Meme

I think I'll do the meme from The Saturday 9.

1. Where did you grow up? Where do you consider home?
I was born in the Bronx, New York City, and moved to New Jersey when I was two. We lived in a garden apartment complex with about a million other WWII vets and their families. We moved to Fair Lawn, on the west edge of Bergen County, when I was 8, and I've lived here, more or less, since then. It's where I consider home.

2. If you could paint your car any color with no loss in value, what color would it be?
My current car is black, which is actually okay with me. But a red car is nice, or a dark blue. I've always wanted a dark blue car but somehow was never able to get one.

3. What do you think comes after death?
I picture it kind of like the Nexus in the Star Trek Generations movie, where at any given point, you're living some happy memory from your life, with the people you want to be with from that moment. If that's it, then my first moment after death will be walking down the stairs to the den in my parents' house, I'm 8 or 9, and Grandpa is sitting on the yellow sofa, setting up the Meet the Presidents game for us to play. In fact, I think that life after death is just living people remembering you. As long as your memory is alive somewhere, you're living after death.

4. Name a TV show that should NOT be renewed for another season.
I'll go along with The Jersey Shore or Jerseyliscious or any of that crap.

5. If you could have a free subscription to any online service, which would you like to have?
iTunes. Unlimited free iTunes access would be pretty nice.

6. Where did you think you'd be at the age you are now?
Funny question. I don't think I ever pictured where I am now. I pictured where I'd be in 2000 -- age 47 -- and possibly retirement at age 60. But now, retired at 58, I'm in a place I didn't quite envision. Having said that, I would have thought it to be pretty much like it is, but with more money.

7. What did you want to be when you grew up?
I always wanted to be a teacher. It was the only thing I ever considered seriously. During my childhood, I occasionally re-thought what I wanted to teach, and then I landed happily and permanently as a school librarian. I could have been happy teaching English or history as well.

8. If you were to suddenly become famous, and were forced to change names, what would you choose as your stage name?
My nom de plume, selected decades ago, would have been Robin Samuels. Not too flashy, I know. My grandpa's name was Sam Robin.

9. What is the first book that you can remember reading by yourself as a child?
We had no hardcover children's books in our home, other than a hardbound set of Grimm and Andersen's tales, and we had maybe a dozen Little Golden Books. My sister read these to me, and I had them all memorized. In August, 1958, my father sat me on his lap after dinner one night and said that I was a big girl and would be going to school soon and so it was time for me to learn to read. He took my favorite Golden book -- I think it was called Baby's Book, with drawings by Eloise Wilkin (I looked that up; I didn't remember the illustrator) -- and he took his mechanical pencil, which fascinated me, out of his shirt pocket, and showed me how the letters that spelled the word BABY had sounds, and the sounds made the word, etc. Within a few minutes, I was reading the whole book, sounding out the words, solving the mystery. It's the first book I read by myself that I was really reading. The first book I took out of the library, a month or two later, was The Five Chinese Brothers.