For instance, I asked her the other day, "Hey, Marty, who do you like in the NBA playoffs?"
"You went and bet against the Bulls again, didn't you?" she scolded. "You putz! Even Rodman can't bring them down."
I mentioned Marty in a column once, drawing snide remarks from colleagues wanting to know more about this cupcake I was taking up with.
I had glib answers. But the fact was, I didn't have the slightest idea who Marty was. I didn't know why she was a woman. I didn't know why she had a male name. All I knew was that she had been there as long as I could remember to set me straight whenever I got carried away with myself.
Then my mom called, laughing her little gray head off.
It seems when I was a toddler, I had an imaginary friend named Aunt Martha who I pulled around in my little red wagon. It seems further that I mumbled as badly then as I do now and sometimes pronounced her name something that sounded like Marty.
"I hope she's not literally on your shoulder," Mom said. "From the way you labored at pulling that wagon, she must have weighed a ton."
Thanks, Mom. So you're saying that I'm two months away from grandfatherhood and I'm still carrying around an imaginary friend from my earliest childhood. You were always even better than Marty at keeping me humble.
It struck me that Mom is about the only one left who remembers these things about me. And her memory is slipping every day. I can't decide if that's a horrifying thought or a relief.
It got me thinking about other things from my toddler days that I wished I still had.
The first thing I wanted back was the child's sense of seeing new situations as opportunities rather than threats. I've been working on that with Marty's help ("What are you afraid of, you putz?") and I'm finding you can actually regain some openness to new ideas in middle age.
Mostly, I miss the people from my childhood who have passed - my dad, my grandparents, my aunts Lauretta, Millie and Fanny. They're all buried at the same cemetery. When I visit, the number of stops I make is depressing.
Then there are the people who are alive but not in my life as much as I'd like. My cousin Paul is smart, witty and fun. We played together a lot as kids and I looked up to him like an older brother. Now I rarely see him except at those damned funerals.
I see my Uncle Henry and Aunt Esther and Uncle Otto whenever I'm in Los Angeles, but I don't get there often. E-mail has been great for keeping in touch with my sisters Debbie and Marilyn and my brother Rick, but I would have liked to have harassed their kids more in their formative years.
I thought of creating living memories by naming my kids after my parents or my Bubbie, but Jewish people think it's bad luck to name babies after living folk.
You would have thought I was a hired assassin when I ran the idea past Bubbie.
"Why don't you just get a bullet and shoot me already," she said. For effect, she gave me that sigh of profound Hebrew burden and held out her arms. "Here, cut my wrists."
At which point Marty butted in. "Leave the poor woman alone, you putz. Don't you know what she's been through?"
