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A Hard Pass

Turns out, fourth time’s the charm

By Joi Floyd

Illustration by Harry Blair

It is an unusually hot summer day, even by North Carolina standards, when my stepdad, Gerald, finishes his latest project. He’s been working all summer on a go-cart. Hands sticky from my melting popsicle, I, a thrill-seeking 15-year-old, am ecstatic.

Both a mechanic and welder, he built it from scratch with a spare motor and leftover materials found under our carport. Then, he spray painted it teal to match our trampoline. When revved up, it makes a VROOM sound just like the sports cars he’s been fixing up the past few years.

Ready to race around, my sister, Bre, and I eagerly hop in. Within seconds, all three of us are strapped in and pulling out of the driveway. We swerve around the neighborhood, wind blowing through our hair and nothing but the sound of the motor and an occasional happy scream from the three of us.

Gerald spins the wheel effortlessly. His way of driving includes carefully gracing every turn with ease and he has no problem going a little over the speed limit to enhance the exciting squeals. “Who wants to drive next?” he asks as we pull back into the driveway. Bre jumps into the driver’s seat first. Her love for driving started early — obviously inherited from her car-loving birth-father, Gerald. And, just like him, she steers effortlessly. Swerving through the streets of the neighborhood like a professional NASCAR driver, she only steers toward home when we beg.

“Your turn, Joi,” Gerald says. I take the wheel, though I don’t quite have my drivers license, and immediately drop the clutch, sending us zooming backwards down the driveway. “Brake!” he yells, trying to keep his calm after the sudden rush. And brake I do, sending us flying forward — thank God for seatbelts. Every move after is just as disastrous. Speeding feels too fast, yet braking hits too hard. And the turns? Well, I crashed us straight into the curb. In no time, I discover that the NASCAR gene is a case of nature versus nurture and I don’t have it.

As I approach 16, I want nothing to do with getting my drivers license, but Gerald insists that it’ll be good for me. So, next thing I know, I’m in Driver’s Ed, scowling at the instructor. Only a few sharp turns and sudden brakes later, I manage to pass the class. But that only means I have to take the official test at the most hated place on Earth, the DMV. Luckily for me, but unluckily for most of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic means I don’t have to take the driving portion, but that doesn’t mean a guaranteed pass. In fact, I end up failing three times in a row — what even is a three-point turn?

“You’ll get it next time,” my mom says as I came out of the DMV after each failure, tears rolling down my face — somehow I don’t think she fully believes it herself.

I’m determined to make the fourth test my final. “Back again?” the DMV lady asks with a snicker as I march into the building, head held high. Indeed I was. Twenty minutes and four missed questions later, I pass. A cheesy grin grows across my face as the DMV lady snaps my picture for my license — and no, I will not be back again.

Though I didn’t start as the strongest, I grow confident in my driving skills and knowledge every day. Who needs a NASCAR gene when you have perseverance and a willingness to learn? Now that I know the ins and outs of the road, maybe I can tackle parallel parking — or maybe not.  OH

Joi Floyd is assistant editor of O.Henry magazine. When not spending all her time lost in a book or catching up on a TV show, you’ll most likely find her outside wandering around in search of a stray cat to feed.

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The Student Teacher

A young stranger imparts a universal lesson

By David Spagnola

Illustration by Harry Blair

Pulling my warm, professionally-detailed BMW M5 out of the garage into a freezing storm, I drive down Cone Boulevard past a young man carrying some sort of bundle. It’s gloomy-dark and his back is to me and to traffic. For the life of me, I don’t understand how he made it this far without being run down. Hazard lights on, I roll the window down and say, “Hey.” 

He gives me a nonchalant, “What’s up, man.” 

I lower the window and ask him if he wants a ride. He leans in and looks around like it’s a spring day and says, “I’m all wet.” I reach across and open the door with an, “It’s just a car. Get in.” 

He does. 

“Where to?” I ask. 

“School,” he says. “Page.”

He’s soaked to the skin. 

“Don’t you have a raincoat or anything?” I ask. 

“I do,” he says. “I used it to wrap up my books.” I look incredulous and when he sees it, he says something that maybe he’d been waiting all his life to say: “Man, education is everything. You ain’t nothing without an education.” 

