Saturday, December 24, 1966.

About this day . . . I can tell you nothing—nothing about my feelings,

nothing about my mood, nothing, nothing, nothing. I shall just tell you,
dryly and plainly, what happened. When I woke up . . .
—Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (December 25, 1870).

I looked out the window, and lo!

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Everything looked strange in the snow, the branches of the big trees
weighted down, front yards as crusty as birthday cakes.

—Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.

A classic winter nor’easter was making its way up the coast: the
Christmas Eve 1966 Snowstorm. The day before had been my
thirteenth birthday. Philadelphia began to experience blizzard
conditions in the early morning that worsened after nightfall. The
storm featured thundersnow, which produces heavy snowfall rates
in the range of two to four inches per hour. Peering out my iced-
up bedroom window that morning I imagined for a moment the
opening chapter of a kids’ book about a mishap in a
confectionery, leaving the baked goods deluged under high
mounds of white frosting.

These lighthearted daydreams were shattered all of a sudden

when I went downstairs, where my parents argued fiercely in the
kitchen. My father was generally in a depressed mood during the
Christmas season. His mother had died on New Year’s Day 1933
and his father had died on Christmas Day 1929. My father almost
always seemed to relive these sad events at the end of the year.
After my parents quarreled, my father retreated to my parents’
bedroom where he listened to the radio. Incidentally, my father
had an Orthodox Jewish background, while my mother was
Polish-Catholic. I did not have a Jewish education, though
“Jewishness” (as well as covert antisemitism) was a pervasive
presence in my childhood. Unlike my cousins, I did not have a
bar mitzvah, the religious initiation ceremony of a Jewish boy who
has reached the age of thirteen.

* * * *

Wednesday, July 14, 1965.

O, I see. . . . Henpecked husband. That wrong?

—James Joyce, Ulysses.

I was eleven years old and about to enter a new phase of my life.
In the fall I would start junior high school and my family was on
the verge of moving to a different neighborhood. My father had
put our house up for sale in June.

On this day, the real estate broker, Stanley Goldberg of the

Ogontz Realty Company, picked up my parents—at that moment
observing a temporary truce in their open-ended marital strife—
to go house hunting. My father had the week off from work, and
I tagged along. An odd encounter ensued. My mother opened
the conversation from the back seat, “Did you hear? Adlai
Stevenson just died.” Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson was the
Democratic nominee for President in 1952 and 1956. At his
death he was serving as United States Ambassador to the United
Nations—an international peace-keeping organization then trying
to get a handle on the intransigent East-West conflicts of the
Cold War. Stevenson was succeeded as U.N. Ambassador by
Justice Arthur Goldberg, who resigned from the Supreme Court
to accept the ambassadorial post. Stanley Goldberg politely told
my mother it was a shame that Stevenson had died, but he was
not interested in talking about Adlai Stevenson. He was
interested in finding my parents a house. Embarrassed, I thought,
“Why on earth would a realtor want to get into a conversation
about Adlai Stevenson?”

My mother’s off-centered comments continued. “Let me give you

a piece of advice,” she said. “You should get married!” I suppose
Goldberg was in his mid-thirties but still a bachelor. He
mentioned that he had just returned from vacation in Atlantic
City, and offered, “I do have fun in my life.” I was mortified by
my mother’s behavior. As an adult, I wonder, in retrospect, if my
mother’s actions were passive aggressive in nature. Perhaps she
was not really interested in moving. It had been my father’s idea
to move, after all.