365 Memories

I have a kitchen angel. He's been with me in every apartment I've ever had, watching over culinary endeavors from his spot on the wall, giving a blessing in the form of a kiss. The angel was once a living man, a butcher in a small grocery near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 57 th Street in New York City. His name was Frank, and he was captured through the lens of my mother's camera in the 1980s. In black and white, his portly frame leans toward the viewer, lips puckered and hand lifted in the moment of having blown a kiss. He's in his stained whites, paper hat on his head, an average workday. There's a story behind the photo, and I remember it this way: My mother was taking a photography class, and for an assignment she was focusing on service industry workers on their breaks, "taking five" from the demands of their jobs. I am pretty certain Frank was part of this series, along with a shoeshine man named Neal—his chair in front of the N/R subway e...

It couldn't have been a gloomier day in New York City today, weather-wise. Lashing rain, wind whistling, dull gray sky. Outside this morning, with my umbrella not only flipping inside out but crumpling into a jagged mess of misshapen wires, I was about to recite a litany of complaints (running late, getting wet, and so forth), when I saw a group from our local fire department—Engine 16, Ladder 7, on East 29 th Street; the guys who routinely wave to my son and who welcomed his kindergarten class to the firehouse this past spring. They were in dress blues, one wearing a kilt and carrying a bagpipe, and my selfish bones to pick about the weather fell away. I was left with gratitude—not just toward the fire fighters but for the fact that I am alive to feel the rain and wind. September 11. This date sneaks up on me now, which shows the effect of eight years' time. I used to anticipate it as soon as the calendar page turned from August to September. It has become perhaps too indulge...

When I was young, someone told me of a superstition: as when going through tunnels, if you pass a cemetery, you are supposed to hold your breath. I don't remember who told this to me, but I know we were in a car. It made some sense to me at the time. People are (perhaps rightly) a bit squeamish about cemeteries. But—at least while living—I actually enjoy them. Which is not to say that I seek them out in some morbid thrill; I am not in any way obsessed with them. But if I am passing by, especially in a foreign country, I will almost always wander in. And there are some that really do merit a visit for their landscaping and the ornate sculptures of tombstones and mausoleums. The marble cutting is often exquisite. I have never visited The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, nor have I been to Woodlawn , which is in the Bronx, although I have driven past them countless times. I do, however, remember two cemeteries that made impressions upon me: one is famous, and people do make pilgrimag...

Today I was honored with a gift: a gorgeous orchid plant in luscious, fertile bloom. The colors are instantly uplifting, especially on as drab a day as today is in New York City, the sky going from black to gray to white and back to gray. In front of me, however, a complex cluster of waxy yellow petals that look as though they've been flecked first with an intense shade of purplish-pink (really, the color you first think of if I say "orchid"), and next with a touch of orange-red, right in the center of each flower. The picture to the left does not do justice to the color saturation; the blossoms are much brighter than they appear here. The orchid is an interesting plant. Its flowers seem fragile; you'd expect them to be like tissue paper. And yet not only are the leaves hearty and thick, the petals (at least on this variety) are sturdy as well. Another seeming contradiction: the blooms are, on the one hand, the epitome of refinement, of elegance . . . and yet, if you ...

Edward Steichen's 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson (cropped detail at left). I would stand in front of this photograph in the Museum of Modern Art for long periods of time. The first time I saw it, I was fifteen years old, and my parents had just moved back East from Los Angeles. We were staying in an apartment that was owned by my father's employer (Pan Am). The small one-bedroom was located in the Museum Towers building on West 53rd Street, next to MoMA . Because the museum was, essentially, my back yard, I went there a lot, often alone. I was with my mother, though, the first time I saw this print. We walked through the galleries, and I was immediately drawn to this photograph. At the time, I didn't know who Gloria Swanson was, but I fell in love with her veiled face, her hypnotic eyes. In them I saw the kind of mystery and sensuality that I longed for—that I hoped to possess one day, when I had come into my womanhood. I also admired the challenging stare, straight into ...

Darkness, thick and warm on all sides, enveloping us. Standing in a crush of bodies, shoulder to shoulder at the back of Saint Athanasios —the very same church where, a century ago, my grandmother attended Easter services. 2007 now, the pilgrimage made, a dream realized: to attend the resurrection service in the town of Filiatra ; to go to church with relatives, whom we had found only that afternoon (a story worthy of its own posting) thanks to the owner of one of the town's many kiosks. Expectation in the air, candles—this time white; those of children adorned with ribbons and trinkets—held unlit in eager hands. The lights in the sanctuary were extinguished just before midnight. Only the luminous canopy of this church's epitaphios , the bier of Christ, now reaches out its gleaming fingers to the congregation. The priest disappears behind the iconostasis . When he bursts back through, it is with joy and no longer grief: he is holding aloft a candle lit from the holy flame of Je...

