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