of disasters caused…
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The “I Know Nothing About Taxes” Blues
Prompted By Taxes
/ Stories
I went straight from being my father’s dependent to being a married lady, so I have only signed a tax return. I have never done my own. I wouldn’t know where to begin. When we were first married, our taxes were simple. We had no investments, very little savings and made very little money. As…
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Neruda
Prompted By Poetry
/ Stories
I read Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s obituary with great sadness and keen interest. She passed away in 2006, aged 52 from breast cancer. She was a leading mezzo-soprano of her day and, though I’d never heard her perform, our lives intersected at a few points. She had also attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in her youth,…
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Jackie
Prompted By Women We Admire
/ Stories
The epitome of grace, class, and intelligence, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was, from the time I was very young, my idol. She married John F. Kennedy when I was a baby and she set about having babies too. She was married to JFK a mere 10 years and was pregnant five times, resulting in only…
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11th Birthday
Prompted By Betrayal
/ Stories
My mother was still in a deep depression, too tranqed out on Miltowns to take care of me, much less plan a birthday party. Dad owned a car dealership; worked six days and two nights a week. He cared but just wasn’t there. We had been in the neighborhood 2 1/2 months and I didn’t…
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Road Trip with Family
Prompted By Spring Break
/ Stories
I had the IUD inserted just before coming home for spring break my junior year at Brandeis. It was a Dalkon Shield and not really meant for young women like myself. I lay in bed for the rest of that day, bleeding and in pain. In fact, I bled for a long time after. I…
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Roach Motel
Prompted By My First Apartment
/ Stories
We married after I graduated from Brandeis in Waltham, MA in 1974. I went home to Huntington Woods, MI to prepare for the wedding. Dan lived in the Boston area with his parents, so found our first apartment at 1105 Lexington Street, in Waltham, almost in Lexington. He worked in Waltham and within two months,…
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“Retro” Revival
Prompted By New Beginnings
/ Stories
She was bereft at the thought that we wouldn’t write weekly. We were a close-knit group and loved reading and commenting on each other’s stories. We had become long-distance friends and in one case, even met and spent a lovely day together. But when Suzy reached out, I told her I needed some time off.…
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Moving On
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
Patti and John Zussman are among my oldest and dearest friends. So I was pleased and honored when they contacted me, nearly three years ago, to be a beta tester for their new website “MyRetrospect.com”. They explained it was a story-sharing medium for baby-boomers to tell their tales, based on prompts the site would provide.…
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Simple Gifts
Prompted By Gifts
/ Stories
He gave me all kinds of intangible gifts. As I wrote in Dude – A Message of Love, I knew Dude Stephenson virtually my whole life as he was my operetta teacher for five glorious summers at the National Music Camp, Interlochen, MI from 1965-1969. He taught me the value of being an important member of…
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Holmes Coffin House
Prompted By Home
/ Stories
We looked for two years. Did we want in-town, or in Katama, closer to the beach? Finally, we bid on and had an accepted offer on a house on Main Street across from the Old Whaling Church; a small cape, but we knew our architect, Patrick, with whom we’d worked since our first Back Bay…
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Gladie and Erv
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
Before I gave Gladys and Erv Pfau their first grandchild, of unknown sex (I was 32 years old, had been married to their oldest son for 11 years but was too young to have amniocentesis, so we didn’t know if we were having a boy or girl until the moment of delivery), they gave the…
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Gotta Sing
Prompted By Songs We Sang
/ Stories
I LOVE TO SING. I have sung as long as I can remember. My mother sang Broadway show tunes to me while she bathed me when I was a little baby. I learned all those songs, mostly Rogers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe and could sing then on command, on pitch and well. One…
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On the Eve of Destruction
Prompted By Politics
/ Stories
The last time I wrote to this prompt was November 7, 2016, the day before our world turned upside down. In that essay, Born Blue, I described what a proud liberal Democrat I was. And I remain so, though these last two years have sorely tried my faith in humanity. My husband went to bed at…
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DSS Twins
Prompted By Pranks and Practical Jokes
/ Stories
I have never been much of a prankster. I don’t like having them played on me, usually don’t find them funny and am not creative in thinking them up. So this is a difficult prompt for me. I never created mischief on Halloween, or any other night, for that matter. The closest I came was…
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Jewelry Girl
Prompted By Accessorize, Accessorize
