The First Five Stories (1-5) From the Boarding House

1.House Rules

2.The Boarding House

3.First Friends

4.Mamere

5.JohnJoe

Heading this section is a picture of me in the backyard of the boarding house with my little red wagon. In the yard are four parked cars owned by some of the boarders. The Model T Ford was my Uncle Mike's, who owned the boarding house. I was 4 or 5 years old and my mother and I shared a room in the rear left corner of the house, as we waited for my father to be released from Seaview, a hospital on Staten Island for those recovering from tuberculosis.

1.House Rules: What I was told by my devout Catholic mother

Change your underpants every day. Don’t think bad thoughts about anyone. Don’t think dirty thoughts, either. Thoughts are equal to action. Sit still in church. Go to confession once a month. Don’t brag about yourself. Don’t shower or swim while you have your period.

Don’t have sex before you’re married. Don’t use tampons until you’ve had sex (after you’re married).

Don’t eat meat on Friday. Don’t serve fish for Sunday dinner. Don’t pick your nose. Don’t stay in the bathroom too long.

Be considerate of the boarders. Don’t touch yourself below the waist. Don’t wear white before July 4 and after Labor Day.

Don’t ask too many questions, especially of nuns and priests.

Always come straight home from school. Always be polite. Don’t believe anyone who says there’s no Santa Claus.

Don’t believe anyone who says there’s no God. Don’t work too hard or you’ll make yourself sick. Find a man who loves you more than you love him.

It’s up to women to make men happy. It’s up to women to make a happy home. It’s not good to love a man too much. Girls don’t need to go to college. Too much knowledge is bad for you. Don’t tell anyone about Daddy; it’s none of their business

2.The Boarding House Though I was an only child, I seldom felt alone. For the first 21 years of my life — from 1939 to 1960—from the day I was born until I got married, I lived in a boarding house in Jackson Heights, Queens. It was owned by my aunt and uncle, but managed by my mother. It was a good arrangement: My aunt and uncle were able to retain it as a small business operation, and it gave my mother and I a place to stay while my father was in the hospital. I was only a year old when my father was diagnosed with TB and, over the next 13 years, he often had to spend months at a time in a hospital, recuperating.

The boarders were my extended family. They were there for me in happy times—playing Monopoly and card games on Saturday afternoons—and in very difficult times—helping me with my homework when Dad died. They included a mix of married couples and single women between the ages of 25 to 60. Single men were not allowed. Some rented rooms for a year; others stayed for five or more. In return for managing the boarding house, we were entitled to our apartment, rent and utility-free. It was on the first floor, the only three room apartment in the house. It contained an eat-in kitchen, a living room and a bedroom. Mom and Dad slept in the bedroom; I slept on a cot in the kitchen. Whenever Dad had to spend time in the hospital, I slept with mom in their bed while he was away. The boarding house was originally built as a two family private dwelling, as had most of the other houses in the area. During World War II, many of them were converted into boarding houses. The first floor had our three-room apartment plus three single room and a double; the second floor had four singles and two doubles. The double room apartments each had an eat-in kitchen and a living room containing a double bed, two comfy chairs, and a large wardrobe closet; the singles each had kitchen facilities along one wall, a double bed, one comfy chair and a small built-in closet. All were furnished with bed

