- Whenever we were sick, she'd buy trashy magazines like The Enquirer and News Of The World at the supermarket for us to read in bed, and she'd make us Junket.
- When I was a Cub Scout and earned my paltry few merit badges, I wound up having to sew them on because she didn't know how to sew.
- Her thick, Bronx accent.
- She once grounded me "until puberty". I was eight.
- Any time we'd say we would take care of something "tomorrow", she'd immediately jump in and start reciting the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy from MacBeth, except the middle always got muddled because she forgot several lines. (I literally grew up thinking that everything between "Out, out brief candle" and "It is a tale told by an idiot" went "blah blah something something blah blah").
- Every year on my birthday she would carefully draw me a placemat on a plain white piece of paper with a set of thousand-year-old markers from her teaching days.
- When I was six I asked her why men have nipples and she told me it was "for decoration". I guess she was kind of right?
- Her Scrabble prowess was always and remains far beyond my trifling knowledge of the game. I think she turned pro.
- For years now, around the holidays, she (a Jew) bakes thousands of Christmas cookies, putting together plates for her friends, neighbors and co-workers in an assembly-line operation that would make Henry Ford envious.
- Somehow she wound up loving Country music.
- She at one time had more shoes than Imelda Marcos.
jan 21 2009 ∞
jan 21 2009 +
jan 21 2009 +