I have never understood why, in English, we call today's religious event "Good Friday." It is most counterintuitive . Yes, we know how the Christian story ultimately ends; we know that Easter Sunday is around the corner, and with it new life. But today, Friday, is somber in tone. It commemorates what exactly? Humiliation, pain, death. What's so good about that, other than the fact that it had to happen in order for the rest to follow? In addition to this explanation of why the crucifixion of Christ might be called "good" (his sacrifice being for the greater good of humanity), there are other theories that are less theological or philosophical and more linguistic. I have come across references to the word "good" having archaic meanings of "holy" (giving us Holy Friday, as the day is in fact called in other languages) and also "God," such as in the word "good-bye," which is a way of saying "God be with you" upo...

Part I One of the last memories I have of my maternal grandmother's life (or was it actually the last firsthand memory?) is from a time, blurry in date, when my mother and I visited her in an apartment on the outskirts of Detroit. The memory involves a pet bird. Yiayia was in her quite-late eighties, I believe, and definitely at the end of her independent-living days. She was moved not long after this to a retirement home, where I don't believe I ever saw her. (I am actually not too upset by this, since she was a fiercely independent woman by nature, and it seems more appropriate to remember her living in her own home.) At this time, she did have in-home visits from an aide, daily I think; I am not sure if I should properly call the woman a nurse. My grandmother was at the beginning of a mental decline that ended in . . . I suppose it was some form of dementia. But for the time being, she was still quite functional, just maybe a little less sharp in hearing, memory, and conve...

My father-in-law was born on this day in 1943, in France. He lived his adult life in authoritarian civil service, as a gendarme—that Gallic cross between the police and the military. Three and a half years ago, at the age of sixty-two, he lost his life to advanced lung cancer. He was a difficult man in many ways—a stubborn man who was responsible for the rupture of my husband's childhood family, divorcing acrimoniously when my husband was at the beginning of his adolescent years. These facts, personal opinion aside, are a matter of public record, documented by the notorious French bureaucracy. What does not belong in the public record, but what rests with me as the sum impression of my own memories of the man, is the following: my father-in-law was a man who loved his children, quite deeply I think, but who did not know how to show it in any of the expected ways. I first met him in October 1998, the first time I traveled to southwest France to join my (future) husband on vacation a...

Detroit in the 1970s. My aunt (my mother's sister, the eldest child out of six in the family) had a finished basement in her house, and she would host large family parties there—often I think, although pretty soon after my birth, we left the Detroit area and so were too far away to participate in many of these celebrations. I think I attended two of the parties, but even to me, it felt like a ritual occurrence, such was the welcoming atmosphere, the instant acceptance of family. Jean and Louis (my aunt and uncle), plus their grown kids and my cousins once removed (who were closer in age to me than my first cousins), opened their home and their hearts, their basement and their kitchen to us all. I was very young, so I don't remember much, nor do I trust the memories I do have; they may just be associations. Mostly I remember two things, and the first is culinary. When we came through the front door of the house (or maybe it was a side door? I have an image of a set of two doors,...

I didn't know what " Googie " architecture was—didn't know Martin Stern Jr., the designer, and couldn't tell you the name of Matthew or Emmett Shipman (or any other of their clan)—but being a Southern California girl at one point in my life, in a certain era, I knew and loved Ships Coffee Shop. There were three of them in Los Angeles, but the one I visited with my family was the one that stood at the corner of Wilshire and, I think, Glendon, marking the edge of Westwood Village. Here is what I remember about Ships, a place that provoked (along with Polly's Pies in Santa Monica) many a comfort-food foray out into restaurant land: I loved the "back to the future" look of the place, the 1960s "space-age" sign, which called to mind a rocket shooting its neon into the (smoggy) California sky. The facade of the building carried through on this visual, with an irregular roof line that echoed the arrow motif. In the early 1980s, the exterior of ...

