Giving Love Away

It’s funny, the sorts of things that have made me feel loved.

When I mine my memory, no grand gestures or extravagant expressions of affection come to the surface. Instead, I remember unexceptional moments on days that I could not locate on a calendar.

For instance, when I was a toddler, my maternal grandmother and I would sit on the sofa of her living room and watch “The Three Stooges.” She would cover my legs and feet with a brown and tan plaid blanket. We laughed together. Curly struck her as especially hilarious. She would laugh until breathless, wheezing the last few molecules of air from her lungs.

My grandmother had emigrated from WWII-shattered Austria less than a decade before. She was a seamstress with scant formal education. The little English she spoke was heavily accented.

She expressed her love by being with. And since my mother and I were…