Grandpa Sam’s wife was Julia. I loved this woman. I left home at 18 (under the circumstances in the precious post). After six months I could not continue living in hippie crash pads in Coconut Grove because by then I had been hired by the research team in the Everglades, and let’s just say when you were in town you needed to sleep!, She took me in, and charged me $5 a week for the room and $10 a week for the board. Four years later I’m in the driveway, the car is loaded with Lady, my dog, and all my trash, she reaches through the window and hands me an old-fashioned bank book. There was a couple of thousand dollars there, and the bank was around the corner. “I knew you wouldn’t save anything for college, so I made you pay me for your room and board, and I put all the money you gave me in this account for you for school”. This was a real sacrifice as I ate a lot in those days, and they were not at all well off. Since tuition and books for a whole term back then was only a couple of hundred it was an amazing gift. I still get teary when I think of her for this. It paid for my undergraduate education!

THE HUMAN PILLOW

She was one of the biggest women I have ever met. My brother and I used to turn her diaper joke back on her when we were little. See, when we were babies, we were told she would pick us up if we needed changing, squeeze our diapered butts with one hand, and say “So round, so firm, so fully packed”. It was an advertising slogan for a cigarette. We would get on both sides of her on the couch, push on her shapeless breasts and voluminous love handles and repeat the slogan. She loved it, even though she was anything but firm!

A PROGRESSIVE

She was well educated for her generation. She had completed “grade school”, the eighth grade. When I was living with her the Miami Herald had an article about a prostitution bust, and she commented, “Who are they hurting? Don’t the police have anything better to do?” We were driving someplace together and I’m looking over at a woman in the next car. As we pull even with her at a stop light, I finally get a good look at her face and boy, she defined homely! After I said so Grandma goes, “You could always put a bag over her head!” A girlfriend Karen had stayed over when they were away for a weekend. She comes in angry with the sheets in her hands. “It’s one thing to have her over when I’m not here, but you weren’t smart enough to change the sheets?” This was a woman who spoke her mind.

She told me a story that she did not tell anyone else in the family, even her daughter. When my mother was born in 1926, the midwife did not do a very good job. Apparently my grandmother was torn very badly. She did not want any more children. They lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was a very Jewish section. If you lived there and were Jewish you were Orthodox.

There is a commandment in Judaism concerning marital relations. From the onset of menstruation until fourteen days later, there is no sex. The husband and wife not only do not even touch, but they sleep in separate beds. When the two weeks is over, marital relations cannot resume until the woman has attended the ritual bath, the Mikvah, for purification. The best anthropological discussion I have ever seen about these primitive rituals was by Mary Douglas, a British Anthropologist, Purity and Danger. Menstruation is dangerous because it is bleeding that is not from a wound. So it is not right. That isn’t how things are supposed to be! An exception to the order the of the Universe, and must be dealt with!

Talk about birth control! You could not design a better system to guarantee pregnancy as often as possible! Be fruitful and multiply, all right. Take a couple of young people with hormones raging and let them have sex just when you are most fertile. Oh, it is a rhythm method all right, but with the opposite goal.

There was no such thing as birth control when my grandmother was a young woman. The tradition was that when the man came home from evening prayers, he would throw his hat into the bedroom. If it was flung back out again then she had not been to the mikvah, and he continued to sleep on the couch. If she kept it then it was all right to go in and screw their brains out.

There were synagogues everywhere then, so it was easy for a Jewish man to fulfill the admonition to pray three times a day. A religious Jew always keeps his head covered (the yarmulke is the source of the traditional skull cap the Pope wears, in fact!) so the hat was no problem. One day she is telling of her dilemma to one of the older women. The woman says, “So you threw the hat out, didn’t you?” Of course, she said no, she had been to the Mikvah. “Dummy”, the older woman says. “He doesn’t know that! Throw it out!” See, if you could just delay sex even a couple of days then the rhythm method worked for you, if you didn’t want kids that is. She never had another child and I suspect my grandfather never knew.