Relatives
Last week because of the internet my mother's second cousin found me. Once we'd met, in 1959 when I was a child and she was at NYU. We remembered one another. Happily familiar she told me in a sentence or two What Happened.
I know very little about my own history. Family stories are largely myths and mine was told mostly by my mother's mother, Anna Sorocer from Baku Rumania. She married Shmuel Markovitz. (my second cousin's relative) Shmuel became Sam Marcks from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Really. They married when she was 16. She said they didn't have too much in common, and then, they had 4 kids in Grand Forks. Shmuel died young. My grandmother lived with us in Ansonia Connecticut until I was 6. One day my Uncle Alex picked her up in a big gold cadillac. She was packed. They moved to Los Angeles and she lived next door to Rosemary Clooney's mother. She had girlfriends and ate a different ice cream flavors. Once a week she wrote us letters. They always contained a weather report. It was usually sunny in LA. I saved her letters for years. She'd end each letter the very same way: Take care of one another because life (she told us over and over again) because life is a dream.