The Mother of All Memories

  • Object Permanence

    My mother was expert at identifying illness through visual cues. A trained nurse, she had once correctly diagnosed a case of tonsillitis in me by spotting a tentative swallow. This… Read more

  • The Heavens May Give

    One sunny morning when I was eight or nine, my sister Ellen found a hamster in a cellar window well off the back steps of our house. We never knew… Read more

  • Facts on Cape Cod

    Each August my family would drive 270 miles from northern New Jersey to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for a glorious two-week vacation. The trip was an annual highlight, rivaled only by… Read more

  • The Black Box

    During my mother’s week-long hospital stay in late summer 1973, my father distracted us kids by easing the household embargo on what we called “good cereal”: the brightly packaged, sugary… Read more

  • I’m Not Lisa

    Mid July 1975 my family was driving to Brooklyn, NY, to celebrate the Rite of Ordination of a distant cousin we had never met. Having turned 13 a few months… Read more

  • Relief

    My parents rarely made a big show of birthdays. Maybe it was their Depression-era frugality or the fact that there were five of us kids. Birthday celebrations at our house… Read more

  • Not Knowing

    It’s July 1975 and we’re back in Brooklyn at my distant cousin’s Rite of Ordination. A group of unknown relatives from my father’s side of the family greeted us warmly… Read more

  • Three Little Words

    The fall of 1975 was a time of beginnings and endings. It was the first day of my last year in middle school. It was a time of trendier clothes… Read more

  • Thursday’s Children

    My first photo album contains a pockmarked old picture of my mother baking Christmas sugar cookies. The dimpling is the result of the photo being ironed into the album at… Read more

  • Reasoning by Analogy

    A classic puzzle that cognitive psychologists use to test thinking skills is the Tumor Problem, which poses the following hypothetical dilemma. A patient has a malignant tumor in his abdomen.… Read more