Thoughts on the Passing

Like everybody else, I was shocked to hear Michael Jackson died. I wasn't surprised — between the well-known addiction to painkillers; the surgeries; the gaunt frame; the overwhelming stress of lawsuits, debt and living inside his own head, it wasn't hard to imagine that something, eventually, was going to give and his body would be unable to withstand it — but I was shocked. I never thought about him dying. So surreal.

Also like everybody else of my generation, I taught myself the "Thriller" dance and awesomed-out in front of my TV back when MTV used to play videos. I engaged in Global Thermonuclear War against my sister Stephanie when we shared a bedroom in order to claim prime wall space for my favorite Michael Jackson poster (see previous post). I had a jacket that turned into a bag, but when it wasn't folded up, I called it my Michael Jackson jacket because it had zippers and piping and pointy shoulders. I tried to moonwalk and failed miserably. I voted for "Beat It" to win "Friday Night Video Fights." I watched the video for "Say, Say, Say" and wondered what ever happened to all the dancing hobos in the world.

Michael Jackson defined the pop culture of my youth just as much as John Hughes movies, Simon Le Bon Teen Beat posters, lace Madonna gloves, The Karate Kid, "Jessie's Girl," Henry Thomas's uttering of "penis-breath" and K-tel's Hit Explosion did. And the music in his heyday was great. The videos were legendary. For a long time, he was arguably the most famous person on the planet. But I'm uncomfortable with all the adulation of Michael Jackson in the wake of his death. It's important to acknowledge and pay respect to what he contributed to music and pop culture, but the adult he became doesn't change just because he died, contrary to those who are extolling his virtue despite four days ago believing he was a pedophile. And I'm not understanding the disconnect. Outside of the actual sadness of the loss of a person, deaths of icons are always fascinating when millions who long ceased celebrating them before their death line the streets in tears after. Michael Jackson was astoundingly talented, but he was also a mess, and talent does not make somebody an unassailable person.

Nobody is arguing the veracity of Michael Jackson's harrowing, truncated childhood. Joe and Katherine Jackson were shitty parents. They just were. It's true that their shitty parenting brought forth "The Love You Save," which, please, best song ever, but yeah, some people are just bad parents. So it was understandable that he'd have a yearning to re-create his childhood, live out the play he missed, and suffer while he admittedly lacked the ability to relate to people offstage. But Michael Jackson's re-created childhood as an adult lasted far longer than any person's childhood does when they are a child, and despite having kids of his own, he relinquished the responsibilities of an adult — which were lifted from his lap by people surrounding him who were happy to take on that burden. How sad that a man who had all the access in the world to all the best, most effective forms of therapy seemed to get worse and worse, more and more detached, and might not have even known how to engage because his life was spent embedded with these "yes" people whose livelihoods depended on him not changing much at all.

Change is terrifying when you only know one way to live, even if that way of living makes you miserable.

As far as I saw it, as a person who will never know what went on behind those doors, what that environment created was, on a good day, a grown man whose relationship with and affection for children was inappropriate, and on a bad day a grown man who may have been a child molester. I believe he was, others don't; perhaps that's the dividing line between who feels unbridled emotion right now and who doesn't. Maybe we'll never know if he was, depending on what the confidentiality agreements say — and even then, most families who sent their children to Neverland were such opportunists, who knows if they're telling the truth. But what I do believe is that Michael Jackson was so sick, so wanting to be someone else that he changed his entire physical self, so used to being used, such a complicated human being who might have never had the support system he needed or who rejected the strong, good-hearted efforts made toward him, that he should have been hospitalized so he could work with professionals who had his best mental and physical interests at heart, away from everyone else's desires of him. His demons — including substance abuse, which is its own evil animal — went far beyond any saving well-intentioned loved ones could accomplish.

I absolutely believe that no matter what happens to a person as a child, there comes a time in adulthood when they have to stop blaming everyone else and take responsibility for where they are and how they've responded to what happened to them, even if there's no justice or closure or apology. That's not to say everything is surmountable — this is absolutely a simplified version of an idealized adulthood, and Michael Jackson's adulthood was anything but simple — but you owe it to yourself, your family and, if you commit to the responsibility of having them, your children to do your damndest to try. Especially if you have children. Easier said than done for an armchair shrink, right? I wonder how far Michael Jackson traveled along that road — perhaps that's why he wanted to be a father — or was he was just too lost, stuck, afraid and invested in living the dangerous, stunted, damaged life he did because, to him, it was safe even when it wasn't safe? And if he did do the things he was accused of, well, that makes sympathy that much more complicated.

