I was the firstborn of parents who grew up around the corner from each other in the Clason Point section of the Bronx – an Irish-Catholic neighborhood that teemed with children and with aunts, uncles and cousins. Mom’s parents had eight children. By the time I came along in 1947, I was their 20th grandchild…
I’ve often felt that there’s something wonderful about families that pepper their conversations with a special vocabulary all their own. Shared experiences create shared memories, often giving rise to a unique, intimate “family language.” Their telegraphic little buzzwords, sayings and mottos sometimes link several generations of treasured family lore. Here are a few that people…
(Stock photo by Matlachu on Pixaby) A PRICELESS SMILE I found the following essay in August 2003, while cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment in Florida after she passed away at the age of 93. I had attached a note saying: “Dear Grandma, I wrote this for my camp application in response to the question: “Who is your hero…
Being a grandparent makes me think of a Hasidic proverb that says “Old age to the unlearned is winter. Old age to the learned is harvest time.” Grandparents entering your grandchild’s world is your harvest time. As I head off to New York for a conversation at the JCC Manhattan with Rabbi Joy Levitt on “The…
“We all have a Benny (l) in our families — the sometimes prickly, even adversarial family member who challenges our ideas and methods. A Benny helps us realize that even when it seems to be going wrong, it will come out right — as long as we are TRYING.” Susan Adcox, Grandparenting Expert for about.com,…
(Stock Photo Credit: AntiqueTools.com) My grandfather, Walter Roswell Truman Smith, is a collector of early American woodworking tools. I love visiting him and Grandma Daisy in Connecticut and exploring their eighteenth-century barn filled with thousands of tools from every imaginable trade. Grandpa knows the history behind every single tool in his collection. A few years ago, the…
(Stock photo credit: Boston Public Library on Flickr) My grandmother, Marilyn Tanzer, was a knockout. “I used to be a very pretty girl, you know,” she would regularly announce to her four grandchildren. Grandma was voted “Prettiest Face” back in high school and had pictures to prove it. But nobody needed proof. Legend had it…
(Photo credit zazzle.com.au) Dear Grandpa, First of all—thanks for letting me call you Grandpa. My maternal grandfather died before I was born and my paternal grandfather died when I was eight, so it’s been a long time since I’ve had a Grandpa in my life. Grandparents are important characters in the narrative of a human…
Stock Photo. Photo credit: Marc Love on Flickr ————————————————————————————————- My “Bubby” Marvis gave me a life-changing gift: unconditional love, acceptance, and respect at a time when I needed it the most. Ten years ago, in my early twenties, I came out to her as a lesbian. Having grown up in a tight-knit, Orthodox-Jewish family and…
Jayendra Bhatt was a rickety old man at first glance. He would careen down our suburban sidewalk using his cane as if it were a comedic prop to make us grandchildren laugh. But “Dada” wasn’t rickety, neither in body nor in spirit. In his native India, he had been a scholar, a philosopher, a teacher–and…
