I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten a tattoo if my daughter hadn’t made us appointments with her favorite artist. I agreed to do it, but didn’t know what to choose. I went back and forth between some ideas (Hawaiian sunset! Lavender roses!), but finally decided on a bluebird of happiness. At the time, my sister was very near the end of her life and I wanted something beautiful and uplifting I could look at every day. And so it came to pass that I got a very optimistic looking bluebird on my midsection, right across from my appendectomy scar (still visible from when I got it at age six!). This was in early 2015. Painful? Yes, it was. But it’s also lived up to my expectations.I don’t know why people get tattoos in places they cannot see themselves without a mirror or serious contortions.

A few years ago now, after my husband was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and I was struggling to deal with the changes in my life, I got my second tattoo–this time a reminder of what I needed to remember (notice the forget-me-nots) to do when I got frustrated or upset.

#2 left forearm

A few weeks ago, I drove past the place where I got my second tattoo and saw a “walk-ins welcome” sign. On impulse, I made a U-turn and went inside. Again, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but had time to think about it. What I ended up getting has historical and religious significance: the Hamsa Hand.

#3 Right forearm

Google says: “The Hamsa Hand is a universal sign of protection, power, and strength that dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. Known as the Hand of Fatima in Islam and the Hand of Miriam in Judaism, it’s believed to protect against the evil eye and all negative energies.”

And: “Beyond its protective qualities, the Hamsa is also a symbol of peace and blessings. It’s often associated with the idea of bringing its owner happiness, luck, health, and good fortune. For many, a Hamsa tattoo is not just a protective talisman but also a symbol of hope and a source of positive energy and blessings.”

I figured: what could it hurt? (I didn’t mean literally, but still). Who doesn’t want to protect themselves from negative energies, while attaining good luck and happiness? And a dose of hope, positive energy and blessings–all for the reasonable price of a little tattoo? I was all in.

There’s no way I can keep up with my daughter, pictured here. But I’m delighted with my ink. At this point, I won’t say I’m done with tattoos, but the ones I have carry great significance and I do look at and think about them every day.

Breathe, seek happiness and positive energy, count my blessings–these things are more than skin deep.

*The variety in skin tones here is not accurate. I cannot account for the vagaries of cell phone photography

Last year I learned that the DMV will suspend your license if you receive a diagnosis of dementia. You get a letter and are offered the chance to appeal their decision. Doctors are required by law to notify the DMV once the diagnosis is made, and so the letter may come as a surprise, depending on how aware a person is of their cognitive decline.

I learned this because it happened to my husband. Like anyone would be, he was devastated by the suspension. Against my protests, he launched a campaign to get his license back. I won’t go into the details of what he did and what happened next, but after one failure he passed the tests and got to drive again.

Earlier this year, another neurologist  gave him some tests and confirmed the diagnosis: FTD. If you don’t know what this is and have never heard of it, I can assure you that it affects a person in a variety of unsettling and surprising ways. Should he have been allowed to keep driving? He thought so, and once again tried to get his license back. But this time, he would not be allowed to test. It is a degenerative disease and nobody wanted him to put himself or anyone else in danger down the line.

Last week, I sold his car. We were both sad about it, but he has now realized it was for the best and I did the right thing.

I’m actually grateful that the DMV won’t allow him to drive anymore. It’s a big change, but we have learned about a great service in our area for seniors that beats Uber and Lyft for cost and convenience.

The burden falls on me to manage just about everything these days. Getting rid of the car and the stress around his driving was only one small step on the long road ahead.

This was a hard one to write, and a belated response to an earlier prompt.

WHERE I’M FROM inspired by a poem by George Ella Lyon

I am from the old country: Belarus, Poland, running from the Cossacks

The Lady with the Lamp: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

I am from Far Rockaway, NY; St. Louis, Detroit

I am from dill pickles, herring, a glass tea

I am from McAllister St., the Fillmore, the Ukraine Bakery; a run-down bar on Skid Row; eggs from Petaluma

I am from the fog, the street cars, the hills

I am from a chance meeting between two strangers on New Year’s Eve: good son Sam, beleaguered daughter Betty

I am from 1825 Turk St, San Francisco; 3023 Humphrey Ave, Richmond

I’m from jump rope, jacks, olly olly oxen free until summer darkness fell

I’m from riding down the street on my bike

I’m from noisy holiday dinners

I’m from backyard birthday parties, home movies without sound

I’m from Christmas mornings without a new bike

I’m from teachers, singers, writers and actors

I’m from don’t wear your heart on your sleeve

I’m from Cocoa Puffs and Trix, canned vegetables and chilled red wine

I’m from scrambled eggs with salami and rye bread with garlic

I’m from kugel and honey cake and matzo ball soup

I’m from a place I still dream about: a big backyard, a hammock strung between walnut trees and a small gray kitten next door

I’m from the show must go on and “Why, Julia Hershey, French toast!”