What is heartbreaking about all of this is that many of us have watched a large part of the living of a very sad, bizarre life. In whichever stages of his career or our evolving tastes, he made an awful lot of people happy, yet he was clearly so very unhappy and uneasy with the world. We're all on a quest for happiness — that's the motivating factor for every decision we make, happiness and love — and it requires a lot of work and luck to find it. Whatever happiness Michael Jackson did find in his life, it's too sad that there was so much else that was missing and askew, and for his three children, I hope that in time they find the happiness and stability their father never did.

Shalom.

David Sagiv died September 30. When we heard he had been killed, Stacy and I asked the same question:

"Was he in a motorcycle accident?"

It was a natural question about a man who embraced his wild streak. And when somebody you care about has a motorcycle, no matter how adept they are at driving it, you're always afraid they're going to be hurt. But David died in a wholly tragic, unnatural way, doing a wholly average, natural thing: He was putting groceries into his car while his pregnant wife and three of their children waited for him to finish, get back into the car, and take them on a fishing trip. From what I understand, a man driving illegally on a suspended license lost control of his van (whether he was speeding or drunk, I do not know) and crashed into David while he was loading the back of his car. David's wife and children saw the whole thing.

The next day, his body was flown to Israel, where he was buried.

His distraught wife could not attend the funeral. She gave birth to their daughter a week later.

I get all of this out of the way early, because when people read that a strapping, healthy 40-year-old man dies, they skim through the article to find out how it happened. It's a natural reaction, a human curiosity for and attraction to tragedy. And this is the ultimate tragedy. But I want to use this forum to talk about David, so there it is, up top. A person who had no right to be behind the wheel of an automobile put his keys in the ignition, drove toward a Brooklyn grocery store and killed my friend.

For nine years, David was my hairdresser. The myth of a woman's relationship with her hairdresser — the hairdresser as therapist, the salon chair as confessional, the hair dryer as microphone, the handheld mirror at the end of the appointment as reflection of the woman fulfilling her aesthetic potential — never really rang true for me growing up, probably because I'd never had a hairdresser who had a clue of what to do with my head. In my experience, hairdressers hate curly hair. All they want to do is, literally, straighten you out. When I moved to New York, Stacy told me about David, her hot Israeli hairdresser. She said, "If he ever moves out of state, I'm following him. You have to go to him." So I figured I'd give him a try. I didn't have anyone to go to, so I had nothing to lose. What was one more mediocre haircut?

David grew up in Israel and learned his trade there, so he trained on curly-haired Jewish women. He once told me that the young women in Israel go to salons at 10, 11 at night to get their hair straightened before hitting the clubs, so he'd often work late into the night, making them look and feel dangerously hot. At first, I was thrilled to finally find someone who knew how to shape my stringy, moody curls (behold, the world of layers!), and then, as we became friends, I began to feel guilty asking him to do my hair, because I looked at him more as a pal as opposed to a person who, technically, I paid to provide me a service. I so often sat in his chair wanting to say, "You don't have to do this if you don't want to. We can just catch up." But how could I possibly give up the business aspect of a relationship with the only person I've ever met who gave me a great haircut?

It's not that our relationship was so confessional, like the myth would lead you to believe. It was just fun. There was always a kiss when I walked into the salon. He was a mad flirt, so when I first started seeing him, we'd talk about sex. I think we had an appreciation for each other's outward raunchiness. And then when I met Josh and I kept those sacred stories closer to my chest, we just talked about other things. His family. Our travels. I only get my hair cut twice a year, so there were always major changes in his life to talk about during each visit. He got divorced. Then he met a beautiful Latvian woman while he was in Europe. They fell in love. She got pregnant. They got married. She moved to the States. They moved into a fabulous house. They shared a happy life together. He held onto his motorcycle. His kids were getting so big. He always asked about Josh. He always encouraged the changes in our own lives. Nothing seemed to shake him. He made even the most profound life events seem loose and manageable. There wasn't anything about him that I didn't find easygoing.

David was a wild child who was completely unapologetic about where he directed his energies. He lived.

He was the only man I was ever attracted to who had long hair.

He was so laid-back that his chilled-out voice was sometimes hard to hear over the drone of the hair dryers, but he was calmly patient and repeated himself clearly each time my deaf self asked, "What?"

