“It’s red!” I shouted in the delivery room, startling everyone in the place. Dr. Goldstein, looking down and then up at me, surprised, then glancing over to my wife Manya, who mumbled curses at us in her delirium, joked lamely about a milkman. We both looked down again at the round wet dome between her…
It is not true that Manya and I never connected. We did, many years later. We made children, and created a family and a home. Wow! My first encounter with Manya represented some form of recognition. No, alas, not a hunger, really, but something more inevitable, something that could be satisfied, that harmoniously fell into…
Brasil, early to midfifties, on the sixth floor of a newish apartment building in São Paulo. Lilo brings a boy my age, same complexion, into the apartment. He was probably some Hungarian kid, the son of one of their numerous fellow Hungarian refugees. She was probably just taking care of it, as a favor to…
We still talk occasionally, though it is now several decades later. Our children know each other, having attended some of the same schools over the years, and the same social gatherings of various acquaintances. Yet, to this day, I’ve never mentioned it; neither has she. I’m not really sure it ever happened. It still saddens…
I live just a couple of blocks away from Manya now, in a two-bedroom apartment above the Riviera Cafe. Each bedroom is barely larger the bed in it, so there is no need to buy any other furnishings. At night, the rattle of the train underneath Seventh Avenue is muffled by the noise of the…
It was on one of those fall men’s college weekends that I first met her. I did not know then that the course of a life could change forever, in the briefest of instants, though the change didn’t become fact until many years later. The light from the sun came at sharp angles, making long…