linens and bath towels, and rented from $7.50 to $12.50 a week, payable in advance, utilities included. There was one large bathroom on each floor that we all had to share. Each floor was approximately 1500 square feet, including the bath and hallway. The basement contained a laundry room with a washing machine with a hand wringer, two large porcelain sinks, an ironing board, and large metal racks that slid out of the wall for drying clothes indoors. The backyard had a long clothesline for outdoor drying when weather permitted. Also in the basement was a communal storage room for suitcases, trunks, and cardboard boxes of off-season clothes, and a coal bin and furnace. There also was a small kitchen that roomers were allowed to use in the summer when it was too hot to cook in their apartments. Coal was delivered through a window on the side of the house above the bin, and it was Mom’s job to heat the house by shoveling coal from the bin to the furnace five to six feet away. Morning and night, I watched her small frame heave the heavy shovels of coal into the furnace to keep the fire blazing. I vowed that one day I’d find her a place to live where she didn’t have to do such a heavy chore. The only phone in the house was in our apartment. Our number was HAvemeyer 4-7754. Boarders were allowed to make or take emergency calls only, for which they paid a dime a call. For all their other calls, they had to use the public phone booth at the end of our block. Tenants were given a set of keys—one to the entry door to the house, one for their apartment and, for those needing it, one to the storage room in the basement. Mom had duplicate keys to all the rooms, properly marked and neatly arranged on a pegboard in our living room. An extra set was kept an in a kitchen drawer in case of an emergency. In addition to maintaining the keys, Mom’s managerial duties included collecting rent, dispersing sheets and towels on a weekly basis, ordering coal for the furnace, keeping the halls, bathrooms, and basement clean, placing ads in the local paper when rooms became available, and making sure they were spanking clean for the next tenant. In addition to shoveling coal in the furnace, she had to shovel the snow, wash the windows, and oversee any major repairs. Mom seldom complained. She was grateful for the roof over our heads, went to Church regularly, thanked God for all we had, and prayed that Dad would recover from tuberculosis and be back with us for good. But she relied on daily dosages of Valium to get her through. I helped as much as I could. I bought groceries, picked up her good dress from the cleaners, held the ladder when she washed the windows, and threw salt on the driveway after she shoveled the snow. Hardest of all was being polite to the boarders when they came to pay their rent. They often sat down and chatted with Mom and me, and it was pretty boring. I learned to pretend that I was listening, while really I was thinking of something else. Just like I did in church on Sundays. Most of the boarders treated me like their own. They invited me into their rooms for Oreo cookies and milk, told me stories about their younger selves, and always asked how school was going. Only a few were annoying. If I stayed in the bathroom too long, the grumpy man who lived in the front with his wife would knock on the door until I came out. When my cat meowed too loudly, the old crank on the second floor would come down and complain. And when a friend and I played hopscotch in the driveway, the spinster, who worked at night and slept during the day, would open her window and tell us to stop making so much noise. But overall, in their varied ways, they became my surrogate aunts, uncles, and cousins. With the exception of one or two, we were a happy household. Our little apartment became the center of many Saturday night get- togethers. But I didn’t realize the magnitude of our relationships until Dad died. It was January. The doctors had decided to remove one of Dad’s lungs to speed up his recovery. They were hopeful that he’d be able to come home in a month’s time. But one night, soon after the surgery, he hemorrhaged unexpectedly and died during the night. He was 46. Mom was 40. I was 13. I couldn’t believe Dad wouldn’t be coming home. Mom couldn’t stop crying and cursing God. I didn’t know what to do. But the boarders looked after us, even the old crank and the spinster. They attended Dad’s wake and burial; they took turns staying with us; helped Mom collect the rent; did local errands and brought us food. They accompanied Mom to church for a memorial mass in Dad’s honor and brought her back home. One woman had her grown son come to help shovel the coal and snow. When Mom’s two sisters and brother came from Waltham, Massachusetts for the funeral, they marveled at the ways the boarders were there for us. “You have your own family right here,” they exclaimed. “They’re taking care of you, just like we would.” When they left to go back home, we were sad to see them go; we were still reeling from the suddenness of Dad’s death. But we knew that the boarders would keep us going. However deeply we felt distraught, we did not feel alone.

