My Family, 1953

In a long-forgotten box in the garage, I came across a piece of tattered artwork I did with crayons when I was nine. My friend Tony at Photo Scope digitized and restored it. This is my family as I saw it in 1953: Daddy with his company car; Mother playing the piano; Joel, an aspiring doctor; Harry, a would-be rich man; and me at a typewriter, putting words together. Amazingly, life followed art. My brother Joel became a neuropathologist; my brother Harry had a richly satisfying life until he died in 1993. And I am still becoming a writer. It’s clear from this picture how much I adored my family and how close we all were in our little house with the gray carpet under the piano and the imaginative decor Harry and I dreamed of having. That cabinet near the piano in the living room is a radio; we didn’t get a TV until 1960.