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pilgrimage to Del Boca Vista
Apr. 12th, 2010 11:28 pmI went to South Florida over the weekend. A bunch of my dad's family lives in the area -- his mother and grandmother both lived in Delray Beach, which, if you're not familiar with it, is roughly Del Boca Vista from Seinfeld. Uncle Sid (my great-grandmother's brother), still lives there, with his wife Sue, so we collected nearby, and mostly hung out at a hotel by the beach.
Quite a few of us showed up, including family from the Bay Area, whom I hadn't seen since Jacob's Bar Mitzvah last May, and Sid's son Herb, whom I almost never see because he lives in Berlin.
Sid totally beat me at ping-pong. He's quick! I hope I'll be able to see a moving ping-pong ball at 83. He told us about a friend from high school who'd recently found him over the Internet, and sent Sid his book about growing up in Far Rockaway.
Sid's son Herb has done a lot of work in machine translation, at IBM and Siemens, although he's doing telecom work now. I think I'd only met him once before, years ago, and I'd never met his family before. He asked some good, pointed questions about my work, and why it's a PhD-worthy contribution, and had some good insights about morphologically complex languages (the morphological information should cut down on ambiguity), and I felt kind of dumb because I meant to ask about Brown et al, since he was at IBM at about that time, but I couldn't remember their names...
And his kids, Lenny and Myra, are bilingual, really tall, and charming, at 13 and 15. (so is his wife, Anna, except she's neither 13 nor 15). We had an interesting conversation snippet about people being so religious in the US -- they find it kind of odd. Lenny asked me, point-blank, whether I was an atheist. Sort of an odd thing to ask, around here.
Sweeney![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
agonistes always has such interesting things to say about her family and coming to understand where they're from. I can't help but want to have an Ancestral Homeland. I suppose Queens is a pretty good one. I'll have to check it out this summer.
Quite a few of us showed up, including family from the Bay Area, whom I hadn't seen since Jacob's Bar Mitzvah last May, and Sid's son Herb, whom I almost never see because he lives in Berlin.
Sid totally beat me at ping-pong. He's quick! I hope I'll be able to see a moving ping-pong ball at 83. He told us about a friend from high school who'd recently found him over the Internet, and sent Sid his book about growing up in Far Rockaway.
Sid's son Herb has done a lot of work in machine translation, at IBM and Siemens, although he's doing telecom work now. I think I'd only met him once before, years ago, and I'd never met his family before. He asked some good, pointed questions about my work, and why it's a PhD-worthy contribution, and had some good insights about morphologically complex languages (the morphological information should cut down on ambiguity), and I felt kind of dumb because I meant to ask about Brown et al, since he was at IBM at about that time, but I couldn't remember their names...
And his kids, Lenny and Myra, are bilingual, really tall, and charming, at 13 and 15. (so is his wife, Anna, except she's neither 13 nor 15). We had an interesting conversation snippet about people being so religious in the US -- they find it kind of odd. Lenny asked me, point-blank, whether I was an atheist. Sort of an odd thing to ask, around here.
Sweeney
agonistes always has such interesting things to say about her family and coming to understand where they're from. I can't help but want to have an Ancestral Homeland. I suppose Queens is a pretty good one. I'll have to check it out this summer.