/ Stories
The night after my father died I received a call from an older first cousin, trying to console me. He remembered that I was a serious little girl who LOVED jewelry. Funny, but not a surprising combination, since my maternal grandfather owned a jewelry store in Toledo, OH and when we visited, I would press…
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Yesterday
Prompted By Beatles vs Stones
/ Stories
Yes, I know, “Yesterday” isn’t on “Rubber Soul”, but this is the only original Beatles album I own. My mother didn’t approve of me listening to that sort of music, so I had to sneak it, by plugging my ear phones into my transistor radio. How could you not love the infectious upbeat, cute guys…
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Op Tails
Prompted By Parties
/ Stories
I went to work for Management Decision Systems in May of 1981. It was a young, vibrant company founded by John D. C. Little and Glen Urban of MIT Sloan School, Len Lodish of Wharton and two of their brightest students, Jay Wurts and Rick Karash, to do marketing models. It expanded to do all…
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Painful Still
Prompted By Middle School
/ Stories
The memories are still painful. A close friend once wished I could have a selective lobotomy to block them out. My family moved from Detroit to a near suburb when I was just shy of 11. In Detroit, if your birthday fell between December 1 and the end of February, you started school in the…
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Mike Wallace, Interlochen and the Aftermath
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
If you think you know this story, read the addendum, added to bring the reader up-to-date two years after this story was written. It will only be public for a week, then will be made private again. August, 1996. Committee reports were given before the National Alumni Board meeting at the Interlochen Center for the…
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Checkbook Gardener
Prompted By The Garden
/ Stories
I have a notorious black thumb. I killed a philodendron in my college dorm room and those things are indestructible. I killed all my house plants, so replaced them with good-looking silk ones. No fuss, no muss. But that is indoors. The great outdoors is less and more capricious. Back home in Newton, MA, my…
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Information Pollution
Prompted By The Social Network
/ Stories
I recently heard Nicco Mele, head of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, speak. He doesn’t use the term “Fake News” to describe the hi-jacking of truth by our president, Russian hackers, trolls and bots who spread lies or disinformation via Facebook and Twitter, or the abundance of verifiably false…
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An Up and Down Year
Prompted By 1968
/ Stories
The radio alarm woke me the morning of June 6, 1968. I listened to the news, silently wept and pulled the covers over my head. I couldn’t get out of bed. After some time, my mother came in to see why I wasn’t up yet. “They got Bobby”, was all I could get out between…
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No Shrinking Violet
Prompted By Nudity
/ Stories
Charlie leered at me, “Hey doll, did you pop out tonight?” Charlie was Charles Werner Moore, a much-respected director, actor, and acting teaching at Brandeis (though I wouldn’t take a course with him until the following year) and director of the first Main Stage show my freshman year at Brandeis. He never learned young womens’…
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Small Town 4th
Prompted By Independence
/ Stories
We are lucky to spend our summers in the historic town of Edgartown on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, seven miles off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. We own an old home right in the old village, a few steps away from Main Street, abuzz with activity all day on the nation’s birthday.…
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Fit For Life
Prompted By Diets
/ Stories
Truth be told, I was always slender, but my weight varied by a few pounds in college. Then, along with my friends, I’d go on the Atkins Diet…no carbs, only protein and 8 big glasses of water a day. The weight would fall off me. I’d eat eggs, hamburger (you couldn’t get good meat at…
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Dude – A Message of Love
Prompted By Teachers & Mentors
/ Stories
I met him when I was 9 years old. My older brother was Nanki Poo in the Intermediate production of MIKADO at camp that summer. Clarence “Dude” Stephenson directed the Intermediate and High School productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, as well as other plays and musicals at the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts…
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Born That Way
Prompted By Babies
/ Stories
In the eternal “nature vs nurture” debate, I can assure you that both play a big factor in how one’s child turns out, but babies are born with certain traits that cannot be denied. David was born 10 days after his due date; I labored for 37 1/2 uncomfortable hours and he was whisked off…
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A Grand, if not Royal, Wedding Portrait
Prompted By Vintage Photos
/ Stories
March 5, 1895. That is the caption in my photo album. These are my grandparents, Samuel Sarason and “Lizzie” (Fruma Leah) Prensky (changed to Prentis by her younger brother Meyer in 1925) on their wedding day in St. Louis, MO, as referenced on the bottom of the photo. I love everything about this photo. I…
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Is That You, Mrs. Schwartz?