3.First Friends Growing up in the 40’s and 50’s, my world revolved in and around Jackson Heights, a small, quiet neighborhood in Queens. My side of the block on 73rd Street had six two-story houses. The first three were handsome brick, one-family dwellings. The last three were stucco boarding houses with one and two room apartments that were rented by the week; mine was the one in the middle. Tommy Sasso, my best friend, lived in the house on the left. His grandmother owned the house and rented the basement to her married daughter and son-in-law who had three kids. Tommy was the oldest and my age. Exactly when we started playing together, I can’t recall, but we were inseparable by the time we were four. Just about then, Eddie Tinari and his family moved into one of the brick houses down the street. Eddie was four, too, and we became a precocious threesome. They were my boyfriends; I was their girlfriend. “What do you and your boyfriends want for lunch today?” Mom would ask me. “Where’s your girlfriend,” Tommy’s mother would ask him, if I hadn’t come over to play that day. Back then, there were no nursery or pre-K schools in the neighborhood, nor could our parents afford babysitters, so we spent our days amusing ourselves, even on weekends. Tommy and I loved being at Eddie’s house the most: it had a long driveway where we rode our little tricycles up and down the length of it. Every so often, Mrs. Tinari would look out her kitchen window overlooking the driveway to check that we were okay. Eddie had lots of toys: a fire engine, a steam shovel, trucks and trains, and wooden blocks. They were much more fun to play with than my dolls at home. Tommy’s house didn’t have as many toys, but we could play hide-and-go seek in the basement, hiding behind the furnace, the water heater, or in the corner of the coal bin. We always made Tommy’s younger twin sisters be “it,” but they didn’t know how to count to ten and came looking for us before we had enough time to hide. If the twins were napping, Mrs. Sasso would bring us outside to take turns hosing the vegetable garden or picking ripe, juicy fruit from the fig tree in the backyard. The three room apartment in my house was too small for us to play in, so we’d go hang out in the basement while my mother did the laundry. We played with my dolls—Tommy and Eddie took turns being the daddies, uncles, or doctors of my dolls; I, as the mommy, told them what to do—diaper the baby, dress the baby, take the baby’s temperature—and showed them how to do it. When we got tired of the care-taking games, we’d take out my picture puzzles. When it came time to help Mom hang out the wash in the backyard, we’d hand my mother the clothespins and then run between the sheets and towels, inhaling their wonderfully fresh smells as they dried on the line. We tried not to touch them with our hands and leave telltale marks. That would cause the roomers to complain, and Mom would have to wash them all over again. When we were five, it was time to start kindergarten at P.S. 69, five blocks away. As my mother remembered it—she loved to tell this story—I was the only child that ran up to the teacher and left my mother standing at the school gate. All the other kids, including Tommy and Eddie, were crying and clinging to their mother, not wanting to go into the big, red brick building without them. Our teacher’s name was Mrs. Harkins. She was short and chubby with a big smile. She made each day at school a time of fun and discovery. At least that’s howI remember it. I loved sitting around the table with my classmates and coloring the precut figures Mrs. Harkins gave us—stars, trees, flowers, boats and animals. I still have the Christmas tree ornament that I made in class: a small mitten madeof red crepe paper, with silver stars glued on it. The mitten is now over 75 years old and wrinkled, and most of the stars have dropped off, but it’s still together enough for me to hang on the tree every year. At home, my mother worried a lot—about the health of my father (he was hospitalized for tuberculosis); about not having enough money (she cleaned other people’s houses in the morning and managed the boarding house in the afternoon); and being on welfare (the social worker visited us regularly to make sure we were complying with the welfare rules). I was seven when the social worker said we had to return a small television set an aunt and uncle had given to us for Christmas. We were told we weren’t allowed to have any luxury items, even as gifts, only things like clothing or food and other necessities. Mom cried as the social worker said that he was sorry but “rules were rules” and left the house. She took me in her arms and apologized over and over again. I was too angry to cry and promised myself then that one day I’d buy Mom a TV set that no one could take away from us. But, for now, we’d have to go watch Milton Berle and Alan Young on my uncle’s TV next door. When I was ready to enter First Grade, the social worker pressed my mother to send me to St. Joan of Arc School, where, I overheard them say, I’d “get the right education.” I wanted to stay with Tommy and Eddie at P.S. 69 but Mom feared that if I did, the social worker might be harder on us; maybe our welfare payments would be decreased, or even discontinued. I couldn’t stand seeing my mother worry so, and felt guilty to be the cause of it, so I went. St. Joan of Arc School was on 83rd Street, ten blocks away, twice the distance from our house as P.S. 69. Mom would walk me there in the morning and pick me up in the afternoon. It took a heavy toll on her. At St. Joan’s, the nuns scared me. I watched them when Mom took me with her every Sunday to Mass. The nuns seemed to glide as they walked, with forced smiles on their faces. Why did they wear those long, black garments? Why did they

