Lou and my father in law Richard and their older brother Harry survived the Holocaust with tales of derring do that was the stuff of action and caper movies. They escaped a work camp, and were caught, and only avoided execution because a Nazi guard knew they were good carpenters, and needed to make office furniture for the staff.
Anyway, Harry and I are FaceBook (tm) friends, and he had a lovely post today talking about how he and his wife, a nurse, first moved to Miami in 1979, and have lived for years in what is now Palmetto Bay, in a neighborhood called Mangowood. I know it -- after Hurricane Andrew they called it, smarmily, Mangle-wood. Harry's final post was nostalgic as he said goodbye -- he and his wife are ...
Harry and his wife came over. I believe we brought in pizza or Chinese -- my Dad joked that he wouldn't dare barbecue for a true Southerner like Harry's wife. They were delightful. Harry had a slight accent, and his wife was full on "Driving Miss Daisy." She was born and raised in Gastonia, which was shocking to me, as she was Jewish.
Harry was out of town, and I was seen by the senior guy Yale, who wanted to admit me to South Miami Hospital, since I technically had "unstable angina" -- chest discomfort that came and went without a known trigger. I begged off, but came the next day for a stress test with thallium, followed by a CAT Scan.
The youngest, Harry, died in his early 40s, when I was a young boy. Ann died last night, 11 months before she would have "made the Smuckers jar," as my sister Trudy pointed out.