Prompted By The Twilight Zone
/ Stories
We live in a large, one story, L-shaped house. Though 70 years old, we are only the third owners. It is a contemporary, and was built as a retirement home by “Mom” and “Pop” Schwartz, who made their fortune in corrugated boxes. It sits on a corner lot, one block west of Boston College. The…
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Oblivious
Prompted By Student Activism
/ Stories
I drifted through high school, worried about my grades, seeking good roles in the school plays, yearning until I could be in the top choir (I didn’t like being in the all-girl’s Glee Club and Girl’s Choir…we sang simple songs and at one point, I was made an alto simply because I had a strong…
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The Sarason Clan
Prompted By Aunts & Uncles
/ Stories
Lizzie and Sam Sarason had eight children over the course of 17 years. Lizzie (for whom cousin Mimi and I were named) was seriously ill with bipolar disorder. No one knew how to treat this at the turn of the 20th century. She had the last two children, including my father, the baby of the…
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From the Sublime to the Ridiculous
Prompted By Restaurants
/ Stories
I grew up eating simple, 1950s food. On Sundays we went to, or brought in from, deli food from Detroit delis, either Billy’s or Darby’s. My favorite was getting a large bowl of mushroom barley soup. Like Proust’s madeleine, I still search for soup as delicious as the one from my childhood. I have found…
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First but not Best
Prompted By Best Picture
/ Stories
My older brother and I were Disney nuts. We loved all things Disney. I skipped piano practice so I could watch the afternoon TV show as a kid. My first movie, as a four year old was Fantasia, some lovely stuff there, but some pretty scary stuff too. I don’t remember my reaction, but I’m sure…
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Proximity to History
Prompted By Watergate
/ Stories
Watergate. The word is redolent with history, even more so now with an imperiled special prosecutor, a sitting president trying to malign real news sources, looking more corrupt by the day. We are reminded of Santayana’s quote…those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We seem poised at another Watergate moment; just…
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Volunteering
Prompted By Retirement
/ Stories
I had already told the “powers-that-be” that I was pregnant, would work several more months, but not return after I had my baby, when the rumors of lay-offs began swirling in October, 1988. I sauntered into Barry’s office. I had worked for him some years earlier at a great sales job (he had fought to…
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Carol
Prompted By Roommates
/ Stories
There was no Facebook or Instagram in 1970. I sent a postcard to Brandeis with my preferences: neat, non-smoker. Over the summer I received one back: Carol from Brooklyn. She received a similar one with my name and address. I later learned that she thought I would arrive in over-alls (the East Coast kids called…
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The Good, The Bad, Even Some Ugly
Prompted By A Year in the Life
/ Stories
If I may steal from Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. 2017 had a lot of both, beginning with the still surreal inauguration of the Orange Monster. I keep thinking he has struck a new low, but he keeps surprising me. I made sure to stay occupied and…
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Cruise to Normandy
Prompted By Vacations
/ Stories
I like history. When I read (now I have eye problems that limits my ability), I read biography. So my husband and I always wanted to tour Normandy and better understand what happened during the beginning of the liberation of Europe. The Americanization of Emily is one of my favorite movies and we agree that the…
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Pain Addiction
Prompted By Marijuana
/ Stories
I walked into my college alumni party on my birthday last month; a cold day in December, which also happened to be my 65th birthday. I was greeted by many from the Brandeis administration whom I knew. While chatting with one, she said, “Do you recognize him from your class, Betsy? He’s doing an interesting…
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Usdan Lives
Prompted By That Night
/ Stories
When I arrived on the Brandeis campus in the autumn of 1970, it did not have a student union, though one was under construction. We were the last class to use the old mail room. Our new student union, “Usdan” officially opened on November 1, 1970. The night before, with barely any furniture to get…
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Cutting the (phone) Cord
Prompted By Technology
/ Stories
I love my iPhone (even the earliest iteration, pictured above), but even before cellular technology, just having a cordless phone was a huge leap forward for me. I remember that first big brick with the antenna. We got it when my first baby was born; it was on a little table beside the chair I…
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More I Cannot Wish You
Prompted By Being Different
/ Stories
I came to college incredibly naive about all things sexual and gender-related. As a theater major, I was certainly surrounded by gays; I was totally unaware. Perhaps they were too, as many were still closeted in the early 1970s. My junior year, I won the role of Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls”. The show…
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Chair For Life
Prompted By Reunions
/ Stories
Founded in 1948, Brandeis is a young university with a small, largely uninvolved alumni base, though the university is getting better at grooming their younger alumni. The Alumni Office knew they had a winner in me right from the start. I used to stop in and visit, particularly after my kids were born. I’d take…
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Breasts
Prompted By Gender Roles
/ Stories
Every female mammal has some form of them. They are functional. Yet for centuries, (mostly) men have dictated style and ferver about female breasts, both how much was decent to expose in fashion and how large was fashionable at any given moment. From the annals of art history and “Rubenesque” women in the 1600s to the…
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Pfau Family Halloween
Prompted By Trick or Treat?
/ Stories
Costumes and candy, trick-or-treating, pumpkin carving and leaves rustling under foot, parades at school. All made up happy times when my kids were young and Halloween rolled around. Autumn in New England is so beautiful with the brightly colored leaves on display. We always hoped it wouldn’t be too cold or too wet when we’d…
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Getting it to Snow Was the Most Difficult
Prompted By Special Birthdays
/ Stories
I was rushing to pack for Boston, but took the phone call. It was my client at the Farm Bureau Insurance in Indianapolis, calling to say the signed contract was being FedExed to my office. Perfect way to start my birthday weekend. Dan and I had lived apart for almost 8 months by this point,…
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An Ode to Surrogate Mothers
Prompted By Generation Gap
/ Stories
“Don’t trust anyone over 30!” I remember the phrase well, but somehow, though I did some eye-rolling back in the day at things my parents said, I never embraced the philosophy. My parents were the babies of their respective families and were 39 when I was born. I am the youngest in a large generation…
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Follow the Fold and Stray No More
Prompted By The Road Not Taken
/ Stories
Shy people often come alive through acting. I was no exception. Though a skirt-hugger as a little girl, I started singing publicly as a 7 year old, and acting at about the same time. Everyone thought I had some talent and I was encouraged to pursue it. I was passionate about it. With the stage…
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A Cautionary Tale
Prompted By Hitchhiking
/ Stories
I didn’t know Maria well. She was a senior and I, a freshman, in the autumn of 1970. She was thin with a puff of blonde curls surrounding her pleasant face. We had mutual friends and we were driving to one’s house at the western end of the Mass Pike late one Saturday evening, exactly…
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A Long, Hot Goodbye
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
We always knew he was brilliant, but as we gathered around the computer on December 17, 2006 to press the button for early decision acceptance into Brown and read “CONGRATULATIONS”, we screamed and I cried a bit, then I called his special ed school, where they all screamed with joy too. Jeffrey was their first…
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9-11 in the Pfau Household
Prompted By 9/11
/ Stories
We came off the Vineyard just before Labor Day, 2001 to a house in renovation chaos and our family in chaos. My in-laws had always spent the parting days of summer with us on the Vineyard, then the beginning of the fall with us in Newton, but Erv passed away the previous May. Gladys still…
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Over-Educated, Under-Qualified
Prompted By Working
/ Stories
I graduated from Brandeis in 1974 with a degree in Theatre Arts and a Massachusetts Secondary Teaching Certificate. I also got married a month after graduating. Dan, my new husband, worked at a small software company in Waltham, MA called SofTech, but would start graduate school in the fall, though he continued to work part…
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Article II, Section 1
Prompted By Quick Take: How Is This Still a Thing?
