Years ago, when I recalled incidents from my childhood---my mother's laughing, crying, stumbling, arguing, or helping---I never imagined that one day those same memories would provoke intense sadness. Naïvely I relied on their continuity. I summoned them at will, and I enjoyed prancing through them frivolously, combing them for new details, sharing them time and again with my parents. When I would insistently recall the precocious nine-year-old who insisted on drinking coffee, my mother would laugh and remind me as she had before, that she never in fact served me coffee when I was in primary school. Rather, her seeming aquiescence to my demands produced a compromise: coffee flavored warm milk that she made for me so that I could “feel like a grown up.” When she could not remember the story herself, she might look at me with a suspicious eye, thinking I had made it all up. “Stop putting on the dog, Lavi,” she would have said.

Waves - Continued here.

This posting is to be continued here in the coming days. The photo above right was taken in an Upper West Side diner on my mother's last visit to New York in December 2005. It was our last family outing, our last trip to a restaurant, and a monumentally brave act by a devoted mother who summoned all her energy to make this exhausting trip for us, really for me, even though she would have rather stayed home, as she repeatedly said before finally agreeing to join.