For some young kids, back in the day (right after dinosaurs became extinct, the 1950’s to be exact), having an extended family living only blocks apart from one another was both a wondrous experience, but at times a rather early draft of what I might imagine a Stephen King novel looked like. So many cousins, combinations some very old, sickly or still speaking (at least in our Jewish family) a mixture of English, Yiddish, and Romanian, as well as kids our age seemingly as normal as us (at the time I had no idea dysfunctional family dynamics were normal.)
My Grandma Braff’s oldest sister named Mima, which was not her real name (later in life we discovered it was Sophia) but Mima was a slang used for the word, Aunt in either Romanian or Yiddish, but no matter what, when we would visit, Aunt Mima, as she sat on the edge of the bed, located in the parlor of her house (a parlor for a bedroom, of all places!) We would first walk over, lean in and kiss her on her forehead. (As an aside, she was the only older female relative from my Grandmother’s side of the family who did not grab our cheeks and state “what a Punim (face) and kiss us on our lips, creating I am certain our first case of herpes.) Be polite my mother would insist and ask Aunt Mima how she is feeling (at this stage of knowing her, she had always been frail and in some kind of pain…and we hated to ask her how she was feeling because the response was so depressing and long, and as she did respond she would for the entire time be holding our outstretched arms).
Her response: “I am usually not feeling well, but this is a fact, I could feel better and might get better, but I know it is not so, but there is hope and so at the end of the day, I will tell you I am well, and you all will hurry out of here thinking the good news. But there is a truth some people do not understand, only I know it because it is my body, my life. But you know what, it could be months or days…no one knows but Hashem (God)
This was my Grandmother's sister, we were told anyone older than us (except kids in high school or college) were to be revered and respected, and no questions asked. We were told ESPECIALLY relatives were to be listened to, maybe not totally believed, but if they said something, we could learn from them. Then when we the younger generation became that 20 something and older demographic of the family, we then were told some other information, the sum of it being that all you heard, may NOT have always been true, or accurate…Later, I discovered a psychological term called PROJECTION: Projection is a psychological defense mechanism in which individuals attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person. For example, a husband who has a hostile nature might attribute this hostility to his wife and say she has an anger management problem.
And now it is 2020, and for many, albeit the most current year of our calendar, (some feel we are in the days of the dinosaur,) Our wannabe dictator, and worried President, that jail time is finally looming for him sans his re-election, has projected his plans to create chaos and a constitutional crisis for all Americans, by stating, "Usually at the end of the evening, they say, 'Donald Trump has won the election, Donald Trump is your new president,'" Trump said during a press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort. "You know what? You're not going to know this — possibly if you really did it right — for months or for years. Because these ballots are all going to be lost, they're all going to be gone," Trump said, repeating false claims about vote-by-mail ballots.