He was the only straight man who could pull off wearing leather pants.

He was a terrific hairdresser, but was open about the fact that he wasn't great at coloring or updos. So when Stacy got married, she opted to wear her hair down, because she would rather have David do her hair for her wedding than wear it up.

Stacy and her husband, Mark, were closer with David than I was. A lot of the most hilarious stories I'd heard about him came from them. They'd been to a party at his house, they'd been on his boat, he was at their wedding. David was an invitation — the more, the merrier. Stacy and Mark's wedding reception was on a boat that circled lower Manhattan, and when we passed in front of the Statue of Liberty, the DJ played "The Star-Spangled Banner." David and I were standing together on the roof of the boat, and we cheesily belted out the words of the song, arms outstretched toward the harbor, cracking up as we sang. I'm sure mirrors cracked and puppies cried with the sounds that came out of our mouths, but damn we had fun. It was only later that I realized I shared that moment with an immigrant, perhaps because David made every place he landed feel like that was where he was born to be. That night, while I gave my maid-of-honor speech, I found myself continually looking up at David — who was so tall, so handsome, so noticeable — because he grinned genially through the whole thing, making me feel like I was giving the greatest speech of all time. He was a calming, comforting force.

When I went to the salon on Wednesday, I was going to have my eyebrows done for the first time. I wasn't planning to get my hair cut until next month. I walked in and the salon was pretty empty, not surprising for 2 p.m. on a Wednesday. I checked in at the desk and then asked if David was going to be in that day. I wanted to chat a little; on the way to the salon, I had thought of all the things I wondered about him that we really hadn't talked about yet, and I was going to just start asking questions. I also thought he'd be horrified about how long my hair is now, but Josh and I had a wedding to go to on Cape Cod this past weekend, so I didn't want to cut it until after the event.

They told me he died. And then they gave me the article from the Daily News. I stood in the middle of the salon and cried. And then I thought how hard it must be for the folks who work there: David was a stylist there for 16 years, he was for all intents and purposes a family member there, and they probably have to watch people hear the news and break down every single day. They have to relive what happened to him every single day. They were very kind to me, they told me what they knew, and then they gently offered to pair me with a different stylist when I'm ready, asking me specifically what I liked that David did so they could give me the name of someone with similar techniques. It's still a business, and David's clients were loyal. I think I'm going to continue going there, as hard as it will be, probably because they were like family to him.

They also told me about a fund that's been set up to help his family. His wife is 24, has three children (including a newborn) and is new to the country. David was her only means of support, and nobody is sure what she's going to do. I can't even imagine. They were just starting their life together.

Tragedy on this scale is a difficult thing to process. All I know is that my friend embraced his edge, his sexiness. He smiled all the time. He respected your space but shared himself with you however you were comfortable to do it. He loved his family. He looked forward. And he dedicated his entire professional life to making women look and feel beautiful. His was a life lived, a life well used. I looked at his empty salon chair before I left on Wednesday, a smock folded over the back, and I know this: He filled whatever he did with talent, excitement, humor and interest. That's the very best way someone can use their time on this earth.

If you are interested in helping David's family, tax-deductible donations are being accepted at the following address:

Friends of Machon Elyashiv, Inc.
31-51 Crescent St.
Long Island City, NY 11106

"Bon voyage," I said. I disappeared.

And so reads the second-to-last page of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, Breakfast of Champions.

Slaughterhouse-Five was the only book I read from beginning to end while I was in college. I had a habit of resenting being told to read books, even if I really did want to read them. I was dying to finally get to In Cold Blood, White Noise sounded like a blast, I'd always wanted to tackle Dr. Zhivago. But all I did was skim them, bullshit my essay assignments, and shelve the books so I could read them after I graduated — on my own time, when I decided to sit down and take them in.

I was such a brat.

But I read Slaughterhouse-Five in its entirety, and then I read it again after I graduated. I almost never read books twice, because there are so many I haven't gotten to once. (I was mistaken in this post. I did read it twice, though I did it several years apart. If the kid in the post had spaced out his readings several years apart, it would have meant he read it the first time when he was a zygote.) The first time around, I tried skimming it the way I did with everything else, but Vonnegut's language was magnetic, and from the time I graduated college in May 1996 until around late 1999 when I moved to my second apartment in Brooklyn, every other book I read was a Vonnegut one.

