Cooking with Mom

by Nancy Orans Eder, a member of Get Your Wordsworth

In many ways my mother, Sylvia, was ahead of her time in spite of the fact that she grew up in a conservative home. Brought up in an orthodox family in Boro Park, an area of Brooklyn that was overwhelmingly Jewish, my mother was the youngest of seven children. She grew up thinking that the whole world was Jewish until she went to Brooklyn College at the age of sixteen and discovered a new world . . . a world of different viewpoints, intellectually challenging and stimulating. After a very active social and political life, at twenty-three she met and married my dad who shared her world view and values. They were happily married for almost forty years. They had three daughters. I was the first.

Collision With Life

By Nancy Eder, a member of Get Your WordsWorth

I’m alive. We’re alive. I scream in disbelief at the gigantic grasshopper which has filled my field of vision with the realization that it is actually a monstrous yellow farm tractor towering and closing in. Impossible as this all seems, this enormous vehicle has come
from nowhere to consume us. There is no heading it off though Ellen is screaming to Wally, “ what are you doing?”, as if to prevent the inevitable crash. We are going to die. It is clear. But the jolt of the impact flings me forward in my seat and the seatbelt boomerangs back as we collide. The front of the rented four door black Mercedes sedan in which we are riding is now inches from the front window crushed like an enormous black beetle.

Riding into the wind

By Nancy Eder, a member of Get Your WordsWorth

The ocean laps the shores of Brooklyn. It is near enough to taste its briny salt spray on a warm June day in Manhattan Beach just east of Coney Island.  In 1943 my parents and I lived on the last residential street of this unique peninsula jutting out into Sheepshead Bay on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south. While technically this is Brooklyn, no upstanding Brooklynite considered it  so. . . too middle class. . . bordering on wealthy when walking west, as the apartment-lined streets turned into large private homes where the owners of Alexander’s department store lived. Too far from subway lines… a bus infrequently meandered down to our end of the peninsula, but to live here meant one needed a car. So, isolated from public transportation, in a city known for being large, impersonal and dirty, this idyllic area made Manhattan Beach a child’s paradise.  This little island of homes within a small peninsula was seemingly untouched by poverty or crime.  The scant few blocks from my apartment to school was a haven and the basis of some of my early childhood fondest memories.