Loyalty to the family is tyranny to the self. I’m sure I’ve quoted this line before. It’s my motto, I have it tattooed across my back, I fly a banner with those words over Jones Beach every summer, I say it every time I’m about to cross a family threshold or look in the fridge. It was spoken by Ninette T. Loos Blanc, an extraordinary woman in her 90’s who I used to bring groceries to on her fifth floor walk up apartment. I was a depressed college sophomore. Her overheated apartment had few belongings, a magnifier, a mirror, a fish bowl with opaque water. It smelled like old slippers. My friend Raymond used to brush her long white hair. It was like silk and I always think fondly of those words around holiday time. I am still that college sophomore climbing those steps, filled with dread and inchoate rage against my parents. They’re gone now. I miss them, of course.
What did your parents give you?
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Betsy Lerner 
so much shame I wish I could sell it to pay for therapy
Incite (spelled correctly)
Insight ( yup spelled right)
The good, some bad, no ugly. Curiosity, many things which I now appreciate.
“What did your parents give you?”
A love of reading.
A deep, abiding fear.
A respect for clocks and deadlines.
A sense of order.
A sense of fundamental isolation.
The knowledge that all good could be yanked away in an instant.
An early and close acquaintance with tyranny.
A clean, well lighted home.
Sufficient rations.
Incentive to leave.
The knowledge that any defense against external irrationality must come from within.
The ability to work and survive.
A place I could turn to when there was no other place to turn.
My first typewriter.
From my mother, love. From my father, conflict.
Too much and too little expectation
A subject
I learned that rabbit – even one with a name and sweet fuzzy ears that made me forget sometimes – does, in fact, kind of taste like chicken.
Both my parents loved to read. It proved to be the foundation for the rest of my personal and professional life.
I received the gift of being funny from my father, and I learned the importance of having fun from my mother. In these challenging times, I’m damn thankful for both.