One of the shocks of my adult life is realizing how much I'm like her. My hysterical Jewish woman energy comes from her. My curiosity for people. My sociability. My expectations and ambitions. I have her crazy ear for language, a certain rhythm and love of repetition of words. An intonation.

She likes to say that she's never been depressed, ever, in her whole life. Not her. She loves to shop and compare prices everywhere. It can be anything. Coffee. Sheets. Turkeys. Suitcases. Plastic cups. Not only does she shop for herself, my father, Janie and her family, Sandy, me; she looks for things for a string of cousins and friends. When anyone needs anything, they tell Elaine, in case she comes across it in her travels. Recently, she told me she had just bought twelve pink and blue gingham bathrobes, for $5.95 each. Twelve? That was just too much. 'You know how I adore gingham, Elsa,' she told me, 'and everyone can use another robe.'

She has certain axioms that will probably reverberate in my unconscious after I'm a 'meek old lady' myself: Put your snow tires on your car by November 11 (her birthday]. Never wear black shoes after May 30. Never wear white shoes after Labor Day. Never go to anyone's house without bringing something, Never put a carton of milk on the table; use a pitcher. Even though my father retired as fruit buyer for Stop & Shop in 1973, my mother still calls and tells me to come right out to Newton for lettuce, sweet corn and cucumbers and carrots. She has a whole crate of Granny Smith apples a friend dropped by, they cost thirty-five cents apiece at the store; I could save a fortune. Before she and my father went to Florida in January 1974, my mother went through her closet to pick out all the winter clothes she wouldn't be wearing that would fit me. Then she emptied her refrigerator and came to Cambridge with her fruits and vegetables and double-knit slacks.

My father had been a professional football player with the Buffalo Bisons for six months in 1929; he played center. But it was the Depression and he had to come home to support his mother. In 1951 he was voted into the Boston University athletic Hall of Fame, although he was very modest, didn't campaign for the honor, or do anything to promote himself. I was always aware that he had been a star and grew up sure he was one of the most important men in Boston. I thought he knew everybody. Anything I wanted, he could get wholesale, if not free. He seemed to know everything. Absolutely anything I mentioned, he could tell me all about. He isn't really all that tall, but he seemed huge to me, a giant. I loved to crawl all over him. When a car got stuck, it seemed to me he just got under it and picked it up. Incredibly stubborn to this day, if not more now than ever, one of the family myths he has had to live with is that when he was six, his mother sent him for bagels. He didn't want to go. 'I'll go,' he said, 'but I'll throw them down the sewer.'

He comes from a flamboyant family -- the Kotzens. I'm named for his grandmother, Ada Kotzen [we have the same Hebrew name], who came to this country from Russia in 1903, and had nine children, my father's mother, Anna, being the oldest. They were all raucous, intensely Jewish (though not at all scholarly), athletic, ready to do anything. The men worked in the fruit market, right on the street. Sadie Kotzen learned how to swim in the twenties, unheard of for a woman. Gertrude Kotzen, the youngest, was the family intellectual. Everyone was in awe of her, if not a little put out. I can remember my aunts and uncles saying, 'Gertie believes in psychiatry.' Eight of the original siblings lived into their seventies; three are still going strong. Only Ida died early, at forty. I like to flatter myself that I'm 'one of those Kotzens.'

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