She had scored all her best goals wearing 22. She wore it for luck, even when she wasn’t playing hockey.
                                           ...
       22 was her number. She just couldn’t play with boring old number 9.
from: The Highest Number in the World
                                                                           by: Roy MacGregor
                                                             illustrated by Genevieve Despres
     
       ​​My mom’s lucky number was 3. Things happened in 3s for her. She married my dad on March 30 (3/30). They shared 3 homes together. They had 3 children, each of us 3 years apart.
       Tomorrow would have been their 69th (notice, 6 and 9 are both divisible by 3, and so is 69!) anniversary. Here are 3 of my favorite memories.

1. I was about 6 or 7. My parents took us all to the zoo where we saw gorillas eating their lunch twice. Yuck! Did you know giraffes have blue tongues? (It is so they don’t get sun-burned while they search for leaves in those really high trees! True: Creature Features by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. 2014, Houghton Mifflin.) And the lions. Wow do they have a loud roar!

 
After a long day, we got home and my parents put me to bed. I woke in the middle of the night with a horrible, scary dream about the lions. They were not in cages and they were chasing me all around the zoo. My dad came in to calm me down. I told him my dream. I was still scared. He said not to worry and lay down at the end of my bed and fell asleep. I remember thinking everything must be okay if he fell asleep, so I did too.

    2. We didn’t eat out often. Our family’s idea of going out to breakfast involved the Coleman stove, a short trip to the park and scrambled eggs. I’m sure we had other food, too, but I remember the eggs. Mom did the setting out and cleaning up. Dad cooked. It’s the only time I ever remember that he cooked. The eggs were always delicious.

    3. Sometimes my girls and I drove in to visit Grandma and Grandpa for the day, and sometimes we’d stay overnight. It took “When the Red, Red Robin,” (and the blue one and the yellow one...) the name of every single friend who “Lies over the Ocean,” and about a gazillion verses of “Charming Billy,” to get there. Mom and Dad always welcomed us hugs and glasses of water. Make that glasses of water and hugs. Driving always made us thirsty!
​ 
       I’m not sure about lucky numbers. My life seems more haphazard than my mom’s. I’ve had 2 marriages and 2 children. I have 5 grandchildren and 5 cats. I have 3 meals per day and exercise 3 times per week. I’m not so much about finding patterns as I am about loving where I am, who I’m with, and what I have.
       Thanks for the memories, Mom and Dad. Happy Anniversary!
 
                                                                   --stay curious!

       ​I never had a great-great-aunt Rose or even an Aunt Rose, but I was lucky enough to live with my great-grandmother, Anna Moroz White. She escaped the terror of pogroms and antisemitism. She conquered her fear (or held it at bay) and moved across a continent and an ocean with her baby daughter, my grandmother. Just the two of them. She carried her bundle from the Old Country: Sabbath candlesticks, a samovar, a dream.
       My gram was a suffragette. They’re called suffragists, now. Early in the century, soon after she arrived in the United States, she worked for women’s rights. She had a three-year-old daughter, after all.
       She was, in her own feisty way, nurturing. I remember sitting on her lap as she sang “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” This was America, you know! I remember her lace-up black shoes that she wore every day. And the soft, flower-printed dresses, reaching about mid-calf, always with a narrow belt.
       I remember her gentle smile that never quite reached all the way up to her eyes. She never told me stories from her home. Not about her friends or family or village.
      Today is voting day in Ohio. After another cup of coffee (or two) I will go exercise my right to vote. Thanks, Gram. I like to think you’re holding my hand as I color in my ovals. I miss you.
 
March is Women’s History Month. Take a few moments to remember someone special.
                                                                   --stay curious!  

     “I do not know if the hole ahead of us is good or if it is clean but it is certainly BLACK.”
     “A black hole!” says the crew.                                                  Mr. Hop thinks long and hard and deep. “No one knows what lives in a black hole.”
                            from: Commander Toad and the Big Black Hole
                                                                   by Jane Yolen
                                                    illustrated by Bruce Degen

       I always thought of a black hole as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking in debris and dust, sinking down and down like Alice, falling through the rabbit hole.
       Now I know that that only occurs near the black hole’s event horizon, the place where stuff like light and space junk can enter but not come back out. Where does all that stuff go?
       Black holes are invisible because they don’t emit the light they collect, but they are not imaginary. They can be detected by noting their gravitational effects on nearby objects.
       Albert Einstein knew this when he proposed his theory of relativity a hundred years ago. And that theory was proved recently when two stars were observed to collide forming a black hole. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0
       Can time escape a black hole? I’d love to capture the moment when my then future husband first smiled at me. Funny thing is, that moment is captured—-in my imagination.
       So Newton, who said that time is absolute and can be measured, was out-thought by Einstein who said it was not time, but light (what we observe) that is the constant.
       I imagine the universe as a spiral, like an infinitely long piece of rotini. Each year on the anniversary of that first smile, I’m on a new level of that spiral. More observable stuff has happened: new cats and grandchildren are added to my spiral and people pass out of it, too. These timely events shape my universe and I am shaped by them.
       Meanwhile, I’ll try to rescue my next great idea before it is sucked into the event horizon of my imagination!
            
                                                                                --Stay curious!