It was completely intentional. Those three-and-a-half years were a tremendous transition time for me. I lived at home for two years after graduating, then moved to New York, where my entire life changed. I rented an apartment in Bay Ridge — a lovely neighborhood located down by the Verrazano Bridge where I knew I could afford to live alone and get my bearings. And it took a while to get my bearings: Acclimating to living anywhere new is like carrying a hippopotamus on your head, and I'd up and relocated with no job, no apartment, only a handful of friends, and a lot of fear. I don't regret a single second of what I did or how I did it, but Bay Ridge is somewhat isolated from greater New York City and I craved companionship, levity, intellectual stimulation, and a bit of wildness. Kurt Vonnegut provided all of that for me.

It was Breakfast of Champions that taught me that there is no limit to what can be put on a blank page. One look (and about eight minutes of hysterical laughing) at a sketch he drew in the middle of a page of a vagina and I saw how Vonnegut stretched the format of the novel. (He was illustrating the difference between beavers of the dam-building woodland-creature variety and, uh, other beavers.) He tested the written word, a reader's comprehension for supposed normalcy, he gave us the benefit of the doubt that we'd "get it."

Around that time, I dated This Guy. I can't say I remember that particular entaglement with any kind of fondness; it was one of those ridiculous situations where we were never officially together but we had to officially break up, so there was all of the headache and none of the benefit. But there were two things about him that I always found appealing: 1) He was a fan of Neil Finn, my fantasy husband; and 2) his favorite Vonnegut book was Breakfast of Champions. When we realized we both loved that book, we had a poseur moment of "Woooooah" that I firmly believe prodded the speedy acceleration of whatever it was we were doing together (which prodded the less speedy and, therefore, less enjoyable, deceleration of whatever it was we were doing together). At 24, being a Vonnegut fan automatically gave you coolness cred. I'd never had coolness cred before. I dug it.

Also around that time, I went to one of his readings at a Barnes & Noble. He stood up and I nearly fell out of my chair. He was so tall. So tall and lanky. I'd always gotten the impression he was a more slight man, but he was a towering force. Such a metaphor — I always thought whatever he put out felt like a surprise, even if he used the same characters.

So when I turned on the TV yesterday morning and the first thing I saw was Kurt Vonnegut's face, I burst into tears. I didn't have the volume on but I didn't have to hear the filed interview to know he was gone. Reading his books taught me that while I wasn't 100 percent sure what kind of writer I was, I could be any kind of writer I chose to be, and that I could say something strong and still make people laugh. It sounds hokey, but I think it's an important lesson for any young writer (and jeebus, was I young then). I'm grateful to have gotten that lesson from him.

Two-thousand Sexy!

Last year, on January 2, I wrote this to a friend:

“I’ve never believed in New Year’s resolutions or in the idea that a new year brings forth new beginnings and opportunities to start over, but 2005 was so uniquely horrendous from start to finish that I’m looking at 2006 with gobs of hope. I resolve to take better control of the things I can, embrace positivity so I don't drive everyone away with my incessant complaining, stop swearing so much (although I will make exceptions for words like “assclown”), and actively pursue a side career in English tutoring. I’m doing well on the quest for productivity so far: I was inspired to make pancakes yesterday, and because I’m trying to be optimistic, I have convinced myself that the next time I make pancakes, I won’t burn them. I also paid my maintenance check on time, washed the dishes, shaved my legs before they got to the stage of forestation, I even flossed. It’s all good.”

Well, what I can say from that is that the next time I made pancakes, I didn’t burn them. The rest is a wash.

Ask anybody and they’ll say 2006 was one of the worst years they’d ever had. Lisa had taken to calling it Two-thousand Sucks, which inspired me to rename 2005 Two-thousand Fuck This Shit (hence, contributing to the miserable failure of my resolution not to swear so much, cuz really, truck driver). For me, 2005 and 2006 were fraught with illness and fear and upheaval and stagnation and financial woes and emotional exhaustion and separation and loss and general, all-around shiteousness for myself and the people I care about. When the ball dropped two nights ago, I celebrated both because a new year had begun and because a craptastic one was over. Since then, I’ve been feeling reflective and weary, which had already been my state of mind since Gwendolyn died.

