I don't know how they did it

My parents had their 46th wedding anniversary last Sunday. My mother was twenty and my father was twenty three when they got married. My Nana remembers watching them drive away (in a borrowed car) and crying: my father was still in school, neither one had a job and they were broke.

I was born two days shy of their first anniversary. My father was still in college and working nights. We lived in a five story walk-up in the Bronx. My mother has great stories about those days, but I’ll leave that for another time.

When my second sister L was born, my father left law school for full time employment. (With five mouths to feed, working nights at the ice cream factory was not going to cut it.) After three daughters in rapid succession, my mother gave birth to two sons who died in infancy. The first child was stillborn and our brother Richard passed away when he was six months old. My sisters have no memory of these bothers, but I have vivid recollections of visiting Richard at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. (When we buried first my grandfather and then my grandmother, it was disconcerting to see those two small headstones between the graves of our grandparents.) Against the advice of doctors my mother went on to have two more children, my brothers T and J.

She was only thirty when J was born.

Faith and character. I am born of strong stock.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Pop, and many more.