Till We Meet Again Read Online Free

living room, I made small talk as I worked my way to the den. Here is where my grandparents spent every evening in their matching Lazy Boy chairs reading the newspaper or a book while Rita and I sat on the black leather bound couch watching TV and discussing our friends from school. There in the den a large stone fireplace had a blazing fire going. Surrounded by walls of books, several people stood talking, eating and drinking. Off in the corner stood our Episcopalian Priest, Father Rogers, in a deep conversation with the Rabbi from the local temple. I spent a lot of time in that Synagogue the year I turned 13. It seemed every month I was attending a Bar Mitzvah for one of my classmates. Expecting to hear some deep theological conversation I walked by them waving and saying, “Hello” as I heard Rabbi Bernstein say, “Yes, I agree but, I don’t know if the Rangers have what it takes to make the playoffs this season.”
    Shaking my head while laughing to myself, I walked into the breakfast room with its picture glass window. There the bar was set up as well as a table full of hors d’oeuvres. Since I was a senior in high school and a full year before I was of legal drinking age, I knew to keep walking past the bar, even if my Uncle George wasn’t giving me a look that said, “Don’t even think about it.” As an Assistant District Attorney in New York City, he had that way of looking at you that said, “You don’t want to test me.” Passing the opening for the back stairs, which were once used as the servants’ staircase back when the house was first built, I went straight to the hors d’oeuvres table and tried to find something I might like. Gefilte fish, Caviar? Why did Grandpa love that stuff so much? I wouldn’t even try it…ugh. Darn! No more “pigs in the blanket”. I decided on a deviled egg, liver pate, and crackers. I got a glass of punch and walked through the swinging door of the kitchen to see if I could steal some “pigs in the blanket”.
    A lot of action was going on in the big kitchen…Ovens opening and closing, plates and bowls being filled. People were running back and forth. In the middle of the hustle and bustle stood my mother’s sister, Aunt Catherine. You could always find her in the kitchen doing whatever needed to be done. While I lived with my grandparents in White Plains, Aunt Catherine still lived at home and was the one who took care of me. I had no recollection of living with my mother and my absentee father, the earliest memories I have are of being with my Aunt Catherine…doing my hair; shopping for my clothes; buying me a gold fish almost every Saturday because it would be dead within a few days; watching her as she listened to her Dionne Warwick and Barbara Streisand albums over and over again. And hiding under the covers while she watched her scary movies on the small black and white TV in her bedroom. Every memory I have for the 1 st nine years of my life included Aunt Catherine. We were always together or at least that is what I thought as a little kid. The day my grandparents, Rita and me moved further north and she stayed in White Plains to continue her teaching career was the worst day I could remember as a child. I felt like a piece of me was gone. I never really felt the same again. Even now that I was a teenager and she had a family of her own I still felt like that piece of me was missing every time she left after a family function.
    It didn’t matter that my grandparents had hired two ladies to assist with the Open House; Aunt Catherine was still in the kitchen taking care of things before anyone else even realized there was a need. “Hey Simone,” she said with a smile as she poured something from a pot and into a large blue bowl. “Can you bring this into the dining room please?” Like the rest of the women in my family, Aunt Catherine’s face did not have one wrinkle even though she was in her mid-forties.
         “Sure,” I said smiling back and