Author Archives: Marilyn Shapiro

About Marilyn Shapiro

After thirty five years in education, I have retired and am free to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a freelance writer. Inspired by my mother, who was the family historian, I am writing down my family stories as well as publishing stories my mother wrote down throughout her life. Please feel free to comment and share.

Bubbe Butt Paste and Other Love Stories

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Soon after my daughter Julie and my son-in-law Sam told us they were expecting our first grandchild, my husband Larry and I discussed what grandparent name by which we each hoped to be called.

Larry determined quickly that he would be called Zayde, Yiddish for grandfather. It was a family tradition, he stated. His father’s father was Zayde Max, and his own father was Zayde Ernie to his seven grandchildren.

Choosing my name didn’t come as easily. My friend Lynn, whose granddaughter lived in Israel, suggested the Hebrew moniker Saftah, but I didn’t think that would work for our future grandchild, who would be living in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado at 9100 feet above sea level. The paternal grandmother, who had a four-year-old granddaughter, already had dibs on Nana. Additional members of the Grandmother Club told me about their sometimes unusual titles: MeeMaw, GG, G-Ma, CiCi, NayNay, Gemmy, and even (Graham) Cracker. Although Bubbe went well with Zayde, I dismissed it as too old fashioned. I pondered the numerous options over the next few months.

Larry and I were in Colorado the day Julie went into labor. While waiting for the Big Moment, we took a hike up to Rainbow Lake, a lovely spot a mile up the mountain near Julie and Sam’s home. On the trail, we ran into another couple who, noticing Larry’s Syracuse University hat, told us they were also from Central New York State. After chatting with them about the Orangemen’s basketball team and the amount of snow that fell the past winter, Larry and I told them about our grandchild’s imminent birth. They congratulated us, stating how much they themselves enjoyed being grandparents.

“What do they call you?” I asked the woman, whose name was— ironically—Julie.

“Grandma,” she said. “I waited a long time for grandchildren, and I am proud to go by the standard name.”

That sealed it for me. Meeting a Julie from Syracuse on a hike the day my grandchild was born was b’shert—meant to be. I would stick with the classic “Grandma.”

Larry and I were introduced to our granddaughter an hour after she was born. When I held her in my arms in the hospital room, I was in heaven. I was finally a grandma! I enjoyed every moment of that summer and the three visits over the next year.

By the time we returned to a rented condo for another Rocky Mountain summer just before her first birthday, our granddaughter was talking. We secretly hoped that, along with her rapidly expanding vocabulary— Dada, Mama, dog, bear, boo (blueberries), yesh, and dough (no)—she would learn and say our names before we went back to Florida.

Happily, over the next six weeks, we spent many hours with her, not only with her parents but also without them as exceptionally willing babysitters. As she sat in her high chair eating her meals and snacks, I determinedly coached her.

“Dog,” I said, pointing to Neva, who was waiting patiently with her tail thumping for the next dropped morsel. “Grandma!” I said, pointing to my chest. My granddaughter would smile and laugh and offer me her smashed banana or mushed piece of challah. Nothing in her babbling, however, even came close to “Grandma.”

Four days before we were to return to Florida, Larry and our granddaughter were playing on the floor with her blocks. “Zayde!” she suddenly stated emphatically. Larry’s face lit up like the Syracuse University scoreboard. She said it again—and again. From that moment, Zayde became her favorite word. She called out “Zayde!” the minute Larry walked into the room, and she yelled it out if he disappeared behind a closed door. Talk about melting a grandfather’s heart!

As happy as I was for Zayde Larry, I was a little—well—make that extremely jealous. My efforts to hear Grandma—any version— intensified. “Grandma!” I said every chance I got. As the hour of our departure got closer, I became desperate and switched tactics. “Bubbe,” I tried, deciding an old sounding name was better than no name at all.

The morning before we were to fly back to Florida, I babysat my granddaughter while Julie and Sam were at work and Larry was returning the rental car. After her morning nap, I lay my granddaughter on the dressing table to change her diaper. She looked into my eyes and clearly said, “Bubbe!” “Yes! Bubbe!” I cried. My granddaughter had spoken, and I was going to be Bubbe! I was over the moon! I immediately shared the news with Larry. Our granddaughter said the magic word again after lunch and after her afternoon nap. When Sam returned home from work that evening, this

Bubbe was bursting with joy.
“And she repeated this every time you changed her diaper?” Sam asked somewhat hesitantly.
“Every time!” I said. “She clearly said Bubbe!”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Marilyn,” Sam said. “But she wasn’t actually calling you Bubbe. It’s her word for butt paste. She has had some diaper rash this past week, and—well—she likes to hold the closed tube after we finish applying it.”

