Joyce SteinMy mother, Joyce Stein, was born Elaine Joyce Marcus on Feb. 10, 1931 in Los Angeles, California. After four days, her name was officially changed to Joyce Elaine. Her father, Edward, was a first-generation immigrant from Kiev, who came over as a bab; her mother, Victoria, was born in Chicago, the youngest of 10 in a family newly arrived in the US from Liverpool. Joyce was the eldest of two girls, with Carole coming along in 1934. Edward sold display cases and refrigeration units to markets and managed to stay employed throughout the depression. Victoria (known by her grandchildren as Grandma Vic), was nonetheless unable to cope with raising the girls on her own and was helped by her mother, Grandma Eva, who lived with the Marcus family in Hollywood until she passed away when Joyce was 12. Joyce was smart. She went to Fairfax High in Hollywood and started at UCLA at age 16. She met my father, Arthur Stein, at UCLA and they were married in 1952. She was 21 and he was 24. They were into left-wing politics and jazz. They waited a bit to have kids, but then had three in quick succession: Abbott in 1958, Adam in 1960 and me, Barney, in 1962. While Art pursued a career in hospital administration, Joyce worked in offices before the kids were born and went back to work by the late '60s for the LA Unified School District, working in HR for several years before becoming a high-school math teacher from the mid-'70s until her retirement in the early 1990s. Art had a major stroke in 1988, living for 13 more years, at first in rehab, later at a VA nursing home; Joyce pursued her dream of travel on her own, often with groups, but never with my father. Still, she visited him regularly when she was in town. My mother was a firebrand. She worked in local politics, she consumed every kind of art, she traveled to the third world many times, to the Gobi Desert, to the Okavango Delta, to the Iranian mud city of Bam before it was destroyed, to the Three Rivers Gorge in China before it was flooded. She camped out in the Australian Outback when she was over 75 years old. She was endlessly social and loved meeting new people, managing to communicate with hand signals if no common language, however broken, could be found. She could worry with the best of them, but she really wasn't timid. At all. I'm not sure what led her to poetry. She wasn't inclined to it when we were growing up. And she was always the math person: practical, technical, able to grapple with any complex Read More Read Less