I don’t need to be told that. At 19, I had become a steel worker. The job was OK and the pay was great, but I soon realized what an education would lead to, which it did: being a street cop, then a homicide detective, now a business owner.

I drop him off and tell him that I bet the principal can find him some clothes to wear the rest of the day. Maybe not exactly in his style, but they’d be dry. He smiles and tells me to have a good day.

I do. 

The universe has a lot to teach us, but I am left wondering, “Who are the teachers, and who are the students?” At 70, just when I think I know it all, I meet a guy who, at 15, teaches me something that I didn’t even see coming till he was gone.

For the next couple hours as I watch my passenger seat dry off, I feel the karma a career cop gets from helping someone, especially someone who wants to get to school. But it’s not about that at all. 

When it hits, I realize it is about a 15-year-old kid reminding me that young people will be replacing us some day. And they are already on the job, preparing through thick or thin, whatever it takes, because, hey man, education is everything.  OH

Originally from Youngstown, Ohio, David Spagnola moved to Greensboro to join the police department, where he served for 30 years, 22 of those as a sex crime and homicide detective. He earned his degree in criminal justice from Guilford College. These days, he is a women’s self-defense trainer and consultant. Email him at davespag@gmail.com.

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George the Wonder Cat

A king of many hearts

By Marianne Gingher

One dreary afternoon, I hear my cat door flap open and glimpse a small orange cat slipping towards the kitchen. My own cat, Dewey Moon, is sawing logs on the sofa beside me. Normally, if any stranger breaches his castle, Dewey puffs to twice his size and leaps to investigate.

I follow the little orange guy, and he notes me matter-of-factly. In fact, I have never met a less intimidated cat burglar. I scoop him up — a featherweight. One eye is blue and one is green. He has a white face, white chest, white paws. Otherwise, he is the pale-orange color of a Dreamsicle. There is immense trust in that little poker face. 

His tag informs me that he lives a few houses away; he has people, but what a cold, rainy day it is, and so I feed him. In my house, if you appear to be waylaid by trouble or weather, I feed you. He eats a bowlful and follows me back to the sofa. Dewey awakes, stretches, rubs noses with the little guy, offers to make him a cup of tea. Little guy says he’s already had refreshments, then makes himself right at home, licking a few remaining raindrops from his fur and nuzzling into a throw-blanket. After his nap, he meows to be let out, and I watch him trot confidently in the direction of his home.

The next day, I walk to his house and find him taking a sun bath on his porch. We wave fondly at one another.

“Do you know that cat?” I ask a neighbor.

“Everybody knows George,” the man says. “He’s feeling displaced these days.”

“Why?”

“There’s a new baby at his house.”

•

The baby’s name is Owen. I soon meet the entire family because George loses his collar over the weekend, and I report it to his mom, Madison. “I’ve already ordered a new one,” she says. “Thanks for looking out for him. Hope he’s not being a nuisance.”

I confess that I fed him, that he is pals with Dewey and that the three of us sometimes nap together. I suggest that, if George became my cat, it would be OK.

“Making friends is George’s thing,” Madison tells me. “He gets free range because we want him to be his authentic self. You’ll love his new collar. It fits a bon vivant like George.”

It is a red bowtie.

•

Everybody who meets George loves him. He shows up whenever I have visitors and glad-hands around the room, like he’s running for office.

•

One Halloween, George is hanging out with Dewey and me when Madison and husband Carr bring their kids by to trick-or-treat. After she sees them together, daughter Ellis starts planning George’s and Dewey’s wedding.

•

George is 18, possibly older. He also has serious kidney issues. But does he ever whine about his ailments? No, siree. Life is for the living, George insists, batting around a cat toy, then jumping on Dewey’s head.

•

When Madison lets me know that George has died (“gone over the rainbow” is how she puts it), after I have wept a good long while, I feel the need to write about him. The writer Sandra Cisneros once told me that the way to write about grief is to write about the presence of a lost loved one, not their absence. And my dear friend George keeps on being present. Through him, I’ve become friends with his funny and spirited family, a gift that endures.