“Butt Paste!” Larry chortled. “She is calling you Butt Paste.”

The day after we returned to Florida, our Colorado family FaceTimed with us. The minute our granddaughter saw our faces on the computer screen, she yelled out, “Zayde!”

“And look who is with me!” said Larry. “It’s Bubbe Butt Paste!”

Sigh!

It took another two months to realize that our now sixteen month old granddaughter could not say the “gr” sound. “How about you call me ‘Gammy?’” I asked her. She smiled broadly and said “‘Gammy!’”

Six years and more grandchildren later, I am now a confirmed Gammy. But I will be happy to receive their smiles, their laughs, their hugs, and their unconditional love—no matter what I am called.

First published in The Jewish World, September 1, 2016

There Goes My Heart

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The first week of September in Upstate New York is a time for new clothes, sharpened pencils, and bright yellow buses that reappear on neighborhood streets like clockwork two days after Labor Day. School opening is an important time for the children. It is also a bittersweet moment for the adults who are saying good-bye to them.

My first vivid memory was my first day of school. My mother walked me up the hill to the big brick building that housed all the grades for Keeseville Central. I quietly sat at a table stringing colored beads in Mrs. Ford’s kindergarten classroom. My mother wordlessly slipped out the door. I didn’t cry.

I was supposed to be the last of my parents’ three children going off to school, but that plan failed. My sister was born three months before I entered kindergarten. Bobbie was a shining example of the little “surprise” many pre-birth-control women in their mid to late thirties experienced just when they thought diapers and formula were behind them. I am not sure if my mother pushed Bobbie in the carriage into the classroom that morning. I am sure dropping me off only to return to a house still equipped with a crib, a high chair, and a playpen was an ironic moment in my mother’s life.

When it came time to send my son Adam off to kindergarten, I had mixed feelings. I was happy for him to be starting on his next adventure, but my mind was filled with concerns. Would his teacher, who had a reputation for being strict, be kind to my son? Would he overcome his shyness, make new friends? My fears were certainly not alleviated when within the first week he didn’t come up our driveway after the school bus pulled away. My phone call to the school triggered an alert to the driver, who found Adam fast asleep in the back the bus. Somehow, he did survive his first year. Life before school became a distant memory as Julie followed Adam up the school bus steps three years later.

What was so much more difficult for me was sending Adam off to college. The summer before, I shopped for comforters and dorm sized sheets and enough shampoo and soap to last him four years. The thought of his leaving the house and our no longer having four at the dinner table caused me to tear up all summer. A week before he was to leave, I was cutting up several pounds of chicken breast when I burst into tears. “I will never have to make this much chicken again!” I sobbed out loud to an empty kitchen.

The night before we drove him to the University of Rochester, most of the purchases were still in bags with the tags still on them. Unlike me who needed to be packed and ready days in advance, Adam was happy to just stuff things into suitcases and plastic bins at the last minute.

The four of us lugged his life in Rubbermaid containers up the five flights of stairs—why did my children always get the top floors of their dorms?—and Adam quickly settled in. My last memory of my son that day was his leaning back on his chair in front of his desk, proclaiming “I am going to like it here!”

Once Larry, Julie, and I got back into the car for our trip home, I felt such deep pain that I thought someone had wrenched my heart out of my body. I cried from Rochester to Syracuse. I finally stopped when Julie commented sarcastically from her perch in the back seat, “You have another child, you know!”

Sending Julie off to Williams College three years later was a little easier—maybe because she was the second child; maybe because she was only forty-five minutes away. We dropped her off in Williamstown and got her situated in her fourth floor—of course!-dorm room. By the time we pulled into our driveway, we were giddy with excitement over our new-found freedom. We knew that both children were happy in their college environment. That knowledge, coupled with the realization that we longer had to worry about the daily angst of their high school lives—homework, car pools, dates for a dance—made the transition into our now empty nest smoother.

Still, each time our children came home, I found their inevitable departure difficult. After sending Julie off to college for her final year, I asked my mother if she ever got used to saying goodbye. “Oh, Marilyn,” she said. “It never gets easier! Every time any one of you gets into the car and drives away, I think to myself, ‘There goes my heart!’”

So, each year on the first day of school, when I see the school bus filled with children with their new clothes, their sharpened pencils their bright back packs, I will be thinking of my first day, my children’s first days, and my aching heart.