/ Stories
The Democratic Party has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but lost the office of the President due to the Electoral College. The Electoral College has GOT to go! The framers of the Constitution had a population made up heavily of farmers, many of whom were illiterate and lived…
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IBS and Then Some
Prompted By Illness
/ Stories
It came on with no warning in mid-March of 2003…unrelenting diarrhea, sometimes several times a day. After a few weeks, I visited my doctor who ordered tests of my upper and lower GI tract. All unpleasant, but proved normal. Not meaning to be too graphic, but I had never been “regular”, and would have occasional…
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A Really Big Show
Prompted By Variety Shows
/ Stories
Gathering in the den with my family to watch variety shows was a weekly treat, from The Ed Sullivan Show to Carol Burnett; we ran the gamut. My dad loved sports, but that love wasn’t shared by my mother, so he watched alone…though I often was in the room and now can follow any sport that…
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Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
Prompted By Drive-Ins
/ Stories
One might think that drive-ins would be a big thing in the Motor City, since Detroit was the birthplace of the car culture, but I have only one memory of going to a drive-in movie. As a youngster, the whole family piled into my dad’s Imperial. He owned a Chrysler dealership and always had the…
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Peter Pan in the Backyard
Prompted By Let's Put On a Show
/ Stories
My older brother and I were both artsy kids. We both still sing and I was a Theatre major in college. As children in Detroit, we loved to listen to classical music and I followed him around like his shadow. We both loved the same movies and shows on TV. We looked forward to the…
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Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair
Prompted By Summer of Love
/ Stories
14 years old, out of braces, in contact lenses…I had arrived! The ugly duckling had blossomed. 1967, my first summer in High School Division at the National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp) and I thought I was BIG STUFF! I got to wear powder blue knee socks, designating HSG, no longer red socks…
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Cruisin’ for Burgers and Broads
Prompted By Camp
/ Stories
The summer before my senior year in college I worked as a counselor at a Jewish overnight camp near Ann Arbor, MI called Camp Tamarack. I was assigned to a cabin in the Pioneer Girls, the oldest girls at the camp. The group was situated a little away from the main camp. There was no…
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Rolling Thunder Revue
Prompted By Concerts
/ Stories
It was a secret. We only knew about it because a good friend on the Brandeis Student Senate contacted us. We had already graduated, but he got us tickets and we lined up outside the gym on that cold November night in 1975, waiting for legends of our musical lives: Dylan and Baez (performing together…
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My Grandparents’ Story
Prompted By Immigrants
/ Stories
Belle Potocsky and Zalman Beckenstein were married in the “old country”; Bialystock, Lithuania in 1902. I have a dress that Grandma wore to a ball when they were courting. These were not “shtetl” Jews like in “Fiddler on the Roof”. They were educated and erudite. My grandmother’s dress is a beauty, with a train and…
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Ruth Paige Dance Studio
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
I always loved to dance, but was a sickly kid, so my mother withdrew me from dance lessons. I came back as an adult beginner to ballet class in my early 20s. Though never great, I truly enjoyed it. I have a wonderful sense of rhythm, can dance modern and “pop” very well, but enjoyed…
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South Beach Nymph
Prompted By The Beach
/ Stories
We are lucky to own a home on Martha’s Vineyard. This paradise island, 7 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, has been settled since the early 1600s, and been a vacation destination since the 1800s. Comprised of six distinct towns, we own a historic colonial, the Holmes Coffin House, built in 1829 in the village…
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Expect the Unexpected
Prompted By Graduation Advice
/ Stories
I recently witnessed a highly successful businessman query a 20-something about her background, her upbringing and her 5-year plan. I remember a mentor telling me to make a 5-year plan. I can assure you, things never worked out as I anticipated. I always loved the arts, my degree is in Theatre Arts and I have…
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No More Vietnams
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
My 10th grade Geometry teacher was William Sturley. He had just graduated from college and received a one-year deferment to teach us. He had gone through school on an ROTC scholarship and was due to ship out to Vietnam as soon as this teaching year was over. He was small and sturdy with glasses, an…
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A Tribute to my Father
Prompted By Father's Day
/ Stories
I lost my father, suddenly, more than 27 years ago. I miss him every day; his gentle spirit and home-spun wisdom. At the time of his death I had a 4 year old and an 8 month old child. I realized there was so much I wanted to ask him, to know about him. He…
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Venice Biennale 2017
Prompted By Travel
/ Stories
The Venice Biennale began in 1895, making it the oldest and most important art fair in the world. It showcases contemporary art from across the globe for six months every other year. Twenty nine countries like the U.S., France, Germany and Canada have Pavilions that have stood in the Giardini, once a large park, since…
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Are You Betsy From Brandeis?
