Resemblances, with Margie

I meet Margie on Mondays near her condo by a string of art galleries.

I told her how moved I was to see my grandfather’s face in Sue’s portrait of me, and that reminded her of her resemblance to her father and his brother, Herman. Her Uncle Herman had a small used furniture store in Bay Shore, Long Island, and Margie spent summers with him and his wife.

“He would have gotten on well with your grandfather, because they were both men of more kindness than ambition,” she told me. Her Uncle Herman barely made enough to keep the store open, which was downstairs from his living quarters. “He loved talking to people,” she told me, “and he would talk people out of buying something if he thought they could do better somewhere else. He was a good man, honest and fair, and everybody felt sorry that he and Aunt Mildred couldn’t have children. I was my mother’s least favorite child, so she was glad to ship me off for the summer, but in Uncle Herman’s eyes, I was a star. He said I was good-looking and smart, just like his side of the family, and he’d wink like it was a secret I shouldn’t tell my mother. I was nine when he died, but I’d go on winking at myself in the mirror just like he did, keeping our secret.” 

I’ve added an extra, one of few photos of my grandfather, taken in his Sunday best, with a cigarette holder in his mouth (he smoked Chesterfields) and a pair of basset hound puppies he was fond of, although they turned out to be failures as hunting dogs.