For years, people have been telling me I need to write down the stories I tell about my life. This happens whenever I go on a self-deprecating rant about something that is basically sad, but comes out comical when I tell it. What I mean by self-deprecating is epitomized by Woody Allen, who sounds like all the old Jewish women who raised me. It was a tough crowd. To survive without excess neurosis, you had to be strong-willed, like my sister, who was reared in our father’s image to know more about everything than anybody else and to argue every point. It wasn’t her fault. My father should have been a Rabbi or a nuclear scientist. He was a genius with an eidetic memory who grew up in the Bronx and never got a chance to demonstrate his genius other than to tell everyone they were wrong and which book proved his point. He was raised among enough Jews to learn to argue every point whether he believed it or not. That’s what you learn to do when you study the Commentaries. My sister inherited his genius so he trained her to stand on a chair at age 5, and recite from the encyclopedia at his command. She was the embodiment of his superiority. She took to Debate like a seal takes to snacks, winning national awards and full scholarships to universities because of her ability to tell you why you were wrong and then change sides. Thankfully, my father and sister, who were agnostic and atheist respectively, replaced religion with high moral principals. (That’s actually what is embedded into most religions but don’t tell them I said so.) Due to their highly ethical morals, my father did not try to bribe the police and did not go to jail, as did his business partner, and my sister’s name lives on in fame for community service. Unfortunately, I was born with slightly above average intelligence but a genius for generalized anxiety disorder. When I fell behind in first grade, my parents told my sister to tutor me. One thing you ought to know about people who are geniuses is that they often think the rest of the planet is dumb as dirt and have no patience with anyone who can’t get what they say, the first time they say it. Setting my sister upon me was doomed to failure. I flunked out when I couldn’t remember what came after the letter “H.” My tears of misery were rewarded with the removal of my sister as tutor and being held back to repeat first grade for a second time. That’s how I earned the title of being the Village Idiot. (My title for myself.) Our real titles were as follows: Papa was a Genius. Ma had Common Sense, meaning she wasn’t smart but could figure out how to keep us from starving to death, something that escaped my father’s genius. My sister was The Smart One. I was The Pretty One. This is not what you call an anxiety-ridden child who flunked first grade and could look in a mirror. It was obvious my sister was beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen until the day I met my Greek friend Fafe and understood why 1,000 ships would be launched to recover Helen. People had to have something to say about me once they remarked about how smart my sister was. They knew my mother had two daughters; it was the polite thing to do. Since the younger one was invisible (I was so shy, I’d learned to be invisible), there was no way of telling if she’d inherited her mother’s common sense, so they called me the Pretty One and promptly forgot all about me. You know the saying, “Tragedy plus time equals humor?” I’m living proof. It was the one thing I learned from my sister that stuck—how to laugh at ourselves. My daughter calls it Dark Jewish Humor. Not everyone gets it. I know entire communities who don’t get it. Mostly they are polite people who cultivate kindness. Some are quite appalled by what I think is hysterical. The first time I got thrown out of a house for offending the host for what I thought was funny, I stopped talking. I mean literally I stopped talking until I could figure out how to be polite and cultivate kindness. That was about 45 years ago. From that point on, I reserved my humor for my children, my Sicilian relatives and their mates, and one or two other safe people. For the rest of the world, I was careful, selective, and said safe, kind things. I deliberately use the word “safe” because I wasn’t. I never felt safe until I got old, got sick, and got rid of the people around whom I walked on eggshells so they wouldn’t kill me. Now I’ve reached the age where I can put down the shield. I’ve won my battles. I have nothing left to prove. The old crowd is mostly dead, and no one in the young crowd is going to give a rat’s ass anyway. The kids want me to write while I can still remember how to type. Maybe that’s just their way to shut me up when I start to say, “Did I ever tell you about the time when….” Yet, sometimes non-relatives insist I absolutely must write these stories, like last month when my hair stylist fell over laughing when I told her about the bodies I’ve had to identify. So that’s what these journal entries are going to be about: things I meant to tell you but didn’t have the nerve until now. I’ve found my voice. The floodgates are open. It’s stream of consciousness typing from here on out. God willing, enough time has passed so that my stories are going to seem funny, that is if you’re Woody Allen, part of the Day family, or Finnish.