The Unexpected Gift Of Being Old

By Marion Bar-Din

Now, at the age of ninety-four and a half, I’m still experiencing things I hadn’t expected.  Many are good things that warm my old heart.  I have, over the past ten or more years, a new group of middle-aged men and women who come to visit me regularly and are interested in listening carefully to what I say.  These are the sons and daughters of my old friends who have already passed away.  They call me and want to visit.  They ask lots of questions, but soon they are telling me about their lives and look to me as a surrogate parent who may have advice or a story about their mother or father.

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New York City To WHERE?

By Marion Bar-Din

It was the end of April in 1939 and I was finally allowed out of bed where I had amused myself since August of 1938. I was 30 pounds heavier, and my X-rays showed real progress in fighting tuberculosis, which my doctors believed I had developed from drinking the milk of a tubercular cow the past summer on a farm where we vacationed. My parents didn’t send me to a sanitarium in the mountains as the doctors suggested. They kept me at home, fed me six times a day, read to me twice a day, took my temperature four times a day and put it on a chart, gave me a bath once a week (all that was allowed), took me in a taxi every few weeks to the doctor who gave me an X-ray, and bought me a radio (unheard of for a child’s room).

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Adam – a memory

By Marion Bar-Din

My memories of Adam remain strong even now, for he brought the war into our family. As I recall, Adam came to us when he was thirteen, from a displaced persons’ camp in Europe, to our large extended family in a central California valley town. We were four families, living less than a mile apart—three older cousins, seven cousins all about the same age—and then Adam. The war with Germany had just ended and the horrors of the concentration camps were just being unveiled; those places that had names which sounded so harsh and strange: Buchenwald, Auschwitz. It was from one such camp that Adam emerged a survivor.

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