always keep their hands in their pockets? Why did the they cover their heads. Didn’t they have any hair? What did they have to hide? On the first day of school at St. Joan’s, the first thing I noticed was that the girls and boys were separated in different rooms. The second was that as soon as we entered the classroom, Sister Michael Marie closed the door, walked to the front of the room, held up a wooden ruler, and placed it on her desk in clear view.“I hope I don’t have to use it,” she said. I had never been hit in my life, at home or at school, and the first time I saw one of my classmates get whacked on the wrist for speaking out of turn, I gagged and didn’t say a word the rest of the afternoon. It was my second week at school and on the way home, I begged Mom to bring me back to P.S. 69. “No,” she said. “I promised you’d go to St. Joan’s. Be a good girl and you’ll be fine.” Later that same week, another classmate got the ruler. I felt sick to my stomach and that day in the lunchroom, I sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria, crying quietly nibbling on my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I didn’t think anyone noticed. The next day, Friday, still crying, I was putting my mostly-uneaten cream cheese and jelly sandwich back in my lunch box. I looked up and saw my mother enter the room.As she sat down beside me, I could see she’d been crying, too. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. “They called me this morning. What’s the matter?” I hate it here,” I told her. Now I was crying hard. “The nuns hit you and I miss my friends.” “You really want to go back to P.S. 69?” she asked; “You’re very sure?” I nodded, "Yes,I’m very, very sure.”“OK, then" she said. 'Let’s go.” I dropped my sandwich and threw my arms around her. I hid my face in the shoulder of her coat, afraid that if I looked up, she might change her mind. Hand in hand, we went to the principal’s office. I’m sure Sister Superior must have tried to persuade Mom to keep me at St. Joan’s, but I don’t remember any of what she or my mother said. I just remember feeling happy, and thinking my mom was the best mom in the world. Early Monday morning, Mom brought me to P.S. 69 and told the principal that she wanted to register me for 1st Grade. He smiled, shook my hand and escorted us to the classroom. The door was open. I could see the teacher, a tall older woman with a mane of curly white hair, writing on the blackboard. When she saw us, she came to the door. “Welcome back, Lorraine. I’m Mrs. Zerecko. We’re so glad to see you.” But not as glad as I was to see her! I loved her friendly face and welcoming voice. She took my hand and led me to my seat.I could see Tommy and Eddie waving to me from their seats. I don’t remember Mom leaving classroom. I sailed through 1st grade. It broke my heart to see Tommy move to Brooklyn and Eddie move to the suburbs at the end of the year, but I managed to make new friends. Looking back, I still find it hard to believe that Mom took me back to public school. She must have had a lot of explaining to do to the social worker, but she never asked me to go to St. Joan’s again. I didn’t realize at the time that Mom was struggling with some health issues. A few months after I was back at P.S. 69, Mom came home from the doctor’s and said that he told her she needed a good rest. Sounding sad and weary, that’s all she told me. The next day, Dad came home from the hospital on an overnight leave and explained that Mom was sick and would have to go away for a while; he didn’t know for how long. The doctor had found her a nice rest home in upstate New York. Before Dad went back to the hospital, he arranged for me to stay with my uncle (his brother), aunt and cousins who lived in the boarding house next door. Eight months later, Mom finally came home. No one ever talked about why she’d been so sick and, during her time away, I came to my own conclusion that my returning to public school must have been the cause of her breakdown. It took many years and asking many questions for me to believe otherwise.