Prompted By Too Young To Be This Old
/ Stories
A women I didn’t recognize came up to me after class in the gym last year. “Are you Betsy from Brandeis?” Guess so. Turns out we were classmates, sort of. She had transferred into my class our sophomore year, but graduated a year after me, so I really did not know her. But somehow, she…
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The Walk-In Closet
Prompted By In My Mother's Closet
/ Stories
My mother had great style and a certain elegance, but no self-confidence. In fact, she actively disliked her looks. She used to say she had the map of Jerusalem on her face. As a grown-up, I tried to disabuse her of this notion, but to no avail. She was a self-hating Jew. Nevertheless, she always…
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Kate
Prompted By Pets
/ Stories
In 1987, the neighbor’s cat roamed around and got knocked up. They gave us the last of the litter, a sweet little female. David was two at the time and had a few children’s books about kittens; in each the protagonist was named Kate so bestowed the name on her. I’d had a dog growing…
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No Friend Like an Old Friend
Prompted By Friendship
/ Stories
My dearest camp counselor wrote this to me in 1966: You call me friend, but do you realize how much the name implies? It means that down through the years, through sunshine and tears, There’s always someone standing by your heart. And I would have you know, where ever you may go, There’s always someone,…
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7th Grade Science Fair
Prompted By Science
/ Stories
Though always a good student, the arts and literature were my bailiwick. I had to work hard at math and science to get good grades. Thus, when Mr. Perkins, who I had for 7th and 8th grade science, announced that we all had to do a project for the Science Fair, I struggled for an…
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GOAT (still)
Prompted By Sports
/ Stories
Haters gonna hate, but I gotta tell you, it is fun to root for a winning team. Over the last couple of years, I have become quite the Patriots fan, political bedfellows aside. I grew up in a household with a father who watched football, baseball and golf constantly, then I married a huge sports…
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Barbie
Prompted By Toys & Games
/ Stories
The general store in Charlevoix of 1959 seems so quaint when I think back on it now; the wide floorboards, the glass display cases and large open shelving. I wonder if my Sarason grandfather’s store in turn-of-the-century St. Louis was similar. We vacationed in this northern Michigan resort destination for five summers and the morning…
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Planned Parenthood Before Roe v. Wade
Prompted By Women's Lib
/ Stories
E asked what I was doing for birth control. In February of 1971 we were both freshmen in college and had both just lost our virginity. I visited her in New York City over Intersession, after my exams, before the start of second semester. At Brandeis, all freshmen were issued a Birth Control Handbook, published…
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Dance Class
Prompted By Dance Crazes
/ Stories
As we prepared for bar mitzvah parties in 1964, my mother put me in a local dance class, which met in someone’s basement one day a week. All the “cool” kids were in the group. I was not cool, but took the class anyway. We learned to waltz, two-step and fox trot. Basic dance steps…
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Wait Until Your Father Gets Home
Prompted By In Trouble
/ Stories
My brother, five years my elder, and I, were remarkably well-behaved children. He was quite passive, liked to read, listen to classical music and watch “The Mickey Mouse Club” on TV. I was a little more obstreperous, but still knew how to mind my manners. I just wanted attention. Our mother was always frazzled, our…
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French-style
Prompted By The First Time
/ Stories
Freshman year in high school, the musical was “The Fantastics”, which it really was. I got called back for the female lead of Luisa, but the role went to a junior, which was fine. I was thrilled to be called back. With such a small cast, I worked on make-up. It was a great, friendly…
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Secret Family Recipe
Prompted By Cooking
/ Stories
Perhaps because he was the youngest of eight, raised by an older sister once his mother was institutionalized when he was 12, or maybe because he didn’t marry until he was 32; for whatever reason, my father liked to cook and was good at it. If we had Thanksgiving at home, he did all the…
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I Like Ike
Prompted By What We Wore
/ Stories
Being a Boomer, I have lived through all the style changes through the years. I wore pretty organdy dresses with patent leather Mary Janes to birthday parties in my youth. I had a dress coat with matching hat each season as I grew. I remember the introduction of velcro into the wardrobe (it made a…
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Blizzard Betsy
Prompted By Snowy Days
/ Stories
With minor modifications, this story was originally written for the prompt Snow, in 2017, but it will be new for most of the current readers. ———————————————————————————————————————————– The weather report called for snow, but none had come yet, so we all went to work; no call for alarm. It started snowing around noon on Monday. I…
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Unstuck in Time
Prompted By View from the Mountaintop
/ Stories
In “Slaughter House Five” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I’ve come unstuck in time”. I am not sure if that is the appropriate phrase, or if we are through the looking glass, but we are definitely not bending toward Dr. King’s moral universe this election cycle; far from it. Every day brings some new, disgusting revelation, whether…
