I have seen some interesting things the past few days. One of the more impressive reminded me how clear thinking my grandfather is despite his many physical difficulties. We were discussing some of the projects I am working on and we got to the topic of how producing an item of media like a great song or a book is something you can do today for relatively low cost and make it available on the Internet for anyone to buy. The problem is that you can’t easily find people interested in buying it. When my grandfather was listening to this conversation he recalled verses from Gray’s Elegy From a Country Churchyard and recited verbatim…

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

I’ll be quite happy if I can sing happy birthday when I am 93 let alone quote great lines from poetry.

A big positive about having come to Toronto for the funeral is that I was able to see so many people, especially family members that I hadn’t seen in many years. I received a full education in the family tree on my mother’s side complete on two pieces of paper that showed me how I am related to people named Blanche, Blossom, Leon, Romie, and Robin. Without this context I would otherwise have thought these to be flavors of ice cream or breeds of flowers but these are real people who I am related to and who are interested in my life and I am interested in theirs. I learned many things these past few days. Here are some of them.

My uncle great uncle Romie who lives in New York and was unable to come to the funeral because it would break his heart at 95 to learn that his sister died frequently dines with the famous Dr. Ruth Westheimer for dinner.

My great grandfather was an avid salesman who was so committed to selling that he worked until the day he died. At age 83 the knitting factory that he worked as a salesman for closed down. They made knitted sweaters for department stores with logos for sports teams like the Maple Leafs. When the factory closed down he convinced another knitting factory that he was an excellent sales person and he then continued to sell for them from age 83 until age 86 when he died.

The Wigdor family tree, my grandfather’s family, traces back to the head rabbi at Warsaw. The family of famous rabbis is the Rabbinovitches and they include rabbis in the family tree back to rabbis in the 1500s who were the head rabbis in places like Venice. Some of the Rabbinowitzes changed their names when they reached America to Robbins and one of them became the Robbins from Baskin Robbins. Another of them started Birds-eye vegetables.

My grandfather met my grandmother on a blind date in New York. He had met a man in Montreal while he lived there who noticed that his name was Wigdor. The man knew a girl named Avigdor and because their names of similar wanted to introduce them to each other. The girl was purported to be very beautiful. My grandfather was interested in meeting her but when he corresponded with her and she was interested in meeting him in Toronto he was being moved to New York City for his work. The woman told him that she couldn’t meet him in New York but that she had a very good friend in New York that he might like to meet instead. That good friend was my grandmother Evelyn.

During the war one of my grandfather’s jobs was to do testing to help fit airplanes made in America so that they would work with Brittish equipment. The problem was that the American planes were built to different standards and the equipment like chutes to deploy flares were incompatible. One of the experiments they needed to do was to test the deployment of flares. So the people in the airplane took a live flare and put it into the deployment chute and it immediately got stuck. The problem was that it was a live flare and if it went off it could ignite the plane on fire. In a panic the pilot flew a deep and low route to try to put the flare out. This didn’t work and they then tried to force the flare through the tube. Finally they landed the plane praying that the flare wouldn’t go off. Luckily it didn’t ignite and they removed it. The lesson learned is that when you are testing whether explosives fit through your chute try sending something through the same size before you try the real explosives.

My grandfather highly recommends the Swedish city of Bergen. When he went there his camera was broken and having a problem. He mentioned this to a man he was talking to and the man knew someone expert in fixing cameras. Within a few minutes he had brought the camera to a camera shop and the expert was tooling away at his camera. After an hour he had fixed the camera and when my grandfather asked him how much it cost to fix the camera the man told him that it was free of charge because “Bergen is too beautiful for you not to have pictures to take home.”

I also heard plenty of stories from my mother’s childhood friend Rosy. Rosy is a short woman and she mentions that she knows that she is short and shrinking so it isn’t a problem to mention it to her. She is well under five feet tall. When Rosy went to the doctor when she was younger she was thin but the doctor looked at her and told her to be careful because she saw that there were more places to hang fat on her than any other person the doctor had ever seen.

I didn’t eat eggplant for ten years because of an incident at Rosy’s home when I was a child. I ate eggplant and turned purple and became sick. My parents from then forwards told me that I was allergic to eggplant and to avoid it. So when my friends parent’s were cooking eggplant parmegian I used to tell them that I couldn’t because I was allergic. One day in my twenties I decided to brave the risk and ordered eggplant. I not only discovered that I wasn’t allergic to it but that I loved the flavor and texture of it. Rosy thought it was funny because she loves eggplant. That is why she had served it to me so long ago.

Rosy also had some interesting experiences when she was younger. Her maiden name is Birnbaum. Her sister met a man with the last name Birnbaum. With thorough checking they determined that there was no relation between Rosy’s Birnbaums and her sister’s boyfriend’s Birnbaums as they came from different countries. So her sister married the man. When her sister was in the hospital pregnant with their first child Rosy went to buy flowers. She told the florist that the flowers were for her sister who had just had a child. When they asked the name she said her name was Ruth Birnbaum. The florist looked at her and shook her head and told her that he was so sorry, thinking that the young Birnbaum was a bastard child.

Rosy’s father had contracted Shingles in his old age. Shingles is a disease like an adult Chicken Pox but far worse. What happens is that your nerve endings form water blisters on the ends of them. Each blister is incredibly painful because it is the end of a nerve. The doctor prescribed a special cream to rub on the blisters and her father’s back had a long string of Shingles blisters in a row such that they created a furrow in his back as you traced them. He was in such pain that he asked Rosy’s mother, who was almost completely blind to rub the lotion into his back. Her mother had been working earlier on a project involving glue and when she went to rub the lotion into his back she mixed-up the bottles and rubbed the glue into the wound instead of the lotion. The blisters hurt more so Rosy’s father asked her to put more lotion into his back to soothe the pain and she continued to add glue to rub into his back. Later Rosy came and saw what had happened and removed the glue from the wound.

I was telling one of my grandmother’s friend’s husband about my dangerous sailing trip in the spring. He thought about it for a bit and then told me that he had been on a more dangerous trip. He had invaded France three days after D-day and had been shot through his cheek by a sniper. Ten men from his troop were captured by the Germans and when they surrendered they were shot on site. When they captured the Germans they also shot the Germans on site. “It was they way things were back then,” he explained. “Things are different now.”

We also talked about superstitions. My mom was wondering what would have happened in the World Series this year of everyone from Boston hadn’t done exactly what they had done to try to make the Sox win. Maybe it was that guy who wore his lucky underwear to every game or the man who didn’t shave his beard, or the girl who closed her eyes every time Jason Varitek came to bat, or the woman who walked out of the room to not watch whenever the bases were loaded. People did so much to will the Red Sox to win and they seemed to need every ounce of energy we supplied them with.

One psychology experiment, according to my father demonstrated how superstition works by feeding a group of pigeons in the dark. Food was dropped into the cage every fifteen minutes as the pigeons were in the dark. Over the course of a night this was done repeatedly. By morning each pigeon had developed a unique set of gestures and mannerisms that they thought might bring the food to fall. Some would flap their left wing while others would peck at a toy or hop on one leg.

I am skeptical of some of these things but the more I know about my own past the happier I can be.