4.Mamere Everyone—family, friends and neighbors—loved my mother, so much so that they all called her Mamere, which is French for “my mother.” It’s what I had called my grandmother, and what my mother asked my kids to call her. Many never even knew that my mother's name was Tilda. Ancestors on both sides of my family were French Canadian and lived in Nova Scotia. The youngest of nine children, my mother came to the U.S. from Nova Scotia when she was 18, as many of her siblings had done before her. She crossed the Canadian border illegally with her older sister and brother-in-law. They hid her under a blanket in the back seat of their car and drove to Waltham, Massachusetts, where some of their siblings had already settled. It was there that she met and married my father, also French Canadian, who had come to the U.S. and became an American citizen a few years earlier. Unfortunately, they married at a time when marriage to an American citizen did not confer automatic citizenship on the spouse; the legislation wasn’t retroactive and didn’t include my mother. Mom froze every time she saw a cop on the street, convinced that they would arrest her and send her back to Canada. On the infrequent occasions when a policeman came to the house and rang the bell—usually to ask for a donation to the local children’s athletic program—she’d ask me to answer it and then hide in the closet or the coal bin in the basement, fearful that they were coming to deport her. I felt afraid, too. Mamere had a sweetness and innocence that enchanted everyone, and her adorable French Canadian accent only added to her allure. I instinctively wanted to protect her from the real world, and to keep her narrow and innocent vision of it intact. She and her sister Alice had a double wedding. Their wedding picture showed two handsome couples in impeccable clothes: the women were attired in long, slinky silk white dresses; instead of veils, they wore custom-made hats; the men wore well-tailored black suits and ties. Certainly none of them suspected that both men would die in their forties—my father from tuberculosis and my uncle from stomach cancer—and leave their wives as widows at such young ages. Having stopped school after 7th grade, mom’s opportunities for work were minimal. I was not quite a year old when Dad was sent to the hospital; fortunately, we were living in a boarding house owned by Dad’s sister and brother-in-law. We lived in a large, square room in the rear of the boarding house. Along one wall was the kitchen. My crib was in one corner; Mom’s double bed in the other. There was a kitchen table in the middle of the room. In lieu of a couch, we sat on the kitchen chairs. For my first five years, Mom supported us by cleaning other people’s boarding houses in the neighborhood. As a toddler, I went with her every morning, following her up and down the narrow hallways as she vacuumed the rugs. She kept telling me not to run and not to yell; she didn’t want to annoy the boarders. But I wanted them to know I was there. I wanted them to invite me into their rooms and give me a piece of gum or candy. Sometimes they’d have a few toys I could play with while my mother finished her work. Then my aunt and uncle moved to Massachusetts, and they asked Mom to manage the boarding house. They paid her a weekly wage and gave us room-and- board. Mom was pleased; she was able to stop cleaning other people’s houses. As an only child, I was the apple of Mom’s eye. It is not an exaggeration to say I was her whole world: what she woke up for in the morning and went to bed for at night. This was all well and good when I was very young, but it became suffocating and burdensome as I got older. Of course, my friends didn’t see this part of her. All they saw was her sweet, obliging nature. She was easy to talk to and a good listener for people of all ages, but Mom did especially well with young children, the younger the better. Problem was when the kids got older and wanted to do things their way, she didn’t understand. In her view, men were the wage earners and women the stay-at-homes. She didn’t understand why girls would want to go to college. It was a waste of time and money. Why would a woman want to work when she could stay at home and take care of the kids? Mom tried hard to keep me as childlike as possible. One day when I came home from school for lunch—probably in the 5th grade (I was old enough to walk to and from school on my own)—I told her that some kids had laughed at me for believing in Santa Claus. Was it true? I asked. Was Santa Claus a myth? She told me the kids had lied and sent me back to tell them that Santa Claus was very real. That was the last time I took my mother at her word. When I confronted her that night, she admitted that she wanted me to believe in Santa as long as possible. She was well meaning and intended me no embarrassment, but Mom needed to believe in Santa more than I did—to protect her innocence as well as mine. For a long while, I resented my mother for being selfish and thinking only of herself. Now I know that it was a matter of her own self-preservation. She was born at a time when men were commonly believed to be superior to women. On the other hand, she had a sophisticated way of handling some parts of my growing up. If I ever wanted to smoke, she said to do it in front of her, not behind her back. If I did something wrong, tell her before she heard of it from someone else. She might not like it, but she wouldn’t get angry. Mom refused to apply for citizenship until I was 18 (that was in 1957) and able to support myself. Dad had died when I was 13, and she was afraid if she tried to become a citizen before I came of age, there was a chance she’d be deported and I’d be left behind in New York. So at 18, I helped make it happen. How she managed to study for the citizenship test, I don’t know. She kept insisting it was impossible for her to keep all the facts in her head. After all, she hadn’t gone beyond the 7th grade.

