Butter and olive oil sizzled in my ears. The aroma of lemon and capers filled my nostrils. And all I could see was the face of a handsome man in his late twenties with a bit of facial scruff and kind blue eyes smiling back at me. I opened my mouth to taste the chicken piccata from the end of the fork that he held out in front of him and promptly bolted upright in bed.

“What you need is a good woman,” Esther says, placing a bowl of stuffed cabbage in front of me. Today is Monday, and Monday means chopped meat. Esther is a woman of rituals. She is a Litvak and makes a tomato sauce instead of the white sauce and raisins we use—used to use—in Galitzia.

An old man lives over down there, near the river, where they’ve gone and put up all those new apartments or condominiums or whatever you want to call them, high-rises climbing to the clouds to block the sun from this insignificant part of the world, on what once upon a time had been open prairie, then farmland…

Sundays were days of worship for some families, football for others. For me, it meant a visit to my grandparents where I would watch cartoons on the shag carpet with a cereal-filled stomach. After his morning paper, toast and smoke, my grandfather would join me.