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Chocaholic
Prompted By Temptation
/ Stories
I LOVE chocolate – fudge cake, fudge, frosting, M&Ms, 3 Musketeer Bars. You name it. Each has a particular association for me. As a youngster, my family vacationed in Charlevoix, MI, a lovely resort spot on Lake Michigan. In their downtown was a fudge shop named Murdick’s. We would wander over, watch them make the…
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Vi-improved
Prompted By New Beginnings
/ Stories
The blog was called “Today, I feel…” and began on Feburary 3, 2014. He sent us the link many months later, called and told us he had “gender dysphoria”. We didn’t know what that meant. Our blue-eyed second born, who had so many issues growing up, seemed to be doing pretty well. After years of…
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My Love Affair With Daniel Day-Lewis
Prompted By Be Careful What You Wish For
/ Stories
I love movies. But I had never loved a movie star; not until Daniel Day-Lewis swept me away in The Last of the Mohicans. Actually, it is my husband Dan who claimed that I was in love. An old friend referred to my condition as obsession. She would know. She’s a therapist. That didn’t stop her…
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Alumni Choir
Prompted By Traditions
/ Stories
My own family has no traditions to speak of, but when I arrived at the National Music Camp in 1964 (now the Interlochen Arts Camp), it was full of traditions. Some I would add. Camp had been around since 1928 and became an integral part of my life for decades. Now I just send a…
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Moose and Squirrel
Prompted By Cartoons
/ Stories
Stroke, stroke, bail…bail..bail…bail! If only you could hear my accent. Moose and Squirrel, Boris and Natasha (did anyone else see her resemblance to the original Barbie?), Dudley Do-Right, Mr Peabody and his boy Sherman. My brother and I loved them all, and reveled in the silliness of the Cold War cartoons with our heroes always…
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Family Sharing
Prompted By Gratitude
/ Stories
It is that time of the year when we take stock of our blessings and enumerate what we are grateful for. It feels trite and yet appropriate to feel gratitude that my children are well and have good values; that I feel love and respect from my family and friends, that I have health and…
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Where Did the Dream Go?
Prompted By The American Dream
/ Stories
My maternal grandparents came to this country from Bialystock, Russia in 1906 to escape the pogroms. They raised four children, my grandfather ran a successful jewelry business in Toledo, OH, were free to worship as they pleased and found prosperity in the heartland of America. One could say they lived the American Dream. Two of…
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Born Blue
Prompted By Politics
/ Stories
My mother was a proud FDR Democrat and preached it at home. My father’s family grew up quiet Republicans, transplanted to Detroit from St. Louis. We never got him to admit who he voted for in 1960, but he became more liberal as he aged. I was not quite four years old during the 1956…
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Saying Shema on the Rosary
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
My maternal grandparents met, married and had their first two children in Bialystock, Russia at the turn of the 20th century. They survived the pogroms (race riots promulgated against Jews) in 1906, hidden by Christian neighbors and fled to the United States with their babies in 1906…yes, immigrants. My grandfather had been a prosperous watch maker,…
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Costumes to Keep
Prompted By Halloween
/ Stories
Growing up in a neighborhood in Detroit full of kids, Halloween was a big deal. My dad would carve the pumpkin in the scrub sink in the basement. We also lived a few blocks from two large cemeteries, so it really was spooky. We ran in packs from house to house, holding our breath. Houses…
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Mama, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up To Be Cowboys
Prompted By Best Advice: Money
/ Stories
As workers, we used what tools we had easily at our disposal to save: IRAs. But other than that, we enjoyed being DINKs (dual income, no kids). We didn’t have children until we’d been married 11 years. At that time, we set up a college fund and started to set aside serious money each month.…
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Have (More) Faith
Prompted By Parenthood
/ Stories
I have two children. David came out ten days late, with a full head of dark hair after a long, difficult labor. Jeffrey burst into the world on his due date in just four hours with blue eyes and blond curls. I used to joke that their personalities were set then and there. David overcame…
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The Band Shak
Prompted By In the Band
/ Stories
David came home for Christmas break from Stanford freshman year and announced he was going to join the band. I scoffed. He had played piano in elementary school, so perhaps remembered how to read music, but knew no other instrument that would help in a marching band. “What will you play,” I queried, “the triangle”?…
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Waiting for Christie
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
We spent the day before in Ogunquit, ME. I walked the beach with my dad and got a bit sunburnt. We had to drive 1,000 miles to get me from Huntington Woods, MI to Waltham, MA for the start of my freshman year at Brandeis University. It was September, 1970. Campuses across the US were…
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Bryce
Prompted By Something Wild
/ Stories
We looked at Jupiter and its moons just before it set.
