And the day after...

[deborahjross]

Rose and I drove up to Marin County for a mini family reunion -- my
father's mother's family. My cousin, Trude now in her 80s, and her
husband, Ben, known me since I was 3 (her father found my father in
post-WWI, post-pogrom Warsaw and helped him immigrate to the US in the
1920s). There was also another cousin from a different branch and his
grown daughter, up from LA, and a third, whose mother had been my
father's close friend, and her husband. I say "cousins" because the
family tree is complicated. Our common ancestor, Baruch Cheskis, who
was a Hasidic rabbi, had 4 wives (in succession) and each branch of
this part of the family is descended from one of their children. We
had a lively discussion about "second cousins twice removed" and such,
but since we don't know who were full and who were half-siblings, I
think it's all fluff. We're cousins and that's it. So we swapped
stories, caught up with news, talked about the virtues of open vs
closed punctuation, politics, movies, books, my knee arthroscopy adn
Maxine's cataract surgery... a far-ranging discussion, if one slightly
slanted toward an aging group. Laurie, the grown daughter, is a
psychotherapist, and she and Rose hit it off beautifully.

I feel rather saturated with wonderful food and even more wonderful
conversation, needing to go off my by myself, listen to Mozart, and
drink tummy mint tea for a while