Kith & Kin

It ’ s December 1, 2023, and my brother Eric reminded me this morning that Mom would have turned 86 today were she still with us. Home at lunch by myself, I looked at an old picture of her, taken before I was born. She is young and slim and attractive; she ’ s pinning on a corsage, and she looks very happy. I looked at the photo and thought about Mom long enough for a painful lump of ice to form in my throat, melt, and come out my eyes. She was an amazing person—one in a million isn’t enough; she was one in a billion. Here are a few scattered memories of her that flutter around in my head from time to time. Days of Joy Mom knew how to raise boys. She knew what boys were like and how to handle them. She must have come by this naturally, because she wasn’t raised with boys—only her older sister. Maybe it wasn’t that she was a natural at “raising boys”; maybe it was just that she wasn’t going to let anybody buffalo her, be it a screaming three-year-old or a disrespectful teen. B...

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yes, this is a true story, related as accurately as I can, considering that the events occurred thirty years ago. Have you ever heard the expression “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule”? According to this article , the saying “is a proverb meaning that one should have learned the lesson the first time. L. Mendel Rivers (1905–1970), a Democratic U.S. Representative from South Carolina, used the saying many times.” For some reason that aphorism comes to mind when I recall turning pages for Samuel Sanders as he accompanied the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman at the Peace Center in January of 1994. I had already been kicked by the page-turner mule once, but when the house manager asked me if I wanted to do it again when Perlman came, I bent over and said, “Yeah! Kick me again!” If you’ve read my previous blog post, “ Adventures in Page Turning, Part 1 ,” you will know that in October of 1993 I had the privilege of turning pages for Emanuel Ax,...