The story that started it all! Published in The Jewish World on August 15, 2013 on Page 12. After moving to Florida, I compiled a number of my stories and published this on my birthday in 2016.

Moments in History: Educators, can you make history come alive?

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In the early 1960s, The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show included segments entitled The Incredible Adventures of Mr. Peabody. With the help of a “way-back machine,” the dog genius and his adopted human son Sherman were whisked back to a moment in history, sometimes saving the day. As schools rev up to start the new year, I was thinking how much fun—and relevant—it would be if students could go back in time to a historic event, even as an observer. After I posted a request on Facebook, many shared with me of their own hypothetical adventures in time travel.

Steve Sconfienza, who has worked as both a pilot and a flight instructor, would take the way back machine to December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.There he would see first hand the moment that Orville and Wilber Wright became the first people to accomplish powered flight. For centuries, many had always believed that human beings could find a way to fly. On that historic day, the two brothers, whose interest in flight had been sparked by a rubber band driven toy helicopter their father had given them twenty-five years earlier, flew the first successful airplane. “Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft,” states Wikipedia, “the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.” Steve, a flier since he was sixteen years old, viewed the Wright Brothers’ accomplishment as “a real triumph of humanity’s reach for knowledge.”

Sherri Mackey, a woman whose deep faith has shaped her own strong voice regarding social issues, stated she would go back to the early twentieth century’s suffrage movement and be present for the certification of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920. Sherri reflects, “I can only imagine the joy for women that had fought hard for the right to vote.” Sherri continues to work to ensure that that right is not somehow diluted by folks with alternative agendas. “We must teach our daughters to embrace their equality,” she stated,”and to protect and defend their equal rights just as diligently.”

Sharon McLelland dreams of being at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore Maryland on November 1, 1938, to witness firsthand Seabiscuit’s victory over War Admiral At what was billed as the “Match of the Century, “Seabiscuit, described in Wikipedia as “undersized, knobby kneed, and given to sleeping and eating for long periods” was the underdog who became an unlikely champion and regarded as a symbol of hope in a country that was fighting its way out of the Great Depression. Sharon, who once lived near Pimlico, now happily lives near Saratoga Springs, “the queen of the tracks!”How fitting for a woman who as a child had pictures of Secretariat on her bedroom walls!

I would take Mr. Peabody’s machine to the debut of West Side Story on Broadway on September 26, 1957. Oh how I wish I were sitting third row center, when the world was introduced the this American classic! Seven years old and three hundred miles away, I listened to the cast recording my father had purchased for me the week Leonard Bernstein’s masterpiece debuted. For years, I played and replayed the 78 rpm— “Something’s Coming,” “Maria, “and the absolutely stunning duet “Tonight”—until I wore out the groves. If I could be Somewhere, it would be at the Winter Gardens Theater that opening night.

After decades of speculation as to who would finally accomplish the track and field milestone, Roger Bannister became the first person to run the sub-four minute mile at the Iffley Road Track in Oxford, England, on May 6, 1954. Larry Shapiro became interested in track and field in junior high and read numerous articles and accounts and the runner’s 1955 autobiographical account, The Four Minute Mile. As he has shared with me since we have know each other, Larry wished he had been there when Bannister crossed the finish line with a time of 3:59:4. For his efforts, Bannister was named the first-ever Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. Just recently, Larry found on YouTube a grainy black and white video of the race with Dr. Bannister himself doing the voice-over. Larry was ecstatic. Fittingly, a copy of Bannister’s book still sits on our bookshelf.

Rabbi Beverly Magidson would be transported to Jerusalem after Israel’s victory during the 1967 Six-Day War. She would like to have stood at the Kotel, when the Western Wall came under Israeli control. Late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin described it in a speech to Knesset in 1995. “Nobody staged that moment. Nobody planned it in advance. Nobody prepared it and nobody was prepared for it; it was as if Providence had directed the whole thing: the paratroopers weeping — loudly and in pain — over their comrades who had fallen along the way, the words of the Kaddish prayer heard by Western Wall’s stones after 19 years of silence, tears of mourning, shouts of joy, and the singing of ‘Hatikvah.’”At the time of the war, Rabbi Magidson was in high school and only vaguely aware of the Kotel’s significance. However, in 1969 she saw it for the first time at a quiet moment in the late evening, and it was a powerful spiritual experience.

When Woodstock, the iconic four-day rock/love fest, took place in August 1969, Barbara Peterson was a 29 year old stay at home mother with three young children. At the time, she was married to a controlling man who thought hippies were disgusting druggies, and she was a dutiful, strait-laced wife. This all changed in 1972, when Barbara divorced her husband, went to rock concerts, and became liberated.“That is when I really regretted missing that historic moment in cultural history.” said Barbara. She has thought about going back to the planned fiftieth anniversary event, but she said it wouldn’t be the same.