The morning of the swearing-in ceremony, Mom took special pains to look perfect. She checked her hair, her make-up and her dark blue suit a hundred times. She kept asking me if the seams on her stockings were straight. Did her purse match her shoes? At City Hall, all five feet of her stood tall and proud as she raised her right hand in front of the judge. I stood at her side, holding her left hand. Both of us were trembling. But when the time came, she answered all the questions and passed. We went to lunch and each had glass of white wine—very well earned, we agreed.

5.JohnJoe They say I look just like my mother. Same eyes, nose, mouth and hands. Same hair, height and figure. But they also tell me I’m not prone to her acute feelings of anxiety and her often-expressed philosophy that “’the glass is always half empty.” That’s because they never met my easy-going dad. His name was John Joseph, but his family and friends called him JohnJoe, pronounced as one word, with the emphasis on John. I never once heard anyone call him John or—god forbid—Johnny. That’s the way it was for us French Canadians. Once you were called by a certain name, it stuck. Speaking of names, Mom wanted to call me Rosemary when I was born. Dad insisted on Lorraine, for which I am very grateful. Just as mysterious is the history of our family name—Aucoin (oh-qua’). In French, it means “on the corner,” and that could mean that one of my ancestors was a prostitute. But even more interesting, it was not only my father’s last name, it was my mother’s maiden name, too. Whenever I had to fill out a document that asked for my mother’s maiden name, I’d be asked to state her correct maiden name which always necessitated explaining the unusual circumstances. As hard as that was to believe, harder to accept was that the same went for her mother and grandmother. Three generations of women married men with the same last name as theirs. And not a drop of incest in the bunch. Or so I was told. My dad died young, 46 years old, from tuberculosis. I was 13. What I recall most was his high spirits, ready-to-go sense of humor, and his interest in everything. He’d had only one year of college but that was at least one year more than anyone else in the family; Mom had only gotten through 7th grade. Both had grown up in Nova Scotia, the children of fishermen and farmers. Some of my aunts and uncles on both sides may have gone through 8th, but after that they all had to leave school help out on their fishing boats or farms. So Dad was looked upon as the educated one in the family. Everyone loved my dad. He was always ready to sit down and talk, loved a good joke as well as a good beer and, before there was television, loved listening to the radio. His favorite chair was positioned directly next to the radio so he could reach over to switch stations without getting up. But whenever he heard a knock on the door, he’d yell, “Come on in,” switch off the radio, and was all ears. He also had a temper, though my recollection is that his anger never lasted for very long. I got Dad’s curiosity, sense of humor and cheery spirit. He was a “glass half full” kind of guy and that’s where I got my optimistic attitude towards life. But, as Mom often reminded me, I also got his temper. Looking at our family pictures, I also have his curly hair and wide smile. I looked at a lot of pictures of Dad because he was in and out of TB hospitals so often, I often forgot what he looked like.

