I grew up in a Jewish household in a Jewish neighborhood visiting grandmothers and cousins and observing holidays with the typical complaints of a child with too much energy to sit still and do nothing while the parents were at temple. We were often told to quiet it down while all of the kids were doing their best (or not so best) in the temple parking lot. I can still feel the heat on my face that came up from the asphalt even on these early fall days. These were my formative years. I lived this way in Queens, New York until I was ten, almost eleven when we moved to Long Island, which was different as night was to day.

While we moved east, my cousins moved south to Florida, and while we wrote often, we were bereft [th] of each other’s company which had been constant practically since I was born. My grandmother was their aunt, and my Bubbe (great-grandmother) was their grandmother. My new neighborhood was more diverse than Bayside’s Oakland Gardens, although our immediate neighbor was Jewish and he had a mixed accent of Eastern European and the Yiddish language. We traveled into Queens to see my grandmother, and into the Bronx to visit my uncle.

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