The Wright Brothers. Women’s right to vote. The first sub-four minute mile. West Side Story. The Western Wall. Woodstock. Historical moments that have resonated and remain important in individual lives. As the new school year begins, may our children’s teachers help students find their own iconic moments in history.

What Makes Us the Same? Trip to Shoah Museum Inspires Writer to Find Commonality

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On a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, Larry and I visited the Holocaust Memorial. A pathway strewn with bronze sculptures of unfinished lives—a violin, a teddy bear, a torn prayer book, —brought us to a curved wall. Two columns were engraved with the brief history of the events that led to Hitler’s rise and its unfathomable consequences on Europe and the world. Plaques etched with memories from survivors are placed on a wall representing barbed wire. One read “As I looked back, my mother turned her face to avoid mine and my little sister gave me a frail and knowing wave;” another, “The fear has never left me.”On the back of wall were carved the names of family members of Oregonians who were lost in the Shoah. Below the names was the following statement:

Our precious life rests not on our ability to see what makes us different, one from another, but rather on our ability to recognize what makes us the same. What ultimately defines us is the moral strength to believe in our common humanity, and to act on this belief.

These words struck me especially hard on that beautiful June afternoon. Larry and I had flown out of Florida just days after the Orlando Pulse tragedy. As I stood in front of the memorial, I was overwhelmed with grief for all those lost in the Shoah. I also thought of those innocent lives lost to another madman who could only focus on differences and destroy so many lives with another act of senseless violence. I began to reflect on my own live and question as to whether I had done enough to focus on “what makes us the same.”

As a child, I knew I was different from most of the people in our small upstate New York town. Along with one other family, we were eleven Jews in a Christian town, an overwhelming .5% of the population. There were a few anti-Semitic instances: A teenage boy yelling “Heil Hitler!” and giving me the Nazi salute as the six-year-old me played innocently on my front yard; “lost” invitations to parties by those my parents tagged as anti-Semites; whispered jokes about my Jewish nose that went unnoticed by my teachers. For the most part, however, the people Keeseville embraced us, shared their Christmas trimming with us; came over for matzoh brie around our formica covered kitchen table. We focused on what we have in common.

Although exposed to diversity on our family’s visits to New York City , as a student at University at Albany, and through—as always— countries and cultures explored through reading, my everyday encounters rarely took me far from my white, Judeo-Christian environment. This changed, however, when I took a teaching position with the Capital District Educational Opportunity Center

The EOC, a division of Hudson Valley Community College, offers tuition-free academic and workforce development opportunities to disadvantaged and educationally under-prepared New York State residents sixteen years and older. Through my interactions with staff and students, I learned to appreciate many different cultures and backgrounds and their personal struggles. A Muslim pharmacist, after being imprisoned in her native country for giving medicine to a Christian, disguised herself as a Bedouin to flee to Egypt then to Albany. A young man had escaped with his family as one of the Vietnamese boat people. Both completed our GED and College Preparation Program and then graduated from Hudson Valley Community College. One of my fellow instructors had overcome a troubled background in Schenectady’s inner city to graduate from the cosmetology program, open his own salon, and then come back to the EOC to instruct hundreds of cosmetology students in the technical and life skills to succeed in his chosen field. I may have taught my students essay writing and grammar and study skills, but the people I encountered at the EOC taught me about courage and dignity and overcoming incredible obstacles. Our differences were secondary to our common goal of creating a better life for ourselves and our families. We all believed in our common humanity and acted on those beliefs. Even when I moved out of the classroom and into an administrative position, my greatest joy was meeting with students, having them share their stories with me, and promote the EOC through its many different success stories.

In the past few weeks, our country has experienced numerous tragedies that resulted from actions by those who failed to believe in the common humanity. Orlando, Florida. St. Paul, Minnesota. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dallas,Texas. The list of cities where incidents of senseless violence continues to grow.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice,” wrote the late Elie Wiesel, “but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” My protests may not take me to the streets, but it will take me to the written word, where I hope I can make a difference.

But maybe, it must start with children. When we lived in Clifton Park, our next door neighbors were an interracial couple—he a Caucasian from Massachusetts and she a Whitney Houston look-alike from Jamaica. We shared our yards and our lives with them and their four children who had inherited their mother’s brown eyes, mocha skin, and curly hair. One day, Julie and Katie, who were the same age, were shopping for matching lockets. When we brought the jewelry up to the counter, Julie, my blue eyed, blonde haired daughter, announced to the sales clerk, “I know we look like twin sisters. We’re not. We’re just best friends.”