My favorite times with my Dad were spent at the corner bar. It was called Dumbarton Oaks, but I can’t remember the origin of the name. I was five when we started going—on Saturdays at 5:00. Mom would be cooking dinner and wanted us out of the house. She didn’t want Dad going in to the kitchen to taste whatever she was making, and she was tired of my asking when dinner would be ready. So Dad and I went for a drink. Dad would lift me up on a stool at the end of the bar, near the shuffleboard. He’d order a draft beer and a coke. The pretzels were on the bar, ready for us to munch on while we waited for our drinks. When the drinks came, we’d click our glasses and take a taste. After that, I kept in time with Dad. As he sipped his beer, I sipped my coke. Next best was playing shuffleboard with Dad and anyone else at the bar who wanted to play. I was always the only child there, and even then I was amazed at how the other adults—only men, always—included and allowed me to be part of their fun. Maybe they knew that my dad, recovering from tuberculosis, was home from the hospital for a while and did their best to make the most of the time we had together. As I got older, Dad would drop me off at the Earle Movie Theater, two doors down from Dumbarton Oaks. He would stand on line with me, buy me a ticket for 25 cents, give me dime to buy two Clark Bars from the candy machine, and escort me into the theater. There, a white haired matron in a white uniform and shoes, took me under her wing and made sure I was correctly seated in the children’s section, along with all the other kids that day. She used her flashlight to lead me down the dark aisle and get me a seat. Most important, she made sure we kids were safe and behaved ourselves. When the movie was over, around 4:30 or 5:00, Dad would meet me in front of the movie theater and we’d go to the bar for our drinks before dinner. He’d always make sure we were home on time for our traditional Saturday night dinner—baked beans, ham and homemade bread. On my birthday, he’d take me to the LAFF movie theater on West 42nd street between 7th and 8th Avenues. It only featured movies that made you laugh. Dad introduced me to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and many more. Over a bag of popcorn, we sat side by side laughing till the tears rolled down our cheeks. But, most best, every night at home, he’d lift me onto his lap and we’d listen to his favorite stories on the radio. They ranged from detective stories to classical music programs to comedy hours. It didn’t matter what they were. I loved sharing those moments. It was a way of being close to him.

When I was 13, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Sophie offered to take me to Nova Scotia as my elementary school graduation present. I had never been to the birthplace of my parents nor had I ever met my maternal grandmother, and a myriad of aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides. Mom wasn’t happy about my going. She would have liked to come along, but she was an illegal immigrant and didn’t have a visa. If Mom left the country, she would not be allowed back in. Then, too, she didn’t want me to go and leave her alone. Dad convinced her to let me go. I could have hugged and kissed him, but he was hospitalized and I was still too young to visit him. The hospital released Dad for just one day to attend my 8th grade graduation. I was valedictorian of my class and, as I stood at the lectern, I spotted dad, sitting next to my mother in the back of the auditorium. He was smiling. After the ceremony we went to lunch and then he returned to the hospital. As he hugged me goodbye, he said that the doctors were hoping that he could come home in the fall. That summer I went to Nova Scotia with my aunt and uncle. It was a wonderful trip and I returned home looking forward to entering high school. My spirits were high. Mom’s, too: The doctors were still optimistic about Dad‘s recovery by the holidays. Her visits to the hospital were buoyed by their conversations about coming home. But right before Thanksgiving, the phone rang at 6:00 in the morning. Dad had hemorrhaged in the middle of the night, unexpectedly, and died. It was a huge shock. Mom started to cry and handed me the phone. I will never forget that awful moment. But I will also never forget the last time I saw my Dad—on graduation day— smiling at me from the back of the auditorium. Even at that distance, I could see that he was happy, it was a very special moment and its memory carried me through my tears. Not long after Dad’s funeral, I felt a strong sense of relief. As much as I had loved him, I had gotten tired of explaining his illness to my friends. It had embarrassed me. Nobody else’s father had TB. Only mine. I thought it must have had something to do with our being poor. Rich people never seemed to get TB, or if they did, they could afford doctors who could cure it. Though it made me feel terribly guilty, it was easier for me to talk about Dad’s death than his illness. It took years for me to admit and accept it.