He was not my cat, and maybe he was not a cat at all. You begin to think that way when your doorway has been brightened by a radiant someone who seems to transcend the limitations of their species while making the world a better place.  OH

Marianne Gingher is a Greensboro writer, artist and puppeteer who lives with her beloved cat, Dewey Moon.

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Uncle Dan’s Quarter

A man who changed the way I saw the world

By Cynthia Adams

Illustration by Harry Blair

My dad bought a 75-acre farm near Reed Gold Mine in Cabarrus County, site of the first documented commercial gold found in 1799, way before the California 49ers struck gold out West. The story goes that Conrad Reed, son of a farmer, discovered a glittery, 17-pound rock in Little Meadow Creek that proved a useful doorstop. Three years later a jeweler in Fayetteville recognized the Reed doorstop was actually a hunk of solid gold. 

Conrad’s father, John, eventually developed a bona fide mining operation, encouraged by the discovery of a 28-pound nugget a few years after the doorstop find. Other mines in neighboring counties opened and flourished, including one with a thriving town dubbed Gold Hill.

Gold Hill eventually produced sufficient gold to result in the establishment of the Charlotte Mint. Charlotte city fathers fretted, wishing the Queen City would thrive like Gold Hill seemed to be doing. It is more than a little ironic that Charlotte’s present-day fortunes were built upon cold, hard cash.

Mining in the state continued until the Civil War claimed able-bodied men, and underground mining ceased altogether at Reed Mine in 1912. Most North Carolina mines were shuttered, even after Cornish miners immigrated there seeking their fortunes once tin mining was exhausted in Cornwall.

Another doorstop never surfaced. But the hope never died. There were rumors, always, of small nuggets found in the Rocky River, which threaded through Cabarrus County past our family farm. 

Frequently, my dad would muse that our horses and livestock were probably making their deposits on top of veins of gold.

As kids, we would climb down the weedy banks into the swift river current, risking snapping turtles and water moccasins to pretend we were panning for gold.

We even knew a prospector, Uncle Dan, who lived in a dirt-floored shack on a dirt road, which lacked electricity or running water well into the 1960s. He was a hermit, a raggedy-looking man, and a source of fascination to all the children in our small community.

Uncle Dan spent most of his days panning in the river, hoping to find a nugget. Unbeknownst to our parents, we would knock at his rickety door and visit. I was too young to attend school, and, in that time, we were allowed to play and roam freely with the understanding we were to be home for meals and bath time. If he was home, we would delightedly crowd into his dark shack, with the only light shining through the boards and the open door as the primary illumination.

Uncle Dan, painfully shy and pitifully poor, was gentle and always kind to us. He was our friend. Sometimes he would show us minute bits of gold and we would gawk.

We children wished him luck and hoped he would have a windfall.

Once, as I played outside busily outlining a playhouse in the dirt with sticks, Uncle Dan passed by the chain link fence separating our farm from the neighbors. “Morning,” I called to him. He stopped. 

“Morning, Miss Cindy,” he answered.

This exchange felt very grown-up, having an adult friend. I grinned a toothy grin — the Tooth Fairy had recently visited — showing the gap in my teeth.

His sun-battered face, wrinkled and dry, spread into a smile. Uncle Dan reached into his pocket and offered something. I stepped closer. He pushed a quarter to me through the fence.

I thanked him and pocketed the prize. Now I had two quarters — one from the Tooth Fairy and one from Uncle Dan!

Were there any coins left for him to feed himself? Even we kids noticed the cans in his shack of pork-and-beans and Vienna sausages.

Quarters still remind me of this moment. A man who had nothing to give freely offered something that was most likely needed and precious to him. 

And that act opened something in me that has never closed. OH

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Spice Relief

Handling jalapeño pain

By Walt Pilcher

I may not be a cultural cuisine aficionado, but I have a nose for Mexican food.

Smoky scents from carne asada or grilled chicken in citrus and spices. The earthy heat of roasted jalapeños or chipotles. Mildly nutty corn or wheat tortillas. The savory sizzle of refried beans. Rice sautéed with onions and garlic. Zesty cilantro and lime. Stale cerveza (beer). Uniquely familiar aromas. I’ll know I’ve stepped into a taqueria even if there’s no telltale mariachi music. And with good reason.