Best friends. Or just friends or neighbors or fellow citizens. Whatever it takes, let us all strive to recognize what makes us the same, to prevent injustice, to repair the world. Tikkun Olam. Amen.

Originally published July 22, 2016. Revised April 2025.

Photo of Oregon Holocaust Memorial courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Big Wheels and Big Hills

My Dad, The Designated Driver

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Bill Cohen, my father, in his best Errol Flynn imitation!

A Father’s Day memory: It is 1956. My father is sitting behind the steering wheel of an idling sedan in the driveway of our house in Keeseville. Laura, Jay, and I are squirming in the back seat. Dad is smoking a Kent and listening to a baseball game on the radio. He gives the horn an impatient tap to hurry along my mother, who is inside the house diapering Bobbie and pulling together last minute items for our car trip. He honks again, more loudly. “Where is that woman?” he asks. “We’re going to be late.”

For over sixty-five years, my father was our family’s self-appointed Designated Driver. Born and raised in Queens, my father learned how to drive when he was fifteen years old at his grandfather’s farm in Burlington, Vermont. In 1940, my mother took her place in the passenger seat. By 1955, four children were filling up the remaining space.

Out of financial necessity, our family usually owned “gently used” cars. No matter how pristine they were when purchased, each vehicle soon lost the ‘new-car’ feel once our huge family—with an occasional dog along for the ride—took ownership.

These were the days before cars had safety features. No one wore seat belts; babies sat on mothers’ laps; Dad’s extended right arm held us back when we were forced to a sudden stop.

As the family grew, sedans gave way to station wagons. One or two of us children happily climbed into the back, where we bounced our way to a school function or the beach or a relative’s house or even to visits to our grandparents in New York City, oblivious to any danger. Fortunately, Dad was an excellent driver. He was never involved in an accident. And his only speeding ticket was when—as he never let me forget—he was rushing home from a trip to Plattsburgh after I was car sick.

Not that he wasn’t guilty of “pedal to the metal.” In the 1960s, my father was elected coroner of Essex County, New York, a position he held for over twenty years. When he got the call from the state police that he was needed to investigate an unattended or suspicious death, Dad would rush out to his car, put the Essex County Coroner sign in his window, slap on his “Kojak” flasher on top of the roof, and drive to the scene like a bat out of hell. If the call came in the middle of the night, one of us would often ride with Dad to keep him company. I remember sitting in the passenger seat while Dad careened through the back roads of Reber or Willsboro or Port Kent, praying one of the other three coroners in the county wouldn’t have to investigate our untimely demise.

Soon after they retired in 1981, Dad and Mom began spending half the year in Florida. Each year in mid-October, they drove the 1500 miles to their condo in Lauderdale Lakes. The week before Memorial Day, they took the same route back. Although they eventually took the auto train to reduce driving time, Dad continued his reign as exclusive—and excellent—driver.

As he got into his eighties, however, his driving skills declined. His hearing was poor, his reaction times were slow, and he relied too often on cruise control so he wouldn’t have to regulate the gas pedal. Concrete car stop bumpers in parking lots saved many an eating place from becoming an impromptu drive-in restaurant. Still, Dad insisted on taking the wheel, promising to limit his trips to nearby restaurants and stores.

In 2005, while visiting Mom and Dad in Florida, Jay and his wife Leslie made plans for the four of them to go out to dinner. The usual fight ensued. “I’ll drive!” Jay offered. “Absolutely not,” Dad countered “You’re my guest. I’ll drive.”

The route to the restaurant included a section on a multi-lane expressway. Dad was in the far left lane when he suddenly crossed four lanes to get to the exit ramp. “We watched in horror from the back seat,” Jay said. “Fifteen years later, I can still remember how Leslie’s nails felt as she dug them into my arm until I bled.”

After that incident, we children insisted Dad give up the car. We arranged for Mom and Dad to move into Coburg Village, an independent living facility near Larry and me that offered, among other amenities transportation to stores and doctors’ offices. They flew up to their new home, and Laura and Jay drove Dad’s car to our house. Dad’s Toyota would stay safely in our driveway until Julie picked it up and drove it back to Colorado that summer.

For the next few months, Dad complained incessantly about how we had taken away his independence. The day Julie came home to claim the Toyota, however, Dad pulled out of his wallet the registration AND an extra car key.

