I know it but I don't feel it. They wrote me that my mother had "passed away". Words in ink on blue paper. I had known that she was ill but I couldn't really picture her in bed. I hadn't seen her in five years. Had those years made an "old lady" of her? I could not imagine her any different than the "jumping rope grandmother" of my girls. It was only five years ago. Mother was just 80 then. She had lived in a world quite different from ours . There were no Arabs in her world. In her back yard were short rows of corn , peas and beans which she had planted and we had tended and watched grow.

There were pear and cherry trees that were our bases for the baseball we played there. The pear tree was first base and the cherry, third. Home plate was a burlap bag that mother sometimes used to put things for the garbage collector. My brothers sometimes let me play baseball with them when they needed someone to make the sides even, but I was "just a girl" and they never let me forget it, and I never could.. Except for dresses and broad wide hair ribbons for my longish hair, mother treated us all alike. Children were children to her and sex was a mere accident and played no role in her educational program. No one pitied me for being a girl. Even when my brother hit me over the head with a mallet trying to get the pears to fall down and I had run into the kitchen with tears running down my face and blood pouring from my nose, mother appeared unalarmed and told me to run upstairs to the bathroom and wash my face. Nothing seemed to faze her! You had to have nerves of iron with five boys and two girls within 15 years. I was the sixth of eight. My sister was five and a half years younger than I always a "baby" to me. It was my brothers who played important roles in my life! My memory goes back to a winter's day when I was about 6 years old sitting with my brothers on the front steps of our porch when one of them grabbed my woolen hat and pulled it off my head. I remember getting furious and screaming to my mother, "He grabbed my hat!" I was upset but my mother wasn't. "What can he do with it?" she quietly asked me. "He can't eat it. You'll get it back!" And, of course I did. We lived in a three story house, dining room, living room, kitchen and what we called the "sitting room" into which the front door opened and it was there that the telephone hung on a hook. I still remember the number. It was Windsor 6969. My brothers used to call a number, any number that they plucked out of the telephone book and would say the most fantastic things to whomever happened to answer it. "Your number came up in a lottery that was held last week!" and "there's 100 dollars waiting for you to pick up", or "Your uncle died and left you his fur coat!" or "Go to church on Sunday. There's a big surprise for you there".

We kids listened, pushed each other and laughed our heads off, "Tell them there's gold for them at the end of the rainbow. They only have to find it!" we whispered between giggles.

Then there was the time I was so terribly embarrassed in school. I suddenly noticed that I had put my skirt on inside out. I would have to take it off and turn it about. I had to go to the toilet room for that but it was too early to ask for permission to "leave the room". I wriggled in my seat hoping that no one would notice. When I thought the time ripe, I raised my hand and asked to "Leave the room". In the toilet I quickly took off my skirt, whipped it around and straightened it out. I went back to my classroom with a beating heart. What luck! No one had seen me! I had never finished sewing the petticoat figuring I could afford to lose the 50 points granted for perfect sewing, a goal I could never hope to reach. but with over 900 points I could sacrifice these fifty. My teacher didn't quite agree with my calculation and though she couldn't leave me back she could insist that I sit in the 6A until I finished it. I sat in the classroom in the morning session presumably sewing. There, I had two problems. I couldn't thread the needle. The eye of the needles being too small for the thick thread I had brought with me and I got so interested in what was going on in the classroom, that I forgot to sew altogether. I don't remember how long it was when I decided to play "hooky" from this session. I sneaked into my classroom as late as possible so that my teacher had no time to question me but neither of my teachers seemed to notice my absence. They never said a word to me. Apparently, they had forgotten and I was free!

Walking home from school one winter's day, my neighbor's boy started up with me, throwing icy snowballs at me. I got mad and chased him down the street. When I caught him, I washed his face with snow and that was the end of his presumptuous irritation.

The day finally came and I went to High School. There I felt very special. My brother was a math teacher and we often went to school together by subway and walked home afterwards, saving ten cents, enough for a malted milk shake.

There was a teacher, Miss Schoenfeld , also a math teacher whom I adored for a few years and wanted my brother to marry. However, he never showed any interest in her. He had a girl friend, Esther, with whom he went everywhere but something happened and they broke up.

It was quite some time later that I met his "new" girl friend, Helen, whom he finally married. She was the leader of the Young Judean club that I joined. I had been wanting to be included in the club, run by Blanche Luria, a brilliant girl in my Hebrew class, but she never thought of me (she was a year older than I , in a higher class) as material for her club until the Field day, to which I went hoping to win some prize but which in the end, I couldn't even participate having broken my arm in the meantime and being unable to shoot a bow and arrow. But I was finally noticed and could become a member of the club.

It was there that I squirmed while Helen managed things. I said nothing though I knew she was going with my brother but I thought she wasn't "good enough" for him, though she was slight and very pretty. I preferred Esther - whom I had never seen but had surreptitiously read her letters to Myron, when I knew he was out of the house. She had a straight backhand handwriting, much admired by this "kid sister" and imitated most unsuccessfully to this very day. Helen's handwriting was like herself Palmer -like, perfect and uninteresting, a bore!

Then there was the day I broke my arm. Ludi wouldn't let me in the house. He locked all the doors and windows oh the porch. I noticed one of the dining room windows slightly open at the top. I could open it enough to creep through if I could reach it. The window was at right angles to the wall and there was a piece of wood nailed across the right angle thus formed, a perfect step to reach the window and creep inside. I got my arm in the angle and pulled. Crack! there went my arm, broken. I danced in pain and my brother, scared by my yelling called my mother who, seeing no blood , took it easy and told me not to make a fuss. It wasn't until after a few days of constant pain that my mother took me to a doctor who set the arm properly and put it into a sling.

It's a funny thing but when I hear or read about the times of my childhood, it doesn't seem possible. The first automobiles appeared on the streets of New York when I was a child having been invented at the end of the nineteenth century. Henry Ford really started to produce cars after l911, the year I was born.