Valentine's Day, 1980. Red and white striped rectangular candy box. In my memory, before finding the picture posted here, the stripes covered the entire background, but otherwise, the box is as I remembered it. Old-fashioned Turtles: roasted pecans, chewy caramel, and milk chocolate--before the brand was bought by Nestle. For 29 years, every Valentine's Day, I have remembered with bittersweet sentiment a gifted box of Turtles. That almost counts as a lifetime; it counts as longer than some lives. The candies on this day in 1980 were the most extravagant Valentine's gift I had ever received, with the possible exception of tokens from my parents in previous years. I was in the fifth grade ( Brentwood Science Magnet School, in Los Angeles), and the candies were given to me by a classmate--a girl who was a friend, but a girl whose friendship brought with it certain tests for my developing moral compass. K. M. was a quiet girl, withdrawn and challenged socially in the face of c...

Because we often lived at a significant distance from Detroit, I didn't visit my maternal grandparents often, but when I did, I could count on several things for certain: I would sleep in a small, cozy room under a heavy, hand-crocheted afghan. We would eat roast chicken and potatoes, all cooked together in the same dish with olive oil and lemon. Yiayia , my grandmother, would have baked some traditional Greek treats in advance (typically these were twisted ropes of sweet dough, the cookies known as koulouria ). We would sit in the living room on green (?) silk- or satin-upholstered, plastic-covered furniture to catch up on family stories. First, though, before too much talking, Papou would peer at me through his browline glasses, which had thick black rims across only the tops of the lenses; in them, he looked like a stylish man of the 1950s, despite this being the 1970s. His eyes looked dark, enormous, emotional behind their glass shields. And this was my favorite moment: He wo...

It was January 1990 when I found out about the death of a family friend, Morgan R. He was an IT man we knew through a work connection, a "techie" before that designation meant much to the average person—before the dot-com Silicon Alley boom (or bust) became part of public discourse. Morgan was a tall, thin man, and somewhat frail. He had pale skin, brown hair, brown or hazel eyes; he wore glasses. He spoke with a Southern accent, though I don't recall where he was from. Perhaps the Carolinas . He was sweet, intelligent, and was dying from the day I met him. He was the first man I knew personally who was homosexual (until then I'd only known boys who were struggling with the issue), and he was HIV-positive when the AIDS epidemic was ripping mercilessly through that population in the 1980s. I remember Morgan walking the office in his gray suit pants, his white shirt—his employee badge and a tiny red-handled screwdriver in his breast pocket. He wanted to leave his job, I...

By which I do not mean to call her a vain woman, as the title might suggest; she was no more vain than the least of us who give average attention to hygiene. But I remember that my paternal grandmother, whose wish was to be called "Mimi" instead of anything sounding more grannyish (OK, maybe that pushes the envelope a tiny bit), had the most amazing "vanity," as used to refer to a dressing table, or a woman's personal toilet items. She was a large woman—mostly just by natural stature, big bones—and not particularly delicate. She walked with a heavy step; her movements were brusque. She was in her element in a busy kitchen but not overly careful with pots, pans, or utensils, which she'd toss into the sink from across the room. There was, however, one way in which she was the epitome of Southern grace and beauty, and that was the care she took with her appearance, her makeup, and the preservation of a youthful, glowing, Georgia-peaches-and-cream complexion. Mi...

They'd move so quickly—hooking, looping, twisting yarn with a crochet hook—your eyes couldn't keep pace with the motion of Yiayia's fingers as they transformed an unbroken strand link by cotton link into a lace doily, a place mat; wool into an afghan. Her hands were always busy, fingers flying, creating an abundance of fabric objects, some functional and others purely decorative, placed under lamps and dishes, serving to cover side tables, the backs or arms of the plastic-coated living room furniture I remember quite well (and thought of as strange). The white lace doilies, several of which I have inherited, are quite delicate, some simple and others intricate; they have in common an elegance that was generally lacking in my grandmother's difficult and often impoverished immigrant life. Because of her circumstances, her culture, her upbringing, her temperament, it should be said that she was not delicate with her children (my mother and her five siblings), and that thi...

Today, first and foremost, I want to remember my Aunt Bea, who is no longer with us—at least not in any physical sense.  I choose the word "want" deliberately, for wanting to remember and remembering do not necessarily follow each other.  I did not spend a lot of time with her; we almost always lived too far away to make that practical.  But I can sketch out some details.  First her looks: I remember her always as having dark hair, though in later years the color was lighter, warmer, a carefully selected auburn.  I remember the shape of her face as being rounded in youth, with lady-apple cheeks and a chin that formed a soft protruding orb but was also cleft the way her father's was; on her it looked delicate somehow, more like an elegant dimple.  She was not tall, and she was slim.  She wore fashionable but understated clothing.  In the photographs I have of her, time runs afoul of traditional chronology.  I have a portrait picture (above) taken in 1950, when I know she c...