Return with me now to the summer of 1965, where I am about to experience both a startling cultural trauma and a culinary revelation of world-class magnitude. My new wife, Carol, and I are driving cross-country to California for grad school and work. Late one evening, we stop for dinner in lonesome Wagon Mound, New Mexico, population 695. Not much is there except the iconic butte the town is named for and what appears to be the only restaurant, a Mexican establishment, the name of which, as far as we can tell, is the single word on a neon sign: “EAT.” We are starving.  

We place our orders. Carol wisely chooses a cheeseburger, but I must show off my machismo and try something adventurous, a spicy Mexican dish with a baffling name now lost to memory. The food comes and it smells good. As Carol savors the first bite of her burger and I am just about to dig into my mystery meal, I notice the kitchen staff surreptitiously peering out as if to see how the gringo (me) will react to what they have prepared. Undaunted, I fork a mouthful.  

¡Madre mía! First my lips burn. Then my tongue does a Mexican “hot” dance. My nose runs. Soon my throat is a tunnel of fire. Gulping my icy Coke does nothing to relieve the pain. I dare not look at the kitchen staff lest they reap satisfaction from their little joke. Quickly, in an almost involuntary reaction as when one claps a protective hand on a fresh wound, I grab the tortilla that accompanies my meal and slap it on the flames. Amazingly, the pain stops! ¡Qué sorpresa! The gringo has prevailed!

I do not leave a generous tip.

But maybe I should have. It turns out tortillas and other wheat-based foods contain starch and sometimes a bit of fat, both of which can help absorb capsaicin, the compound that causes the burning sensation. A possible contributing factor is that wheat contains traces of humulene and myrcene, terpene compounds that fool the brain into not feeling the topical discomfort. Flour tortillas, bread, dinner rolls, pita and all sorts of grainy foods seem to extinguish the fire. Foods made from hops, like beer and sauces, are richer in the terpenes and potentially have even more of this soothing effect. Science aside, I only know when I touched the tortilla to my lips, the pain went away. Knowing wheat-based foods are an antidote for spice pain has proven quite useful to me and to friends with whom I’ve shared this knowledge during travels worldwide and in the wide range of ethnic eateries here at home.  

Whenever I inhale the distinctive aromas of Mexican cuisine, my thoughts return to Wagon Mound and the prank-turned-epiphany that changed my life. How pleasurable eating spicy food has become since that transformative experience. And now I know why beer washes down Mexican so well.

I have not gone back to Wagon Mound other than in my mind. I wonder if the EAT restaurant is still there. Has it become a chain? I have seen other EAT signs in my travels, so maybe.

If it has, I hope the staff is still pranking the gringos. 

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Farm to Fable

A handmade bench sings its story

By John Adamcik

Our family’s kitchen bench sings. Farm songs, mostly. Warm and friendly tunes, passed down through generations.

Some might think it’s the old wood and nails, creaking in protest after decades of heavy use.

Or North Carolina heat and humidity working on the wood Grandpa chose when he built the plank bench for his family of 11 to use in their Michigan farmhouse.

I know better. It’s what’s inside the bench that makes it serenade.

My mother was an upholsterer. When I was young, she’d pay me to remove fabric from heirloom sofas, loveseats and armchairs. By 10, I’d learned how to pull rusty staples and tacks from a frame without damaging the antique, hand-carved wood. I could look at a piece in Mom’s shop and tell you whether the innards were foam, straw or horsehair. 

Just as I can tell you what’s in almost any upholstered furniture, I know what’s in our family’s bench.

It’s stuffed with memories from family gatherings, where Grandma kept court at the dining room table. Her encouraging smile remains in my mind’s eye, a reminder of her unconditional love for all of us in her family. There’s residue from orange Kool-Aid she kept in the fridge for frequent visits by us grandkids. Dregs of the beer Dad and my uncles drank, the kind advertised on TV during Detroit Tigers games in the ’70s. Smoke from cigars the guys enjoyed while playing pinochle in the living room (once the farm granary, before the grandparents moved the family there in the 1940s).

There are echoes of laughter and prayers. Grandpa’s jokes, told in half-Polish/half-English. Silhouettes of the tornado of 1951. An undecipherable howl from an uncle struck by lightning as a boy (he lived). A soft groan of shock from another uncle when he got skunked as a youth.

