An Interesting Life, So Far

Joyce, the younger of the two daughters, was the main influence, and I probably had a crush on her. She was pretty, dark haired, dark eyed, romantically thin and flat breasted. She was a year or two older than me and I looked upon her as civilized when she spoke of Edna St Vincent Millay and the then popular American-Lebanese mystic Kahil Gibran, who wrote The Prophet. At a place where her friends congregated we listened to the juke box and she pointed out some passage in a Glenn Miller recording where a trumpet without a break continued a phrase started by a clarinet. She was not an intellectual like my cousin Mimi in Philadelphia, but she was much prettier and closer to my age and I was enchanted by her and the normality of her family, although my mother with unexpected prejudice claimed that they were Southern European Jews of Italian origin.

Joyce’s older sister Molly studied speech therapy at Syracuse University and tried to soften some of my rougher edges, including a tendency to lisp as my tongue had not learned to go where it should when making S and th sounds. She told me that she would never say she loved a man before she married him—