frank and ethel, 1990

Sometime right around when this photo was taken (I think this must have been Thanksgiving or sometime around then), my grandparents gave me an aquamarine ring as a Christmas/Hanukkah present.  They died not that long after and for the last 21 years, I have spent almost every minute wearing that ring. It has become almost like a superstition — what if something happened to me and I wasn’t wearing it?  What if I left it at home and my house burned down?  It is a way I can carry them around with me, a mechanism for remembering them, though I don’t really need one.  It is also, I think, a way to remember myself because when they died, I sometimes think my childhood did, too.  I learned what pain was, what loss was, and I have never been the same.

Sometimes I am not even sure what it is that I miss, except that it seems like something essential I once had.

Frank Markus Hoffer (1909-1991) and Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (1918-1991), center,
me, age 9 1/2, top left