Three Generations, 1972

Deb, Leah, Eva, and Abby, Brooklyn 1972

I've always loved this portrait, my Grandma Eva flanked by me and mom on the left and Aunt Abby on the right.

Mom was only 27 years old here, and entering her very stylish Grad Student phase, which was to last a number of years, as she traveled back and forth from Brooklyn to Columbia University on the subway, and juggled books, research, young daughters, and a household until the completion of her doctorate. I admire her so much for what I now recognize to be a heady success--but I admire her sartorial splendor of this era even more! I remember staring at her as she set off for class or dissertation meetings, always beautifully dressed. I particularly loved one look; I called it her brown outfit--a tailored chocolate brown wool suit that she paired with silk blouse, plentiful gold jewelry, and a wonderful floppy brown felt hat. She looked amazing but never minded a squeezy sticky hug from her young girls; she was warm that way. She even let us wear that hat around the house, and her brass-buckled heels as well! Oh what a mother.

If you notice her bell-sleeved minidress and stocking-tops in this photo, well, you've got a good eye for fashion. Those thick real gold hoops in her ears are still with us, and turn up from time to time on someone's ears, a tangible memory of my childish admiration.

Also still with us is that dark green and blue sweater my aunt wears so fetchingly. The gamine haircut Abby sported from high school until the time of her death, in Tel Aviv, in 2001--so soft and brown right til the end. I loved to sit in her lap and wind the short curls, so different from mom's long thick dark waves, around my stubby little fingers...

I was two years old here, and so obviously fussing it's almost palpable. I suppose that was my regular state. I was often caught between cracking a ribald joke, and fussing. Much as I am now.

If you look, you can see that we're arrayed before my grandparents' formal fireplace in their living room. My grandfather certainly arranged it that way, and framed the photo in perfect symmetricality. Symmetrical furniture placement was the style of my grandparents' time, and in these modern days, when feigned insouciance in home decor is the way, I've continued to cling, almost despite myself, to these formal conventions of a bygone era. Note the matched end tables, china lamps, and doilies (crocheted and tatted by Grandma). There was something so comforting in the regularity of these pairings, and I've recapitulated this in my own living room, almost without thought, as an animal will act on inherited instinct alone.

Peeking out from behind Abby is a bunch of dried hydrangea, cut in the pink flush of their prime from Grandma's bushes outside her Adirondack summer house, and transported by car, carefully, all the way back to Brooklyn. It was an end-of-summer ritual as regular as the phases of the moon, and to this day those bushes survive and we cut branches every Autumn, carry them to Brooklyn, and tuck them in vases to bolster us with summer memories, much as people will can and preserve foodstuffs to line their pantry shelves against oncoming winter.

Three generations. Only half of us, pictured here, remain. A generation passed, but the colors are still so vibrant, the habits so strong, the wool, though moth-eaten, so soft, and the gold still glinting, comfortably...