My grandparents were humble people whose lives reflected their faith, love of family and commitment to our mid-Michigan community. The city’s main employer — Dow Chemical, at the time the world’s largest single chemical plant — emerged in the 1800s to mine and transform the area’s subterranean salt deposits into useful components. Grandpa worked there. Dad and my uncles, too. Salt of the Earth, some said. The area. The people. My grandparents.

The bench is packed with testimonies of their farm life.

Early in Mom’s career she lovingly reupholstered the bench for Grandma with embossed, golden polyvinyl chloride fabric jokingly advertised as the shed “hyde” of a mythical creature (but which came from a factory much like our town’s). Ornamental brass tacks still hold the fabric on the bench’s scuffed brown paint.

When Mom moved to Florida years later, she grew as an artisan. Her skill and work ethic built a client list of the retired, the wealthy and the famous. When a fashion model’s Siesta Key home was featured in a national design magazine, Mom’s work filled every page of that spread. 

My wife and I inherited the bench. I’m keeping it “as-is.” No repainting or recovering it. My kids can do that someday, if they want.

Mom stays with us now. She enjoys sitting on the bench, visiting with family and friends or keeping watch on the stove. The bench sings to her more than anyone.

I understand, because I know the song.

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Please Pass the Salt

Tickled pink, but feeling blue

By David Theall

Bad news in my email just now: “FINAL NOTICE: Your Discount on the Pink Salt Weight Loss Solution Expires Today.” Unless I can come up with $79 fast, all of my friends are going to be posting about the great deal they got on Pink Salt Weight Loss Solution and I’ll be the unlucky loser, relegated to plain-old white salt, no weight loss solution in sight.

With my customary Mountain Dew in hand I’m compelled to learn more. What is pink salt and how do I get this miracle weight loss solution? Knowing that sometimes there can be unsavory operatives in the weight loss industry, it’s a relief to see that the email came from Diet Science Review, an organization that likely rivals The New England Journal of Medicine in addressing critical emerging topics in modern medicine.

I then make the dream-crushing mistake of using the web to learn more about the Review. From the AI feature on Google: “As of October 2025, there is no major publication titled ‘Diet Science Review.’ The name appears to be used in some blogs and for book promotions, rather than representing a formal scientific source.”

Damn! My dream is not completely crushed, however, because the email also mentions Harvard researchers . . . more than once! “Harvard Researchers Shocked: Women Are Using This ‘Pink Salt Hack’ to Drop 20 Pounds Without Giving Up Burgers or Wine.” That stops me, dead in my tracks. I don’t want to give up burgers or wine, sure, but the Harvard researchers only mention women. Is the Pink Salt Weight Loss Solution gender specific?

I guess that’s it for this guy. No miracle pink salt for me. I can’t target my arm, belly and thigh fat while continuing to decimate area buffets. I visit the website link in the email to see if there’s a male version, but find this statement instead: “Some reviews or testimonials may be fictitious.” So, I’m starting to think all this “miracle weight loss” talk should be taken with a grain of salt (pink salt, to be specific).

Honestly, this whole weight loss business is new to me. Is it common for these products to be gender specific? Does the whole internet think I’m an overweight woman? Should I try to find a Blue Salt Weight Loss Solution?

More bad news. After checking online, I learn there’s no male alternative for the pink salt hack. Digging further, I discover that there is no such thing as blue salt either. With no way to redress this senseless gender inequality, maybe I’ll just go out and discover blue Himalayan salt for my own self, even if it means bringing food dye to find it.

Then, using retired meth lab equipment purchased at a New Mexico police auction, I’ll cook up a formula for Dave’s Famous Himalayan Blue Salt Weight Loss Solution. We’ll keep production cost low and sell it for $59 per half-ounce bottle. We’ll hire Zach Galifianakis or Jack Black to post on socials and — bingo! — I get to retire rich, relinquishing all concern for my public appearance as well as basic daily hygiene.

No weight loss, no problem! 

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Food, Actually

If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around the table

By David Claude Bailey

This is a love story. It began 60 years ago.