“You could have walked down the driveway and driven that car anytime you wanted to!” I said.

“I know,” he said with a wink.

After that, Dad grudgingly accepted his place in the front passenger seat when either Larry or I drove. Six months before he passed away, Dad got a brand new shiny red mobility scooter. When I came over to have dinner that night in the Coburg dining room, Dad was already sitting on his new toy with a huge smile on his face. Mom and I followed him as he navigated his way down the long hallway to the open elevator door. Entering a little too fast, he gently hit the back wall. “I’m fine!” Dad said with a wink. “I got this!”

Of course he was fine! My father was finally in the driver’s seat again.

From Diaries to Blog Posts

Where Was Freud When She Needed Him??

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Some people don’t remember their dreams. Mine are so vivid that they have become at times their own reality, creating some very embarrassing moments.

When Larry and I first moved to Clifton Park in 1976, we didn’t know anyone. At the urging of Larry’s mom, a lifetime member of Hadassah, I joined the fairly new but very active Clifton Park chapter. The very first meeting I attended, I sat with a group of women who were also newcomers to the community. We became friends, and several of us became pregnant the same year. We attended Lamaze classes together, went to each other’s son’s bris, and attended La Leche League meetings together. Yes, 1978 was a bumper year for Clifton Park Hadassah babies.

When my son Adam was around eighteen months old, that core of Hadassah mothers, along with a few other friends, formed a playgroup for our children. Each week, we would take turns dropping off our child with the designated mother at ten o’clock in the morning. Seven of us would go off on our merry way, free from toddler responsibilities for two blissful hours. The assigned mother would organize activities for the day’s playgroup. During the winter months, the children played with toys, participated in an arts and crafts project, or enjoyed a story time. In the summer, the children went outside and played on the swing sets or in sandboxes. The mom-in-charge fed the children lunch—usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit juice and cookies. By twelve noon, the playgroup mom was more than ready to hand the visiting children back to their own mothers.

The group went well, and the children, for the most part, played well together. Yes, there were the expected outbursts and tantrums and fights.But this arrangement worked well for both the children and the mothers.

The eight of us became good friends, so I was saddened to hear that Fern, her husband Steve, and their son Marshall were moving to Chicago. I shared the news with my friend Diane during a phone call on a non-playgroup day.

Diane immediately questioned my information. “Are you sure?” she said. “I spoke to Fern yesterday, and she didn’t mention a thing about a move.”

“No,” I insisted. “Steve got a promotion with his company. Fern feels bad about leaving all her friends here, but she said this is an excellent opportunity for Steve. They are moving in two months.”

Diane was still doubtful. “Look, I have three-way calling on my phone. Let me get hold of Fern right now and the three of us can talk.”

I agreed and heard a few clicks and buzzes as Diane set up the conference call. We soon heard Fern’s hello.

“Hi Fern!” said Diane. “Marilyn was telling me that you are moving to Chicago!”

“I’m not moving to Chicago,” Fern immediately responded. “Where did you hear that, Marilyn?”

“We talked yesterday, I responded. “You told me all about Steve’s promotion and his transfer.”

“What promotion?” Fern said. “As far as I know, we are staying put in Clifton Park.”

It was just at that moment that the circumstances of my “conversation” with Fern fell into place. Horrified, I realized that this entire episode had taken place in a dream I had experienced the night before. Every moment of that dream came rushing back to me.

“Oh my G-d!”I exclaimed. “I am so very sorry! This whole conversation took place in my sleep!”

I was totally embarrassed. I stuttered my way through apologies to both Fern and Diane. They understood—as much as they could understand that this crazy lady couldn’t distinguish dreams from reality. And what if Fern thought it was ‘wishful thinking’?

All of the mothers in that playgroup remained friends through our children’s nursery school years that followed. Three years later, some of us mothers, who all delivered younger siblings in 1981, formed another playgroup with the same positive results.

Many of us joined the same synagogue. Even after some moved out of the area, we continued to stay in touch. We attended each other’s children’s bar and bat mitzvahs, rejoiced in their successes in high school and college, comforted each other during the sad times, and shared each other’s joy in our former toddlers’ marriages and the births of each other’s grandchildren. Obviously, Fern and her family didn’t move to Chicago. She and Steve still live in the same house that housed our sons’ playgroup over thirty-five years ago. She is currently president of Sisterhood and is stepping up to the plate to become the next president of Congregation Beth Shalom.

I still clearly remember the “conversation” I had with Fern. After that incident, I was a little more careful after waking up from a vivid dream. I have checked myself several times over the years, realizing that I was about to pull another “Fern Moment.” But I also remember our playgroup and the friendships that grew from those once-a-week get-togethers.

