Archived

This weekend, my Great Aunt Gertrude passed away. I was fortunate enough to see her several times a year when I was growing up, and saw her even more frequently since I moved to New York.

Gertrude was the kind of woman who you’d bring a box of cookies, yet return home from still holding that box and ladened down with several more.

She was the kind of woman who would visit the Met, look at a Picasso or a Renoir for a few seconds, and, if it didn’t strike her fancy, shrug and say, “it’s nice enough, I guess, but I don’t really care for it.”

And, mostly, she was the kind of woman who told stories. Excellent stories. Especially with her younger sister, my grandmother, the two would regale my brother and I with tales of growing up in New York City, disagreeing with and correcting each other, talking over one another to add commentary and fill in the blanks.

I realized this weekend that, with her death, many of those stories have disappeared. So, this week, in partnership with my father, I’ve stocked up on condenser mics, mixing boards, and the array of other equipment needed for professional quality audio recording.

Armed with it all, I’m setting out to record the stories of my extended family – how they met their spouses and what holidays were like in their homes when they were growing up. Funny things their children did while they were young and bits of wisdom their parents passed along.

As of yet, I don’t have a grand plan for what to do with all of those stories once they’re recorded. At the moment, I’m simply collecting them, trying to lock them down, taking comfort in that permanence achieved in the shift from ephemeral sound waves to preservable backed-up bits.

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June 1, 2006

Mamma Mia

One afternoon, when my brother and I were about 5 and 8, respectively, our mother picked us up from school in the family Volvo. She then drove down the road about five hundred feet before announcing that she wasn’t our mother, but rather an alien, who had come to kidnap us.

Obviously, a debate about this ensued, with my brother and me insisting that she was, in fact, our mother, and her insisting, no, in fact, she was an alien, but that the other aliens had just done a remarkably good job in making her look precisely like our mother. The debate raged for nearly the entire ride home, with my mother holding out just long enough for my brother and I to start developing serious doubts.

To this day, I’m not entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but if she were to do it again, I also wouldn’t be terrribly surprised. Because, while she’s smart and articulate and logical and organized and successful, my mother also jumps on beds and pushes people into swimming pools without warning.

Or, at least, without much warning; by now, my brother and I have both learned to recognize that certain gleam in her eyes which serves as the signal for both of us to run for our lives.

Apparently, my mother inherited this troublemaking streak from her own mother, who once, while measuring her for a skirt she was shortening, poked my mom in the posterior with a pin, “just to see what would happen.”

So, on this Mother’s Day, to any readers who have been following along with self-aggrandizement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, I say: go ask my mom. Much as she’d deny it, her genes clearly account for at least half of the whack-job traits I possess today.

Happy Mothers Day to moms everywhere, but especially to my own, because, frankly, she’s better than yours.

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May 14, 2006

Fraternal Love

Dear David-

As my younger brother, you should know well that coming to New York for job interviews, staying with me, then taking naps in my bed while I’m working and thereby giving me your cold, is totally grounds for an ass-kicking.

Watch your back.

Love,

josh

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November 30, 2005

Blogopera

Though my Italian is fractured, it’s just good enough to follow along this saga, as blogged by my former professor and current friend [Nefeli Misuraca] [nefeli]:

In short, finding most men so below her standards that they barely warranted ‘even one raised eyebrow’, Nefeli took matters into her own hands, found [another Italian blogger] [ombra] who seemed a suitable match, and declared the two of them engaged.

Unfortunately, she didn’t actually inform him of this fact. Perhaps inevitably so, as the two had never previously spoken, online or off.

The guy discovered as much today. [Hilarity ensues] [fidanzo].

[nefeli]: http://nefeli.ilcannocchiale.it/
[ombra]: http://ombra.ilcannocchiale.it/
[fidanzo]: http://www.ilcannocchiale.it/blogs/style/writer/dettaglio.asp?id_blog=7703&id_blogrub=26291

*Update:* Nefeli informs me that the fun is just beginning, as these blogagements are too be a weekly tradition, with some new unsuspecting mark on each pass.

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April 15, 2005

self-knowledge

An email from my good friend Lindsey:

will do my best to phone this evening. this paper-a-day thing is killing me.

oh, wait, wait. actually, it’s the lack-of-will-power-not-to-
watch-the-bachelorette-for-two-hours that’s killing me.