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60% of the Revenue, 40% Less Stock
Prompted By Working
/ Stories
I interviewed for a year, but it was a start-up and they weren’t ready to hire salespeople. I was looking to leave the software company I worked for and come to this one, as the product was a good fit with what I already knew. In fact, it could serve as a friendlier front-end to…
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Flood
Prompted By Disasters
/ Stories
The call came very early that August morning in 2007. We were both still in bed on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I heard the voice of my Brazilian cleaning lady from my house in Newton. She was very upset, talking quickly, “The toilet in Jeffrey’s bathroom broke. There’s water everywhere. I’m trying to mop…
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How Do You Spell PFAU?
Prompted By How We Met
/ Stories
“You know I almost didn’t ask you out”, said Bob. We had been dating six days, were in bed, post-coitus. “A guy named Dan Pfau told me you were a tease.” “Who is this guy to call me a tease (since I, obviously, am NOT!), and how do you spell PFAU?” I queried, quite upset…
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Mean Girls
Prompted By Good Riddance
/ Stories
I am so glad I am not in middle school and no longer have to deal with cliques and mean girls. Thank goodness I grew up and survived that phase of life.
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What I Didn’t Tell You Then
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
How could I respond “I love you”? You always ended every conversation “I love you…”, waiting for me to respond in kind. I always heard your criticism in my head: “stand up straight”, “don’t wear your hair behind your ears”, “you missed that note” (screamed from another room as I practiced my singing while taking…
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Tin Lizzy
Prompted By My First Car
/ Stories
My dad lost his Chrysler dealership, due to bad business deals and the UAW going on strike, leaving him with no inventory, in 1967. My mother’s 1967 Plymouth Valiant was the last car to come from that dealership. I student taught my senior year at Brandeis and needed a car, so I bought it from…
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Sound the Call to Dear Old Interlochen
Prompted By Camp
/ Stories
I spent six glorious, formative summers at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. Founded in 1928 on an old logging camp, in a pine forest, between two lakes, it is the granddaddy of arts camps and was heaven on earth for me and like-minded friends. We waited all year to get there and not…
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Frae Bonnie Scotland
Prompted By Travel
/ Stories
I had a Scottish nurse when I was a baby. She called me her “wee little treasure” and gave me dolls that said, “Frae Bonnie Scotland” on them. Her name was Jean James but I called her Jean-Jean. I loved the way she spoke and the way she cared for me and my brother. Because…
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He Called Me “Boop-de-Boy”
Prompted By Siblings
/ Stories
Rick was alone with our mother for almost 5 years. I was not welcome when I came along. I was a hairless creature. He thought girls should have hair, so I must be a boy, right? He called me boop-de-boy and tripped me as I learned to walk. But as I became more fun to…
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A Borrowed Story From My Neighbor, a Judge
Prompted By Independence
/ Stories
The Honorable James L. Oakes and his wife Mara lived next to me on Martha’s Vineyard until his death in 2007. He was kind, patient, brilliant and I adored him. Mara, with whom I remain close, shared this article on citizenhood, reprinted from the Brattleboro Reformer, on July 4, 2010. She gave me permission to…
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I Wanted the Fairy Tale
Prompted By Weddings
/ Stories
Dan and I started dating during my Junior year at Brandeis. He graduated that year, but lived locally, and would come by after dinner to spend the night. He always began phrases, “When we are married…” Finally I said, “Do you really think we’ll get married?” He responded affirmatively, so I said, “Why don’t you…
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Seven Double Chivases on the Rocks
Prompted By Good Bosses, Bad Bosses
/ Stories
I moved to Chicago in 1978 to take a sales position with a company willing to hire me. My husband stayed in Boston and we commuted for 16 months, seeing each other every second or third weekend. The photo is me, “dressed for success” in August of 1978. I have no photos of “AL”. My…
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No Valediction
Prompted By Graduation
/ Stories
1970 was a turbulent year. Four of us graduated with perfect grade-point averages, but we were not asked to give remarks at graduation. I think the school feared what we might say. It was just a few weeks after protesting students at Kent State were shot by National Guardsmen. So I had to be content…
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Girl Stories
Prompted By What We Read
/ Stories
I was an exuberant reader, often reading by flashlight under the covers when I was supposed to be sleeping. I heard my 3rd grade teacher telling someone in the school hallway that I tested at a 10th grade level at that tender age. I loved “girl” books and there were plenty in my household, hand-me-downs…
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Action Jackson
Prompted By An Unforgettable Person
/ Stories
(I keep updating this story as I learn new information about my long-lost, but still fascinating cousin.) The last time I saw him was in October of 1980. He’d called my office a day earlier. “You’ve got to come up over the weekend. It’s fantastic here.” Trying to get a room in Woodstock, VT over…
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Keypunch!