I’m from plan your work and work your plan

I’m from I love you with tears

…and they want their stuff back! Oh, the clunkyness of it all.

This photo is easily worth one thousand words, but instead: my favorite screen saver: On Mighty Toaster Wings!

No matter where I am–at home or abroad–people ask me for directions. I don’t know why. Most of the time I can answer correctly, but I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes.

Years ago, I brought this up at lunch with my friends and colleagues at the high school where I worked.

One of the (younger) teachers said,”Well, everywhere I go people try to sell me drugs.”

We looked at each other and wondered…

Photo by Joshua Harris on Unsplash

My favorite fairy tale? Hands down, it’s “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Why? The princesses would dress up every night and disappear though a secret tunnel to dance the night away with handsome princes. They would return the next morning, their shoes worn out from dancing.  I loved that story, partly because of the new shoes they got every day, but I also liked the part about getting dolled up like that every night, sneaking out, and not getting caught.

I have two beautifully illustrated versions of this story. It’s almost a TL;DR kind of tale. Lots of build-up that ends, predictably, with a wedding. But it’s a fairy tale, so it has to end happily ever after.

But for me, it was always about the shoes. And the dancing.

My story begins at the end of a harrowing week, the week my 81 year old father died. His kind heart, the one he always wore on his sleeve, finally gave out. He had warned me in so many words: you never have as much time as you think you do. He died on a Sunday morning in April.

I’d just returned home after having coffee with friends. Over my usual café au lait and bagel, I had told them that my father was tired, he was done, he was living a life he no longer loved. Good friends, they had listened and sympathized.

As soon as I got in the door, my teen-age son greeted me with a face I’d seen before–when he was about to complain of a stomach ache on a school day. “What is it?” I asked him, thinking: he has a rehearsal today and he can’t miss it, even with a headache or a stomach ache. In our family, with a long involvement in theater, the show must go on. He swallowed hard and finally said, “It’s…your sister called.” And then: “Papa Sam died this morning.” I burst into tears and held onto my son. And then I reached for the phone and called my mom. My husband came home moments later and found me sobbing into the phone.

Tradition dictated that the burial happen quickly. We settled on date, place and time. We wrote the obituary. We planned for food. All the arrangements got locked into place. Finally, we had to think about what to wear. I would be speaking at the service, and wanted to look nice. And so I ended up driving to the shopping mall with no ideas about what to look for and no real desire to be there.

It was destined to be one of those bad shopping days. Nothing fit, the colors were wrong, everything was too young, too old, too not-right. The racks in all the usual good luck places were out of magic. No marked-down sale items on hangers calling my name as I walked by. I remained unmoved by their fall from retail grace. Maybe I just wasn’t under the usual spell of enchantment, oblivious to the charms of the pianist gliding her fingers over the keyboard as she played  show tunes and standards designed to make shoppers reach eagerly for their credit cards, trance-like, at the counters throughout the cavernous store. Shopping at Nordstrom was usually a happy time, but not that day.

Halfheartedly running my hands along fabrics in spring colors, occasionally taking a hanger off a rack and putting it back — this was worse than I anticipated. What was I doing there anyway? Was shopping the best thing I could think of to do right then? What did that say about me?

I was drawn toward something. It was a red jacket, a blazer. The color was more of a  sedate scarlet than a perky cherry red; it had a quiet dignity that didn’t scream “red” so much as say it:  I’m red. Don’t make a fuss.

As if on a blind date with someone I had doubts about already, I walked back to the dressing room with the jacket, certain to be let down. I tried it on, while trying not to look at myself above the collar. I knew the harsh lighting would highlight the dark circles under my eyes, my washed-out skin and dull hair. As I looked in the three-way mirror, I decided that the jacket would do, but the sleeves were several inches too long. I had spotted the sign on the way into the dressing rooms that designated a day too far in the future for alterations on purchases made that day. It was not to be, this red jacket. Then Esther, the sales person who had brightly offered to help me, peeked into my dressing room and cocked her head.