What happened with Gwendolyn was this: She was never the same after she lost her eyesight in November. She tried as best she could to adapt, and she really did well, but she had grown depressed, and adapting was so much work for her. Her blindness, combined with her kidney and liver disease, it was all just too much to take, and she began to let go. In the last week, she had stopped cleaning herself and wasn’t eating much, and by the last two days, she wasn’t eating or drinking at all, she wasn’t peeing, she couldn’t walk, and her breath had gotten so bad that we knew her kidneys had completely shut down.

The last night, the 26th, she could no longer hold her head up. We brought her into bed with us, slept with her, and we all went to the vet first thing Wednesday morning. Sadly, the vet who took such remarkable care of her all these years, Dr. Kinnear, was in Florida for the holidays, so he wasn’t able to say goodbye to her. Honestly, without Dr. Kinnear, we wouldn’t have had so many good years with Gwendolyn. But the vet who was there was so kind. He told us she was in end stages of kidney and liver failure, all of her organs had given out, and there was nothing we could do. We had some time alone with her, they put her to sleep, and Josh and I went home to figure out where we wanted to bury her. We know we did the right thing, and were somewhat comforted in knowing that Gwendolyn was smiling when she died. She was ready.

Let me say this: In my mind, euthanasia is the most humane way to let go of somebody. It allows the sick to make decisions for their own lives, it allows those left behind to say goodbye, and it’s painless and peaceful and complete and, in its own way, cathartic. If we’d brought Gwendolyn home to die, she’d be unable to move or eat or make decisions, and then she’d be gone. On Wednesday, we think she knew we were there and she knew we loved her and we were able to thank her for taking such good care of us. I think of the pain that my grandfather was in for the months before he died and the frustration and sadness that my grandmother felt in the months before she died just this July, and it boggles the mind that the most beloved people in our lives aren’t spared that pain but our pets are.

We buried her on Saturday in Josh’s parents’ backyard, in a spot that gets sunbeams all day long. Ironically, it was a cloudy day, but just as we finished pouring the dirt over the box, one ray of sun splashed across her grave — the only sun we saw that day, anywhere. It was like she was approving the spot. (Another sign of her approval on Saturday: We buried her with several items, one of which was one of her favorite toys that chirped when she batted it around. On the way to the vet to pick her up, the toy didn’t make a sound in the box, even when the car hit some sizable potholes. After we picked her up, we put her in the box and put her in the car, and the toy chirped during the entire drive to my in-laws’. We could have sworn she was playing with it.)

I have decided to look at Gwendolyn choosing to go when she did as her knowing that, despite the horrendous past two years, Josh and I will be fine. So I approach this next year with so much hope. I’ve learned a great deal in the last year, because after 2005, I knew I didn’t want to have taken all those punches without having gleaned something from it. So 2006, no matter how difficult, was a time to strengthen myself. Among so many things, I learned that sometimes the best you can do to take care of others is to take care of yourself first, to ensure that you’re strong enough and centered enough to do things the right way no matter how difficult. I learned, through my blog, how to keep perspective and hold onto a sense of humor when it seems like few things are funny and loose. I’ve learned, through losing my grandmother and Gwendolyn, that you can’t choose when you mourn — that if you need to cry at 3:30 one afternoon just because, that you should do it — and that nobody ever truly leaves us.

And I’ve learned that laundry lists of resolutions are all well and good because they remind you of the path you want to forge, and direction is a good thing, but the best thing you can do is take one day at a time and find the beauty where it is. And I truly feel that moving forward with that in mind is what’s going to make this a grand freakin’ year.

I wish all of you a happy, healthy 2007.

Pain, illness and ... pain

The other day, while in the shower, while shaving my pits, I lost control of my razor, it flipped in the air and cut my lip on the way down to the bottom of the tub. It was one of those tiny surface cuts that bleeds profusely and stings like a fothermucker. I felt like a gigantic idiot, as I've never heard of a shaving accident involving the face when one is not actually shaving the face. My face has nothing to do with my underarms, and yet ... It's like walking into a salon for a haircut and leaving wearing a new pair of pants.

This came about at the tail end of my victorious battle against The Phlegm. The Phlegm has taken over my face twice a year since college, but I've managed to temper it in the past two years, though I don't know how. The Battle of Bunker Phlegm, I have taken on your challenge armed with vitamin C pills and Kleenex with aloe, and I reign supreme! But now Josh is all congested, so we have a lot of this conversation:

JOSH: I can't breathe!
ME: I shaved my lip!
JOSH: You're an idiot.

