My parents named me Mindy Ellen Stern, and I never changed it. In Ashkenazi Jewish custom, the dearly departed are deeply honored by naming a newborn after them. Thus, an American Joe carries the spirit of a late European Yosseleh, Susie is named after Saraleh, Faye and Faith are modern versions of Faygie, which actually means “little bird.”

March 21, 2021 - Aish.com

Bubby closed the door to her home on Joste Strasse before rushing to the Hauptbahnhof train station in Berlin, not knowing when she and my mother would return. Their second-floor, comfortably furnished apartment had a fireplace in every room. It was graced with Meissen figurines, crystal wine goblets, an antique brass filigree clock they wound up once a week, a huge silver menorah with two lions, cups for oil on opposite ends, and eight smaller cups on the bottom. They never saw any of these things again.

You know the feeling. You open your mailbox with a sliver of hope – maybe today there’ll be something special in there.  You’re greeted instead by a pile of advertising brochures, tax statements, and worse: bills to pay.  Once or twice a year, around your birthday and December holidays, handwritten cards may appear.  Some are as bad as bills, Hallmark cards personalized only with Dear You, and ending with Love, Us.   If your name is common enough, you could swap your card with your neighbor’s and no one would be the wiser.

To mark our one-year anniversary, I offered to create signature cocktails, so we could raise our glasses together and celebrate our unique group. Each cocktail’s ingredients had to include the letters, T, S, R, & P. And to accommodate different palates, budgets, and the limitations of our fridges and cabinets, I offered choices with different flavor profiles.

Jan 25th, 2021 Mercer Island Reporter

Inauguration Day. I’m listening to Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” as I drive, thinking of my parents, and how proud they would be at this moment. We called them “the love birds.”

In 1948, when she was 20 and he was 25, they met at an engagement party for mutual friends whom my father had introduced to one another. The successful match was inspired after Dad was set up on a date with someone he deemed too tall to be his love interest.

May 9, 2020, Aish.com

I didn’t know them when they were hungry and feared for their lives during the Holocaust. Their two and half years in hiding, surviving on carrots and the occasional onion skin were nine years behind them by the time I was born. At the war’s end, my mother and grandmother emerged from a dreary attic in Belgium jaundiced, their teeth in shambles. Their new life in America restored their health. Like Scarlett O’Hara, they vowed to never be hungry again. They raised my sister and me to be self-sufficient, frugal, resourceful, always ready for the unexpected, qualities that prepared us for some of the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

You’ve seen kids wearing shirts that boast, “My grandma went to Italy and all she bought me was this lousy T-shirt.”  I’m not that grandma.  I want the people I’m abandoning to look forward to my absences, and to welcome me home with open arms. Finding gifts for my family has become part of the adventure - things with a touch of the exotic to help them feel a little closer to what I saw and smelled and did on my travels.  I’ve made plenty of mistakes when searching for the “perfect” gift.  This is the story of how I left home alone, meandered to Tuscany for a travel-writing class, and searched for presents that should make each recipient look forward to my next escape as much as I do.