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January 11, 2005

tough guy

The real secret to Thai kickboxing success is possessing an unusually high pain tolerance. Beyond a certain level, both opponents’ skills are similar enough that, essentially, it comes down to a test of who can stand the pounding longer before crumpling.

Which, in short, is why I do it well. It’s not that I’m a masochist – I don’t like pain. I just don’t register it much. In large part, that’s due to the games my younger brother David and I played when growing up. Bloody knuckles until we’d both be literally bleeding. Or simply taking turns giving each other Indian burns until one of us threw in the towel.

Over the years of such needlessly rough play, I usually bested my brother – though just barely – giving me license to call him a wimp, a pansy, a sissy, and a whiny little girl on more occasions than I can count. Today, however, I officially retract all such charges. David called to say that, after two weeks of a minor sprained wrist still not healing up, he had gone in to see a doctor, who, after a handful of MRI’s, deduced that David hadn’t actually sprained his wrist after all, but shattered four different bones in his hand.

He’s bound for reconstructive surgery early next week, replete with bionic-cool insertion of metal pins. So, sorry Dave; walking around for two weeks with a shattered hand, even toughing through it to hit the winning homerun in an cancer cure benefit softball game, makes it pretty clear you’re not a wimp, a pansy, a sissy or a whiny little girl. It makes it clear you’re actually an idiot instead.

Just kidding. Still, if any readers have healing psychic power to spare, please channel them Denver-ward, as my brother gets his hand put back together. Until it is, we can’t play the game where we take turns punching each other in the shoulder as hard as we can until one of us gives up.

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October 21, 2004

meeting up

As post-graduation celebration, my parents are now en route to Ischia, Italy, the site of their engagement some thirty-three years back.

And, certainly, engagements are important – particularly now, when “how did he do it?” supercedes even “can I see the ring?” But meeting stories, I’ve always felt, are what really count.

My grandparents, for example, met at a baseball game – my grandfather, who played catcher, had forgotten his lunch. My grandmother, a cheerleader for the other team, offered to share hers. With that beginning, how could they have weathered less than their seventy years of happy marriage?

My parents, on the other hand, ended up in Ischia in a more round-about way. Both were students at New York City’s Queens College. My mother ran the college newspaper, my father the radio station. He appeared on my mother’s doorstep two hours early for a joint media meeting being held at her house. He was on his way back from Jones Beach, wearing a tank top and short cutoffs. Depending on whose version you rely upon, he may also have had some nameless girl in tow.

My father, apparently, was instantly smitten. My mother, on the other hand, was instantly convinced my father was a jackass. Still, with a bit of persistence, he managed to drag her out on a date, and then another. He was serious. She continued to see other guys. But they dated, on-again, off-again, from that point.

Towards the end of their senior year (during, I believe, an ‘off’ rather than an ‘on’), my father asked my mother if she had any post-graduation plans. Actually, she did: having never traveled abroad, she was setting off for the summer to tour Europe and Israel. My father, with absolutely no summer plans, jumped on the chance: he was intending to do exactly the same thing – perhaps they could go together?

Somewhere in the extensive pre-trip planning, off became on, and when their flight left JFK, my father’s mother famously turned to my mother’s mother to ask if she had renewed her passport. Renewed her passport? Yes, just in case their children decided to hold the marriage abroad. After all, my father had decided that they were getting engaged, and he was particularly good at getting what he wanted.

And, in fact, he did get what he wanted – though the wedding wasn’t until the following fall, they sent back news of the engagement via telegram.

My brother and I, to this day, give my mother a hard time about their story. Growing up, nearly every pet we ever owned, we bought on the trip back from ski weekends up in Bear Valley. Take her out of her environment, we knew, and she’d come back with all kinds of housemates she’d never have agreed to back at home. My father, it seems, new exactly the same trick.

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July 26, 2004

falling behind

Despite cumulative travel time for the New York to DC and DC to New York trips passing the twenty hour mark, the trek was absolutely worthwhile – I’m exceedingly proud to say I’m now the child of two doctors, one of medicine, the other of education policy.

As my brother just sent me a copy of his biz-school application essay, it seems I’m well on my way to becoming the family underachiever.

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