How I Know Winter's Officially Over, The Joy of Spellcheck, Why I Blog

While snow was still falling this morning on eastern Long Island, the City of White Plains officially declared the end of winter. Not by proclamation, mind you, or by adherence to the astronomical calendar which placed the end of winter last Thursday. 

Rather, White Plains put action behind its conviction that no more massive storms will drop snow within our fair city’s borders. A Dept. of Public Works employee came by this morning to remove the red metal pole and flag from atop the fire hydrant in my cul de sac. There’s still an iceberg of slowly melting snow in front of the hydrant, but the city no doubt is confident its trucks will not have to plow any more flakes onto the heap.

Spellcheck Doesn’t Catch Everything: If I have one continuous fault I am willing to own up to, it is my inability to let small writing and speaking mistakes escape my correction. I particularly find “between you and I” to be highly objectionable. Are we not teaching that “between” is a preposition and that the object of a preposition can only be “me,” not “I”?

Not that I am infallible. It is très difficult to edit one’s own copy and speech, though I did have a rule on my magazine that any copy editor who changed even a comma in my manuscripts had to first run it by me for approval, or else. 

I've become a little less pedantic in my dotage, except when it comes to résumés and cover letters I review. But I still occasionally point out an error when I am amused by its presence. Such was the case in an email from Ellie earlier this week suggesting a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she works. 

“I just wondered through this contemporary Chinese art show, which closes April 6, and it was so good … maybe you could see this show … It's great how it's installed among the rest of the collection, rather than in a separate gallery,” she wrote.

To which I replied, in part: “Don’t take this the wrong way, that is me trying to correct you all the time, but I was tickled by a mistake you made in your note that actually makes perfect sense. You wrote, you "wondered" through the art show. You probably meant "wandered," but wondered actually conveys a real sense of discovery and joy.”

Spellcheck doesn’t work when the wrong word is spelled correctly. Sometimes, it’s for the best. BTW, Gilda and I will be going to see the exhibit next week. For those who can, take Ellie’s suggestion and see it, as well.

Preserving the Past: It is difficult to gauge how readers will react to any single post. Monday’s story about my father’s reunion in Perth, Australia, with his first love elicited some heartwarming notes of personal stories from their respective families. 

When I started this blog four and a half years ago one of my objectives was to initiate remembrances among readers through the stories of my family’s history. While I wanted to bring you into the Forseter family sphere, I would have been less than fulfilled if I did not make you reflect on your own, individual heritage.

I am not alone in trying to capture history for the next generation. The NY Times recently ran an article titled, “Preserving Family History, One Memory at a Time,” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/business/preserving-family-history-one-memory-at-a-time.html?ref=business). 

As far back as the mid-1980s my brother, sister and I videotaped our parents and their siblings. Within the last year I transferred the tapes onto DVDs, and with the help of our nephew Eric have made copies for each of our children. For Gilda’s family there’s a DVD of their early life in Saratoga Springs, NY. 

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favorite fiction characters. It would not be too much of a stretch to quote his oft-repeated phrase, “Time is of the essence.” If you’re not already doing something to preserve your patrimony, get cracking. 

From Ottynia to Perth

I had fully intended to finish up my tax returns today but two early morning emails derailed that plan. By “early morning” I mean shortly after midnight, not that I was awake to read them when they descended from the cloud into my mailbox.

I got up at a reasonable hour this morning, slightly before 8. That is, my eyes opened for good, though I did not get out of bed for good for nearly another two hours. I blame email. As most of you probably do, I check email first thing in the A.M. Never know when Linda the Realtor might have an ASAP project for me to complete (which she did just past noon which deferred my writing this post until evening). 

In quick succession I read two emails that opened up links with my past. The first was from Lisa, a Denver resident searching for family roots in Ottynia, the hometown village of my father in what is now western Ukraine. She had found me several days earlier after googling Ottynia. My blog came up at the top of her Google search. As she wrote, “Now that’s optimization.”

After reading and responding to her second email this morning, we communicated the old fashioned way, by phone for half an hour. Just prior to that call I answered the other email that jolted me this morning, from a distant cousin in Minneapolis who I had last seen about 20 to 25 years ago when I was making annual visits to the Twin Cities. A year ago I wrote about his father’s surreptitious entry into the United States in the early 1920s and his subsequent flight to Minnesota to evade being picked up as an illegal alien. Like Lisa, David had read about Ottynia in my blog.

So I began reading old posts about Ottynia, thrust forward also by reports of wreckage from Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 possibly being spotted some 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia. There in one of the blogs from October 2009 was a promise to relate a story about my father and mother’s visit to Perth.

One of the hallmarks of my parents’ 53-year marriage was their open expression. In other words, they argued, sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest. My father never let my mother forget that his first love was Dora, a woman he met in Danzig prior to World War II. Though he asked her to come with him to America in 1939, as an only child she chose to go with her parents to Australia. Sadly, within six months of arriving Down Under, her parents died. She tried to reconnect with my father, but could not. 

My father married my mother in 1942. Whenever my father would tease her about his first love, she would respond she was ready to buy him a one-way ticket to Australia. 

My father had many friends who left Poland in 1939. They were spread around the world. They agreed to meet in Israel in 1989, but one of them, a doctor in Sydney, Australia, had cataract surgery and could not travel. So my parents decided to visit him. As could be expected, before the trip they argued about something, my father mentioned Dora and my mother decided to call his bluff. Why don’t you put an ad in the Australian version of The Jewish Week and see if she responds, she suggested.

He had his doctor friend place an ad, asking anyone who knows a Dora who came to Australia in 1939 to contact him. A few days later, a friend sitting in Dora’s kitchen in Perth saw the ad. When Dora’s letter reached our home, it was hard to say who was more startled. Dora had married, had two sons, but was widowed in 1955. Hardly a day goes by, she wrote, that she did not think of my father.

Suddenly, a “simple” trip to Sydney was transformed into a romantic adventure. Her bluff called, my mother had no choice but to accompany her husband on his transcontinental trip back down lover’s lane in Perth. Indeed, whenever Dora was alone with him, she wrapped her arms around my father and said she would be there for him if he ever were single again. 

Ah, but my dad’s innate conservative morals thwarted any thoughts of seduction. Dora had told him she had boyfriends after her husband’s death. His ardor cooled, he returned to America never again threatening to run off to Australia.