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sWeet sixteen
starting to enjoy the role as big-brother-to-be; and our having a dinner party for which I actually did some of the cooking (!), probably for the last time, with Beth and Jeff, the couple who had fixed us up, and one other couple. We had drinks in the beautiful family room that Kathy had just recently built, and then we feasted on steak and potatoes and onions (my contribution) on the dining room table, which was normally laden with piles of books, coats, sports equipment, and innumerable other things but was now visible to me for the first time, as Kathy had cleared it for the occasion.
There was also the mandatory trip, early on, for me to meet Kathy’s entire family. I had already met her folks, but I had not had the pleasure of meeting the Lohmans (not to be confused with one of my mother’s favorite haunts, which might have sounded the same but was spelled differently), who consisted of Kathy’s sister, Nancy; her husband, Steve; and their three young children: Molly, who was (and remains) eight months older than Dan; Peter, about two and one-half years younger than Molly; and Joanna, three years younger than Peter. For that pur- pose, Kathy and I drove to Nancy and Steve’s home in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was there that I first really encountered the culture shock of dining in a home that was not filled with loud, talkative, sometimes critical, sometimes contentious, always storytelling, and (did I mention talkative?) older Jewish people.
I felt as if I were in a scene from Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, as, after pleasantries were politely exchanged, we got down to the business of having lunch—and there was absolute, dead, silence at the table! And this seemed to go on and on, with the possible exception of requests that the pepper (pepper! who uses pepper?) be passed. I was completely con- vinced either that I had committed a terrible faux pas (but I hadn’t really eaten anything other than the soup, which did not, I hasten to add, con- tain beans) or that there was some inexpressible secret that the family was opposed to the idea that Kathy would marry again or that, if she would, she would chose someone like me. Of course, as it turns out, and as Kathy reassured me: In her family, nobody ever really said anything that constituted surplusage, nobody was noisy, not even the children (at
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