I spent much of my time when I was young with my mother’s parents.  Sitting on the curb in front of my grandfather’s shop on Rodeo Drive waiting for my imaginary friend to pick me up to take me to summer camp.  Drawing at the big turquoise table in the family room on the cardboard my grandmother saved from my grandfather’s newly dry-cleaned shirts.  Eating strawberries with sugar for breakfast while I watched Saturday morning cartoons.  Reading the my aunt’s and my mom’s old books that I found stowed away in their old bedrooms.  Sitting in the movie theatre waiting for the movie to begin.  Eating pickles sitting in the booth at Nate ‘N’ Al’s.   And, while I was doing all of these things with my grandparents -- especially my grandmother -- I started becoming the person I am now.  The gifts she and my grandfather gave to me -- their time, their patience, their willingness to let me be myself -- are things I appreciate more and more as I grow older and realize how precious, important and sometimes rare these things are.

I know my grandmother was not perfect, but the things that other people did not like about her were never really things I noticed (apart from those times she’d hound me to stand up straight and smile more).  To me, she was always a sort of rock, a steady companion who would let me be to draw or read or even watch tv without interference, but who was always there when I emerged from being solitary.  She took me to the movies, read to me, bought me books and markers -- and in the process she taught me how to be myself, though it would take a long time before I would realize this is, in fact, what she was doing, without perhaps even recognizing it herself.

She died 18 years ago last week and though I know we likely would have found our differences, our bones of contention, our petty annoyances at one another as I grew older, the fact remains that those things never were allowed to happen.  And I still miss her as uncomplicatedly as I did the day she left me forever.

Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (1918-1991)