With my father, justice is big and quiet.

He tells us, his children, many times about when he’s in a Woolworth’s 5 and 10 cent store. This is in the 1920’s or something like that.

The saleslady makes ready to wait on my father ahead of a man who was called Negro, and that was how it was. This man has been waiting long before anyone else there.

My father says to the saleslady in Woolworth’s what is unheard of:  “This gentleman was here before me. Please wait on him.”

The man looks gratefully at my father and says, “Thank you, Sir.”

My father tells this story the same way he tells about when President Roosevelt stops in Springfield on a train. President Roosevelt waves to my father and says, “Hi, Pal.”

To my father, these stories are equal, for, in each one, he feels himself blessed.

Unlike my father, my mother doesn’t talk about dreams and hopes and what might have been. She talks about hard luck and defeat. “When you’re licked, you’re licked,” she says, and she drags life along.

But she shows her dreams.

She loves French provincial furniture. Good woods. Mahogany. Walnut. Fine linens. Cut glass. Crystal. Fine china. Bone china. Limoges. Wedgewood. Castleton. Regularly we go to Hall’s Galleries and pick out the china we would buy if we were buying. The nice thing about not buying is we can change our minds and pick out something else next week. If we keep going enough times, we will have them all!

My mother tells stories like nobody else in this world. Her lips and tongue snap to them. She draws the story out. She whirls stories around like cotton candy. She makes a hundred threads gallop and come together at the end. She ripples stories. She winds them up. She unwinds them. She churns them. She whips them. She tosses them like salad. She kneads them. She throws them like pizza dough. She spreads them out like a deck of cards. She embellishes, embroiders, and decorates them and serves them up like a miraculous cake, and I eat every morsel.

People who know say my mother speaks a beautiful Yiddish.

I can say with certainty, that if my mother had been born in this country, she would write melodramas such as Stella Dallas on the radio or Dark Victory in the movies. She would be a great actress like Bette Davis, and my mother would star in the melodramas she herself wrote.