Pretending to Be a Ninja...

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Yesterday, Facebook sent me the following invitation from my niece:

"[Your niece] invited you to join the Facebook group 'you may not be able to tell ...but im a pro at pretending to be a ninja'."

I responded to my niece that I was delighted to join the group, and that I enjoyed much of the narrative that described the purpose of the group, but suggested that my niece consider removing the multiple references to fecal matter.

Later, I saw that of course she hadn't written such vulgar prose, but rather it was done by the person who started the group.

While swimming earlier today, I thought about how I could be her "Aunt Tovah." Aunt Tovah, may her memory be blessed, was my father's (may his memory be blessed, too) sister and I used to send aerogrammes full of pre-teen and then teenaged writing to her in Israel; I loved her for taking me seriously in her responses.

What a treat to receive an aerogramme from Israel just for me. I can still picture my aunt's elongated, script handwriting. I felt so close to her just because of that not-even-terribly-frequent exchange.

Since her death from breast cancer in 1989, I hadn't thought about the letters much until today's swim. Our reflective writing acquainted us with each other in ways that the rest of our family didn't know us, I'm convinced.

The 2007 version of an aunt-niece exchange, apparently, is enabled by Internet social networks. Alas, I don't think either of us even knows what the other's current handwriting looks like.

My aunt, Tovah, was relatively tall, large, with wavy, dark-black hair, olive skin, Multiple Sclerosis, a penchant for romance novels, and spoke Hebrew and English with a southern accent -- she had grown up in D.C.

Her father, my grandfather, may his memory be blessed, died in the '60s, and so did my Swiss-born uncle, Lulu (Ludwig), her husband, may his memory be blessed, when he slipped and fell in their bathtub. She never re-married. Instead, the two widows -- my sabta(grandmother), may her memory be blessed, and my aunt -- lived together till my sabta died when I was 16.

My father flew to Israel for both men's funerals and came back with gray hair. Six months after he came back from his mother's funeral in Israel nearly 20 years later, he died of common bile duct cancer.

Aunt Tovah had a Ph.D. in Food Technology from the University of Maryland and worked for the Tel Aviv Department of Health for her entire career. That translated into her being able to assure us that we were eating the best Israeli ice cream whenever she served it to us in her home. Once, she made me chicken schnitzel and I ordered it a lot when I lived in Chicago because it reminded me of her.

During my junior year in Israel, after I broke my left ankle, my aunt let me spend a convalescent couple of days at her home; mostly I sat in her backyard, by the lemon tree, reading her copy of The Feminine Mystique. To me, my aunt always seemed heroic and stoic, and also sometimes funny.

She recalled, for example, learning Hebrew and calling after some new friends enthusiastically, "L'itriot!"

Later, they corrected her. Tovah thought she was saying, "See you later!" (L'hitra'ot!), but she was actually saying, "To noodles!"

Tomorrow, my niece will graduate from the Jewish day school, where she has been studying for eight years and we'll go to the ceremony. Today, for the first time, I started thinking of how we might be friends as she becomes an adult.

I wonder how she'd describe me to her social network.

How would your niece(s) or nephew(s) describe you?