“We can have those sleeves taken up and have it ready for you in a couple of days.”

“No,” I told her, shaking my head slowly. “I need it for tomorrow.”  I took one more glance in the mirror, and then began to take the jacket off.

She looked at me, thought for a moment, and asked, “Can you find something to do for about an hour? We can have it ready for you then. I’ll be at lunch, but someone else will keep an eye out for you.”

I nodded, mumbled my thanks, and waited for the seamstress to come in, still avoiding my reflection.  How could Esther have known what I wanted the red jacket for? Did she read it in my face? I didn’t think to ask. A short woman with a pincushion on her wrist entered the dressing room moments later, quickly pinned up my sleeves, then gestured for me to go as I shrugged out of the jacket.

I stepped out into the April sunshine and found a pretty card in a nearby stationery shop. I sat down and wrote a note to Esther, telling her that my father had always liked me in red and that I would wear the jacket at his service the next day and how much it meant to me that she was helping me, and as I wrote I could not keep the tears from falling. Shoppers passed me by, enjoying the afternoon, not really noticing the sniffling writer on the bench pouring her heart out to someone she would never see again.

I took out my cell phone and called my sister, letting her know that I had found a nice red jacket and that by some miracle of understanding, through the kindness of a stranger, it would be ready in time for the service the next day. She was glad to hear it. When the hour was up, I left my note for Esther, claimed the red jacket in its zippered bag, and drove home in tears.

I will always be grateful to the saleswoman who saw something urgent and desperate in a grieving daughter’s face. All these years later, every time I see that flash of red in my closet, I think of her—and how much my father would have loved hearing the story about Esther and the red jacket.

The original: Saucy

A Risa in LA was named after me. And several years ago, a couple in my neighborhood named their baby Risa. We were Big Risa and Little Risa for a while until we both thought better of it. We Risas don’t like to stick with things when they are no longer cool.

A few years ago, I introduced myself to someone who told me that a Risa he knew belonged to the The Reesa Society. “The what?” I asked him. He said there is a society for people named Risa, no matter how it’s spelled.

So I checked out the web site, and printed my very own certificate of membership. There were so many comments on the site that the host stopped accepting new ones in 2003.  The grand originator, the inspiration to mothers all over America in the 1950s, the anthropological Lucy to all of us, Risë Stevens the opera singer herself, had signed up as a member.  She passed away recently at the age of 99. Saucy and long-lived: a worthy goal.

With my certificate of membership, I am now part of a sisterhood with a shared history and a built-in understanding of what it’s like to have such a fuss made over a simple name like ours. My fellow Risas are a font of information. Where else would I have learned about the Reesa character on Seinfeld, and Star Trek’s planet Risa, the “infamously lush resort planet, renowned for its breezes and easy-going sexuality, host to millions each year.” I wonder if Risë Stevens ever heard about this. Makes saucy sound kind of weak.

A couple of the Risas I read about had gone through a period where they gave up and just answered to Lisa or Rita or Theresa or whatever. I used to toy with the idea myself when I was younger, but I actually liked having a name that was different, even if I had to go through the questions and the spelling every time I was introduced to someone.We Risas like to be addressed correctly. As one member of the Reesa Society wrote: “Everyone wants to pronounce it wrong. Then they tell you it is the prettiest name they have ever heard.” We laugh, because Risa means  laugh or laughter in Spanish, as I have been told so many times.

It still makes me stop in my tracks when I see my name in print, though. We are often literary people, and take notice on the rare occasion an author shows the grace and sensitivity to name a character Risa. And thank you, Michael Chabon, for the mention. (The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, pg. 265)

I find it comforting to know there are more of us in the world than I ever imagined, and according to the Reesa Society website, we are not all named after the same person, we are not all descended from Russian Jews, and no one ever uses those whaddya call ‘em dots over the e anymore. As far as I am concerned, mine is the only correct spelling, but we Risas are a tolerant group and welcome the double ee’s, the double ss’s and even the occasional extra “h”.