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
“Over-educated and under qualified”. That’s what the folks at SofTech said to me when I was desperate for a job in August of 1974. I had graduated the previous May from Brandeis University, magna cum lauda with a BA in Theatre Arts with honors and a Massachusetts teaching certificate in Secondary Speech and English. Married a…
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Second Choice
Prompted By Prom
/ Stories
I was not a “cool” kid in high school, and, though I had run through a fair number of dates, I never had a long-term boyfriend. As prom time approached my senior year, I desperately wanted to attend that rite of passage, but things were not looking good. My two best friends had been in…
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Memories
Prompted By The Things I Keep
/ Stories
I keep memories. The photo is me in 1972 wearing a cherished dress brought from Russia by my maternal grandmother in 1906. It was part of her trousseau, four years earlier. My mother and I were the only women in the family small enough to fit into it. When it became too fragile to wear,…
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Different Types
Prompted By S#*t My Family Said
/ Stories
My parents were very different. We were never quite sure why they married in the first place, or how they stayed together as long as they did. Dad was a home-spun philosopher, having come from a difficult family situation. His mother was bipolar, started in and out of mental institutions when my dad was 8…
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One Toke Over the Line
Prompted By Altered States
/ Stories
I was a goodie-two-shoes, as straight as they come. I never tried drugs during high school, though I dated a “druggie” Junior year. He came over on my birthday, high as a kite and sang “Happy Birthday” while hopping on one foot. I was amused; my mother didn’t get it. He visited once when I…
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Boston Strong
Prompted By Sports
/ Stories
I have never been an athlete – no hand-to-eye coordination; never enjoyed participating, always enjoyed watching. Lately I’ve become a gym rat and workout six days a week, staying fit with Pilates and other forms of working out. My husband always was a sports enthusiast, on intramural football and softball teams in college, but…
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Play List for Life
Prompted By What We Listened To
/ Stories
My mother only allowed me to listen to classical music for a long time. I was a serious singer, took voice lessons, attended a music camp in summer, but wanted to be like the other kids and listen to rock and roll too. I got a transistor radio with an ear piece and broke the…
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Posing in 3-D
Prompted By My First Paycheck
/ Stories
The Brandeis Theatre Department hired a new scenic painter in 1973. In addition to painting all the backdrops, he also taught a life drawing course and advertised for models. I had done a little modeling during my time at Brandeis, but nothing note-worthy. This was a real class, taught by a master, so I signed…
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Nicky
Prompted By Pets
/ Stories
My father and I were crazy about dogs. My mother was terrified of them. All my lobbying fell on deaf ears for years. Finally, my brother was off to college and I was a lonely 14 year old. Evidently, my mother had had an interesting discussion with an aunt while I was at school one…
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What is Faith?
Prompted By Faith
/ Stories
What is faith? I struggle with the concept. We were minimally Jewish, attending services sporadically, though my brother and I were faithful Sunday school attendees, until my brother was 12. He was not being prepped for a bar mitzvah, unlike every other boy in his class. Girls still weren’t able to be “called to the Torah”…
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Belle & Zalman
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
My mother’s parents came from Bialystock, still part of Russia when they met in 1902. I have a fancy dress from Grandma’s trousseau that she brought over on the ship. My mother was always proud that her family came over second-class, not steerage. My grandparents married in 1902 and were successful. She had a maid…
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Charlevoix
Prompted By Vacations
/ Stories
Charlevoix. For five glorious summers my family stayed at the Scutt Guest House in the resort town on Lake Michigan for a few weeks in August, beginning in 1959. I believe it became quite a well-heeled resort, but at the time it felt cozy and lots of our friends and family from Detroit also made…
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Shy Child
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
I was so shy, I was a skirt-hugger. I loved to play with my dolls, the kids in my neighborhood and was dazzled by the performing arts. My first love was ballet and I started lessons at the age of seven. With flat feet and a sickly constitution, I wasn’t very good, and often missed…
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Movies That Made a Difference
Prompted By What We Watched
/ Stories
I tend to love romantic movies; big sweeping costume dramas, though occasionally go for thoughtful dramas. It is difficult for me to pick just five that have rocked my world, as I love to come back to favorites and watch them over and over again, just for pure pleasure. So I will share my top…
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Donn goes to Nam
Prompted By War & Remembrance
/ Stories
Camp was a strict place and we were not supposed to fraternize with the staff, but my best friend and I were fascinated by Donn. 1969 was the second summer that he and his sister had come to work as part of the back-stage theater crew, she on costumes, he on scenery. They were several…
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Lanny
Prompted By The Crush
/ Stories
Lanny was SO cute. We were in 10th grade Geometry class together and our lockers were close to each other. I barely spoke to him throughout all of high school, but he sat next to me in that one class. He was a wrestler; at that point, the lightest on the team, though eventually he’d…
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I Always Wanted Long Hair
Prompted By Hair
/ Stories
I guess girls are supposed to have hair. I was born bald so my brother, five years my elder, called me “Boop-dy Boy”. He was confused. Eventually I grew hair, nice, shiny, straight, almost black hair. I always wanted to grow it long. My mother, for some reason which she never shared with me, wouldn’t…
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Moon Reflections
Prompted By Moon Landing
/ Stories
The moon has a spell-binding hold on our collective imagination and never more-so than the summer of 1969. That summer was my sixth and last summer as a camper at the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts Camp) in Interlochen, MI, the granddaddy of fine arts camps, set in a pine forest between two lakes…
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Brisket
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
My mother was insecure in life and insecure in the kitchen. Having me around made her nervous, so I was forbidden to watch. I didn’t learn to cook in her kitchen…a story for a different day. With her limited cooking skills, she cooked the same menu every week: Swiss Steak on Monday (barely edible –…
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