HEY, WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING This reminds me of a time when Herman and I went to a bar mitzvah given by our neigh- bors, David and Ann Epstein, for their son, Eddie. On the way home we were driving behind a trolley car and it was weaving on the tracks. We pulled up next to the streetcar and Herman shouted to the motorman, “Why the hell don’t you watch where you are going?” Herman may have had a drink or two at the bar mitzvah. But the incident stuck in my mind. How many times I have felt like that motorman. The streetcar is on the rails, there is nowhere it can go but straight ahead, even if it sways a little. Complaining about something you have no control over is like yelling at that motorman on a streetcar.
him what he was doing, Michael had a very rational explanation, he said he was going to kill the DECAYJA – an ugly creature in a toothpaste commercial. It took us a moment to figure out that the monster was the Decay Germ. Frank’s vocabulary sometimes astounded me. About his construction projects: “Mommy, don’t I make the most fabulous buildings?” About difficulty getting through to his Daddy on the telephone: “Mommy, I’m getting very impa- tient from all this.” About my use of an indeli- cate word: “Aren’t you embarrassed?” About my having another baby: “Mommy, I have God in my heart now, and he tells me you are going to have another baby.” Frankie is something else. Both Frankie and Michael liked to help me in the kitchen. Each boy would get his own little chair and stand on it, then lean on the counter to supervise. One day Frank saw the most minia- ture printing on the bottom of a Betty Crocker box and said to me that it was “General Mills.” He said he had seen it on TV.‘ HORSE SENSE Once, driving to the restaurant to pick up Daddy, with Frankie and Michael in the back seat, Frankie said, “Tell Daddy that he has to get a sticker for his car which says, ‘Hitch horse sense to horsepower,’ otherwise his car will fall down to the ground and it will be a shock. I don’t want my Daddy to get hurt.” Frank had been watching a television program that was about highway safety. You never know the impact of such things, or how little minds are paying atten- tion and learning all the time.
Dorothy Resting on the Couch of her first home.
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