Never Forget

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How does one comprehend the unfathomable? How does one grasp how six million Jewish lives were snuffed out by a world gone mad? For me, it was through the lives of Anne and Elie and Sophie and Pavel and many others. Thanks to brilliant writers, I have experienced the Holocaust through literature.

Neither of my parents spoke of lost relatives as their families had emigrated from Russia by the early 1900s. My first in-depth exposure to the Shoah came from reading The Diary of a Young Girl. I was thirteen years old, the same age as Anne Frank when she started her journal. While I was worrying about acne and first crushes while living in a small, upstate town, Anne was worried about having enough food and not being caught by the Nazis while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. Her words were prominently displayed on a poster on my bedroom wall throughout high school and college: “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Her journal, found after she perished in Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, remains one of my most beloved books

As a first year high school English teacher, I was assigned to teach Police State in Literature. It was a challenging course, made even more difficult for me as I was replacing a well-loved teacher who purportedly made Brave New World fun.

Instead, the students faced a young, idealist Jewish teacher who had been told to include in the curriculum. Night, Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his life in the Nazi concentration camps The following June, two of my students handed me their yearbook to sign. They had drawn swastikas on my picture. Refusing to sign them, I sadly realized Wiesel’s shattering tale had not impacted them as it had me.

Anne and Elie showed me the Holocaust through teenage eyes. Sophie’s Choice forced me to see it through the eyes as a grieving parent. William Styron’s novel depicted the story of a young mother who was forced by a camp doctor to make a heart-wrenching decision as she entered Auschwitz: She must choose which of her two children would die immediately in the gas chamber and which one would be allowed to live, albeit as a prisoner. Hoping her blue-eyed, blond-haired son had a better chance at survival, she sacrificed her daughter. I read the book when I myself was a mother of two young children. Reading about the grief and guilt that haunted Sophie for the rest of her short, tragic life broke my heart. Shortly after finishing the book, I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “Don’t take Julie! Don’t take my daughter!”

Reviews of the subsequent movie were outstanding, and Meryl Streep won an academy award for her performance as Sophie. I myself have never seen the film. It was hard enough to read the book.

In 1994, a collection of art and poetry provided a way for me to revisit the Holocaust through the art and poetry by Jewish children who lived—and perished— in Theresienstadt concentration camp. A line in a poem by Pavel Friedman (1921-1944) provided the book’s name. “For seven weeks I’ve lived here/Penned up inside this ghetto/But I have found my people here./The dandelions call to me/And the white chestnut candles in the court,/Only I never saw another butterfly.”

The butterfly became my symbol of the Holocaust.Even today, each time I see a butterfly, I am reminded me of that young man standing behind a barbed wire fence wishing for freedom. In honor of Paval and the six million, I wear a chain on my neck with two gold charms: a Jewish star and a butterfly.

In recent years, literature helped me explore the Holocaust from the perspective of those on the other side of those camp fences: people who eked out their lives in war-torn Europe during Hitler’s reign Kristin Hannah’s novel The Nightingale followed the story of two sisters in Nazi-occupied France. The older sister Vianne desperately struggled to do whatever she could to keep herself, her daughter, and her friends—including a Jewish woman and her child—alive. The younger sister Isabelle risked her life to work for the Resistance. The description of physical and emotional deprivation experienced by those living through the four years of Nazi oppression gave me appreciation for the brutal,often deadly, conditions that were a fact of life for everyone—Jews and non-Jews— under Nazi rule.

Through a novel written by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I came to understand how experiences encountered in death camps often haunted not only the survivors but also their children. The Speed of Light, a novel by Schenectady native Elizabeth Rosner, tells the story of two adult children whose lives were shaped by their father’s time in Auschwitz. While Paula tried to bring her father joy through her globe-trotting career as an opera singer. Julian a scientist, lived as secluded, highly structured recluse. ‘My father …carried his sadness with him, under his skin, Julien states.”It was mine now.” How the siblings moved past their father’s demons and redeem themselves was a fascinating read.

I am grateful that despite all that has already been written about the Holocaust, the topic still generates literature that gives us new ways of examining one the darkest periods in civilization. “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. I will never fully understand the horrors endured by so many. But at least through the extensive amount of quality of literature available, I can at least hope we can learn ways to assure “Never again.”

