My mother had other school stories, and it took just one phone call to someone who knew her in her youth to realize that every one, in all that beloved detail, was completely fabricated.

You lie under this man whom you know you will marry, though you've only been together for a few weeks, and he doesn't know your fanciful plan yet…

The baby is real; everything else is up for grabs.

Never wake a sleepwalker.

At the nursing home, we listen to my mother’s favorite Cuban tunes and she begins to dance, her memory alive again.

In 2010, a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki—who lives outside the coastal city of Ōtsuchi—built a telephone booth on his property.

The woman shows me how to lay the fire – “just this once, and then you’re on your own,” she says.

I cherish a photograph of my mother carrying her first grandchild, my daughter.

At 62, Judy Bolton-Fasman sends encouragement to her inner first-grader, whose love for Wednesday Addams and dancing badly helped her survive racist bullying.

When my sister Carol opened the door on Thursday, January 20, 2011, the morning of her 47th birthday, she was as bald as our father and grandfather.

I visit my mother twice a week in her nursing home at Hebrew Senior Living.

I read the obituaries of those who have died in the pandemic, and say many of their names softly before I recite the five paragraphs of the Kaddish—the Jewish prayer of mourning.

I tried to recreate my mother’s picadillo recipe from memory and scribbled it down for my friend Brenda.

Including my mother, we inhabit seven squares. At the beginning of each Zoom session, my mother asks who we are.