Beyond that, and I don't know how to say this, we had to put Gwendolyn to sleep yesterday. She deteriorated rapidly in the past two weeks and by Tuesday night was mostly unresponsive. She just had enough and all of her organs shut down. So I hide behind humor so I don't cry at work, and I'll write about it from home this weekend because I have so many thoughts. So please bear with me while I get my head together. Thanks.

Esther Miriam

Despite my intentions to keep this blog fluffy and leave the heavier stuff to my own venting grounds, I didn’t want what’s been going on during the last several weeks to go unrecognized: My beloved grandmother, Miriam Ferst, died on July 21. So I’ve been with my family in Detroit, saying goodbye to her while she was still relatively well and then mourning with them once she passed. I can say that, although she had been sick, she went on her own terms when she was ready, and I think she felt that her life was a full, rich one. We certainly did. And I can say with passionate gratitude that the support of those who surrounded my family this month has been overwhelming and deeply appreciated. It’s an incredible testament to the person my grandmother was. There’s an awful lot that I learned this past week about family and the dedication that goes with perpetuating relationships among relatives beyond one’s immediate unit; my grandmother had it down to a science, and I hope to make her proud.

I’ve had a very hard time writing about her — my sisters scooped me up and wrote our eulogy without much help from me, and they did Grandma proud — so I’m just going to say that her absence leaves a considerable void for all of us, and I’m going to miss her terribly. I can’t put into words how all of this makes me feel. I will in time, but I can’t right now.

What I’m not going to miss is people who show up to funerals and say things like this:

“You'll always have memories of your grandmother to share with your children [insert pronounced eye-roll and condescending tone here] IF YOU EVER HAVE ANY.”

There’s always one.

But beyond those who are disappointed with my unoccupied womb, there have been countless others who have been just so damn nice. Today when I came back to work, Lisa gave me a peach. It was a simple, sweet gesture (and super-yummy!), but what she didn’t know is that the peach itself meant something: Around the time Grandma was starting to get sick, she was falling a lot and cutting herself — her skin was fine like phyllo dough. She never wanted to be a burden to anybody and therefore tried to hide her injuries from us, both so we wouldn’t worry and so she could avoid the hospital. One day, her hand was bleeding profusely from a fall. When my mother asked her what happened, Grandma said she’d cut her hand on the stem of a peach, a rationale that made sense to Grandma at the time. When Lisa gave me the peach today, I noticed that it did not have a stem. It was a safe peach. No cuts, no hospitals, no pain, the perfect peach.

Another thing I learned is that you’re not supposed to say “thank you” to those who offer their condolences. This makes no sense to me. I’ve been groomed my whole life to thank people when they do something kind for me, and now when I’m at my most appreciative, I have to express it in another way? Perhaps I’m tacky, but I thought it odd. I couldn’t get used to it. I suppose there are problems worse than the automatic blurting of “thank you.” Like, for instance, Mel Gibson’s automatic blurting of the equivalent of “Yay, Nazis!”

I was grateful to return to work today. It’s a breath of normal when everything outside of work isn’t normal. I do want everyone to know that at my job today, my boss and I discussed where to add the hyphens in “sugar tits” in an item about Mel Gibson. Changing the world I am, one hyphen at a time.

Also at work today, I came across the entry “Babbage, Charles” in the dictionary. He was an English “mathematician and computer pioneer.” It also quite naturally reminded me of one Edna Babish from “Laverne & Shirley.” I mean, duh. So now I look at it as concrete proof that Edna was the true brain behind the Pizza Bowl and Cowboy Bill’s, and that Frank DeFazio was too stubborn to take heed in her savvy business advice. There’s no way that Edna would have approved of Shirley throwing knives at Laverne just to bring in business. Knife-throwing is so gauche. I mean, duh. Again.

So for now, I close with two quotes-of-the-week:

Wednesday was my sister Lauren’s 22nd birthday. We were getting ready to go out for dinner, our first night out after shiva ended, and Lauren was playing with my mom. “Thank you for giving birth to me, Mom,” she said. My mother humored her and said, “Um, you’re welcome.” Then Lauren said something like, “I hope I haven’t been a problem.” To which my mother smiled and said a hesitant, “Uh-huh.” And then Lauren said, “I hope I haven’t disappointed you.” My mom paused, and in the greatest delivery, put down her hairbrush and said, “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined you.”

And from Grandma, one of our favorite musings of hers on one of her favorite actors, Harrison Ford: “He can leave his boots under my bed anytime.”