The Silence of the Frogs

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On the lanai in our new home, Larry and I have a large set of wind chimes that make beautiful sounds with the slightest breeze. One morning I had a Shalom Club board meeting at my home. The patio door was open, and I commented to those gathered around the dining room table that I never get tired of hearing the music. “It’s fine during the day,” one of the board members commented. “But have any of your neighbors complained? I had to ask my neighbors to take theirs down as I was losing sleep!”

How ironic that I never gave it a thought, I who has struggled with noise most of my adult life.

It certainly wasn’t a problem when I was young. Our house in Keeseville backed up to bowling alley on the right and lumber yard to the left. Often times the lumber trucks would come in at 2 am. And the noises of the pins crashing in the bowling alley? That was constant. In addition, we lived less than 15 miles from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, and the jets flew over our house all the time. I never heard them, never thought anything about them.

When my parents purchased a cottage on Lake Champlain in 1966, we were lulled to sleep each night by the sound of crickets. Guests from the city who stayed over night complained, but to me it was a symphony. When I went to college, the dorm was always noisy. Radios blared, people stomped upstairs, and parties went on into the wee hours on the weekends. In addition, our campus was a scant few miles from the Albany airport. Planes were flying over our dorms and our classrooms all day. Did I hear any of that? Never.

With all this history of noise, you would think I would have been totally desensitized. The apartments that followed, first with a former college roommate and later in our first two years of marriage, had just the occasional sound of footsteps overhead.

In 1976, Larry and I bought our first home, a nice raised ranch on a very quiet street in Halfmoon. The first night we moved in, we opened our bedroom windows to get some fresh air and were hit with a wall of noise. As we looked out into the darkness, we saw the headlights of the cars flickering through the trees. What we hadn’t realized when we bought the house was that we were less than a half a mile from the Northway. The sound from the cars varied from a low background hum during the day to a cacophony of sounds during the rush hour. The winter cold exacerbated the volume. The worst time was in the summer when the windows were open. We could even hear trucks changing gears.

It would be wonderful if I could say that I handled this with calm and fortitude, but I fixated on the noise. Despite a lovely backyard and a big flower garden, I spent as little time outside as possible. During the day, I kept the doors and windows shut and turned up the volume on the radio or the television. At night, we turned on the window air conditioner in our bedroom so we didn’t have to open the windows. Within two years, we put the house up for sale and began to look for a quieter spot in Clifton Park.

On a warm September afternoon, our realtor showed us a lovely home on a quiet cul-de-sac two miles west of the Northway. The front lawn was plush and green, the skies were blue, and a cute squirrel lopped its way across the expansive front yard. The back yard backed up to a quiet wooded area, and the house was immaculate on the inside. We put a bid on it the next day.

A week later, I made arrangements for my mother-in-law to see the home. While we were waiting for the realtor, we saw a plane fly over our heads on its way to the Albany Airport. It was so low that we could read the Southwest insignia on its side and see the wheels descend as the pilot prepared for their descent. “My goodness,” my mother-in-law exclaimed. “You thought the Northway was bad! How in the world are you going to handle the planes?”

As soon as I was near a phone, I called Larry and burst into tears. “We are on a flight pattern!” I cried. “The plane noise is worse than the noise from the Northway.We can’t buy this house!”

Larry tried to calm me down. It was too late to go back on the contract, and I felt as if I was going from the frying pan into the fire. However, over the thirty-six years we lived there, I made peace with them. As a matter of fact, that last morning, when I said goodbye to our neighbors before we started our 1300 mile trip to our new home, I cried like a baby, wondering how in the world I could leave our lovely, quiet cul-de-sac behind.

Larry and I drove down to Florida pulled into the driveway of our new home in early June evening. The house was closed up, and the air conditioning was on full blast to counter the early summer heat and humidity. We unpacked the suitcases and boxes and wine we had brought down with us to settle in a bit before the moving van was to arrive three days later. By 10 o’clock, we were tired and ready for some down time. We poured two glasses of wine and opened up the doors to our lanai. We were hit with a wall of noise.

“What in the world is that?” Larry said. It took us a couple of minutes for us to realize that the roar was coming from the nature preserve behind our home. We had arrived at the height of mating season in Central Florida, and we were hearing tree frogs, alligators, wild boars, and goodness knows what other animals lurked in the wildlife preserve behind our house. The noise was louder than any college dorm, any expressway, any flight pattern we had ever heard. But somehow this was different. This was the noise nature made, similar to the sounds I heard on Lake Champlain years before. I was home. I started laughing, and I gave Larry a hug. “We’re home!” I said. “L’chaim!” And we clinked our glasses and toasted our new home, our new life, our new adventure.

The pond behind our home in Florida