Upon arriving home from the hospital, I found that my family lived in an urban setting, several blocks north of a prestigious university. Our two bedroom apartment sat on the top floor of a three-story, massive, brown brick building, which wraps around the corner of a quiet intersection to this very day.
At the time of my birth, ‘white flight’ will not have transformed our lovely, middle-class, culturally mixed neighborhood into the lower income ghetto that it is fated to become. (As everything comes full circle, I’ll find, much to my delight, upon returning to that neighborhood, many years later, that social awareness and urban renewal will have restored a cultural mix to the street where I'd spent my childhood, once again. At this later date, I’ll learn that our spacious, two bedroom apartment will have been broken up into smaller units where university students eat, sleep, study, and party like hell.)
At the time of our family’s tragedy, my mom's mother, Grandma Ella, lived with Mom and Dad and not quite three-year old me. Grandma Ella, who’d been raised in a Russian shtetl (a small Jewish ghetto), was a good looking, robust woman who'd mixed music and dancing into her cooking and baking.
One look at my brown eyed, brunette grandma made it plain to see why she'd deemed herself the ‘gonsa baleboste’ (number one mistress of the house). Each time her animated spirit flew around the kitchen, pots, pans, and rolling pins came to life. She was a strong-willed woman, who often spoke before she thought, but I don’t believe my grandma meant to wound anyone she loved.
One look at my brown eyed, brunette grandma made it plain to see why she'd deemed herself the ‘gonsa baleboste’ (number one mistress of the house). Each time her animated spirit flew around the kitchen, pots, pans, and rolling pins came to life. She was a strong-willed woman, who often spoke before she thought, but I don’t believe my grandma meant to wound anyone she loved.
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