Nicknames are an issue, though. You can only shorten a four letter word so much. A few people like to call me “Ris,” but it looks funny when you  write it R-i-s, and if it’s R-e-e-s-e, then that’s longer than my actual name.  Old Brooklyn Dodgers fans might have been tempted to call me “Pee Wee Reese” back in the day, but it would be an unseemly nickname for someone who prefers to be thought of as “saucy.”

Then there was the whole  Rhesus monkey thing in elementary school.

Some joker gave me a Reese’s Pieces t-shirt once upon a time. It was bright orange and also sported the slogan “Two Great Tastes.” I wore it proudly, especially when I was nursing my youngest child.

We Risas are able to take a joke, even when it has to do with something as closely tied to our self-esteem and our feelings as our very own special name, which, as you know by now, means “laughter.”

There will never be things with my name on them hanging on those racks  you see in toy stores. I think about the young Risas of today with no little license plates, no toothbrushes or barrettes. To them I say: suck it up! We are saucy, confident, and proud. We don’t need no stinkin’ barrettes! Say it loud and spell it clearly. Over and over again.

And remember to smile when you say: Hello, My name is Risa!

This is what I read at my Dad’s funeral in 2001. It sums up many of the life lessons I learned from him.

My dad was a teacher, and like many outstanding teachers, he never took time off from teaching. Sure, there were vacations and summers, but he was always on the job. If no students were around, he always had my sister and me.

I have put together some of his most important lessons into a set of guidelines that I call “Sam Elkind’s Guide to Living a Rewarding Life.”

First, stay connected. Pick up the phone, write a letter, send an e-mail. Don’t put this off. It’s just as important as the other things you’re doing. Call for no reason, just to check in and say “How ya doin’?” He always did this, which is why his network of friends goes back to junior high and high school and extends to all corners of the world.

Treasure your friends and your family. Tell them you treasure them, using your own words.

Keep moving—physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

Read something challenging, try to understand it—and then talk to people about it. And don’t just talk to people who think the way you do. Mix it up a little.

Sit in the sun.

Take a nap.

Or, better still, combine these two things with a baseball game—but don’t necessarily follow the game. Go with friends or family and use the time together to talk about life and the arts and other things.

Lose yourself in music, any kind of music. Dance whenever you can. Teach your children to love music and how to dance. Consider it an honor to dance with them.

Be patient.

Retain a sense of wonder. Never cease to be amazed at things.

Keep an open mind an open heart.

Be a good student.

When you screw up, admit it.

Keep someone’s legend alive. Tell the favorite stories over and over and laugh until you cry. Repeat as necessary.

Wear your heart on your sleeve. Tell the people you love that you love them. Look them in the eyes and tell them. And not just on special occasions.

Be a devoted brother, a good uncle, and a surrogate father to anyone who needs one.

If people do a great job and you are proud of them, tell them. Say, “You did a great job and I’m very proud of you.” Someone else’s success does not diminish your own.

Be generous with compliments and praise.

Eat with gusto.

Try to look good and keep your shoes shined.

Find the joy in simple things: a nice walk with a friend …a perfect, clear day…a great knish.

Be true to your teeth or they’ll be false to you.

Be there for someone. Be the person that people can talk to. Keep your door open.

If you have been lucky enough to find your passion, pursue it with all you have. Keep the passion alive by challenging yourself and setting new goals. Don’t rest on your laurels.

Plan your work and work your plan.

Always thank your cast and crew.

See the world and fall in love with new places, but always leave your heart in San Francisco.

And when you find that you can’t keep moving anymore, and you can no longer eat with gusto and it is time to rest on your laurels, then reflect on a life well lived. Tell your family, your caregivers and your many friends how much you love and appreciate them.

Give them a chance to say goodbye and thank you.

And finally, leave wonderful memories and your own legend for everyone to keep alive.

Billy Joel’s recording of  “Just the Way You Are” was released (or “dropped” as we say now) in September of 1977. By early 1978, the song was still getting a lot of airplay on the radio. During the nearly four months my daughter was in the Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF, my husband and I  sat next to her crib for hours at a time. Whenever that song came on, played softly against the constant beeping of the monitors and the bustling activity of doctors and nurses, I looked at my baby girl with her Mohawk haircut (to accommodate IVs when they ran out of good veins), her NG tube, her scars and her chest tubes–and I would blink back the tears. When I was alone outside the hospital, I would always start to cry when I heard those first few notes.

And after each new setback and indignity, I would look at her and think: I love you just the way you are.