About Me & Them

This collection of stories featuring each of my parents is very dear to me. These are the stories that were my life as a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. My memories are those of so many others who grew up in the same decades. My mother’s stories: collecting green stamps, her insecurity about her front teeth, her mother, learning to drive, making out so many Christmas cards and the letters she wrote with them to family back home in Utah, and watching Westerns which reminded her of her childhood. My dad’s stories: coloring Easter eggs inspired by the Ukrainian eggs using a pin and melted beeswax, smoking cigarettes and sometimes a pipe, working at the Post Office, doing crossword puzzles and collecting stamps, and spending too much time at the local barroom. I also share their final stories where each suffered slow deaths from cancer; my dad at 59 and my mom at 75. Stories that are etched in my memories and that fill me with sadness as well as joy to have lived during this time.