I met Renee 25 years ago when we were both working librarians – I at Jane Addams High School in the Bronx, and she at New York Public Library. Renee had been trained as a book discussion leader, and as part of NYPL’s outreach to schools she came to the neighboring Lehman High School to run an after-school faculty book club. Luckily for me, I knew Paula, the Lehman HS librarian, and she invited me to join the club. Renee was a superb, very well-prepared facilitator...
When I was a child my grandmother owned a small hotel in the Catskills where my family spent idyllic summers. Sadly when I was 11 she was no longer able to run it and it was sold. But when I think about the hotel it seems only yesterday we were all there together. (See My Heart Remembers My Grandmother’s Hotel, Dec 21, 2013, Hotel Kittens – for Grandma Esther, Oct 20, 2016, Our Special Guests , June 1, 2018) My father worked in the city during the week, and...
My parents named me Dana after two relatives they never knew – my father’s grandmother Dena who perished in czarist Russia, and my mother’s uncle David who drowned as a teenager in the Rockaways. I like my name and never minded that it’s a bit uncommon, but it’s always disconcerting when people spell it wrong or mispronounce it. And because Dana can be a masculine name as well, I certainly wasn’t happy when as a high school senior I got mail from armed forces...
Since my friend Ethel died at the age of 85 early this year, I’ve been thinking about what made her such a special soul. Ethel and I met in the 1980s at Jane Addams, the south Bronx vocational high school where she taught cosmetology and I ran the school library. Like so many of us at Addams, Ethel and I loved the school, were dedicated to our students, and forged a life-long friendship. (See Mr. October, Mar 14, 2014, Magazines for the Principal , Oct 3, 2015, and...
My aunt Babs was the last of her generation in our family when she died in Florida last year at 92. Babs and my mother’s kid brother Paul met in the Rockaways and were childhood sweethearts who went on to have a long and a very happy marriage. (See Aunt Babs and Uncle Paul, May 3, 2015) My mother was an artist and when Babs and Paul got married she painted a Rockaway beach scene for them. On the back of the canvas she wrote, “Where it all began!” My cousins Deb...
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