Our new Boy Scout executive, Wofford Malphrus, is explaining how we’ll have more guns, more bows and arrows, more everything at summer camp. As he’s leaving, he pulls a photo from his wallet and says, “This is my daughter and some of you will be going to school with her next year.”

I am stunned. She is without doubt the most beautiful woman on the planet. At the same moment, I realize I have zero chances of ever dating her. In fact, at age 15 — shy, one-eyed, gawky, a beatnik wanna-be — I’m yet to have my first date.

Fast-forward two years and my best friend, Spencer, tells me that Anne Malphrus has seen my ’45 Ford army surplus heap of a Jeep and wants to ride in it.

And she does. Double dating with my cousin, Bill, and Anne’s best friend, Mary, we picnic at my uncle’s farm. My mother packs leftover roast duck and blue cheese, while Bill’s mom sends deviled eggs and savory lemon bars. It’s love at first bite as two foodies feast away. In sprinkling rain on the way back to the car, our first kiss comes as we huddle under the picnic blanket.

We remain an item through Anne’s freshman year at UNCG, when we elope and get married under our Greek professor’s whispering pines. A year later, we take a sabbatical from school and hitchhike all over Europe, mostly in Spain and Greece where we can afford to stay in a hotel instead of a youth hostel. We discover heady gazpacho, goat cheese and succulent melon served with paper-thin slices of Iberian ham. Hello, rabo de toro (bull’s tail stew), calamari and bacalao (salt cod with tomato sauce).

Time passes and we’re still together — me, a reporter covering the earliest days of the Space Shuttle; Anne, an artist and food columnist. On our 13th anniversary, Anne tells me no more excuses, no more delays, it’s time to have a child.

We do, first Sarah and then Alice. And so begins the most magical years of our lives, reliving youth through our children’s eyes, building villages out of twigs and rocks for Terabithians, reading them the same fairy tales our mothers read us. Our girls learn to ride bikes, swim, make and keep friends, drive cars. We blink and they’re off to college.

A few years later, Sarah announces she’s moving to Spain. She does and loves it. Over the next 20 years, she manages to acquire a husband, a horse and an apartment in Europe’s equivalent to Myrtle Beach, Mallorca. Gaining Spanish residency, she works in a digital job we barely understand. A cordial divorce follows.

She moves to Málaga and falls for Toni Mayo, a landscape designer, serial entrepreneur and Airbnb owner. After spending Christmas with his family in La Higuera, way up in the mountains, she becomes part of a loving Spanish family, who adopt her without reservation.

Finally, at age 43, Sarah figures out how to have children and presents us with a perfect grandchild, Jeva.

It’s Christmas Eve. As a fire crackles in the hearth, Toni’s mother’s house fills with Jeva’s aunts, uncles, her great grandmother and the world’s dumbest Labrador. Anne and I are on the floor with Jeva, who is now, surprise, a bossy 2-year-old. She is sitting very contentedly in my lap as I read to her, for the 40th time this season, the adventures of Santa Bear. Soon, we sit down to shrimp croquettes, gazpachuelo (a rich fish soup creamy with mayonnaise), antequerano (cod with oranges) and an array of other traditional holiday dishes, washed down with sparkling Spanish cava. Standing up, I propose a toast to love and to family, a family that has adopted me and my loved ones — heart, soul and stomach.

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A Last Last Name

Heading into 50 with a nifty new surname

By Danielle Rotella Guerrieri

At the beginning of our fifth date, I finally knew how to pronounce Tom’s last name. After walking into 1618 Midtown’s entrance on a scorching July evening, the hostess asked if we had a reservation, and he kindly replied, “Yes, it’s under Guerrieri.” Needless to say, I spent a chunk of that dinner silently pronouncing his name in my head.

For the first chapter of my life, I had a unique name that I loved — Danielle Rotella. Easy to pronounce, no middle name. Government forms have three blank spaces for your full name, and I discovered, from frustrated government employees, that I couldn’t leave the “middle name” box blank, because, as one agitated DMV employee told me when I got my first driver’s license in 1991, “It looks like it was left blank by mistake.” I quickly learned to always write “NMN” for “no middle name” in that space.

At 26, I took on a third name when I married my first husband. Scooting Rotella to the middle name spot was a relief, knowing I wouldn’t have to write the three-letter acronym anymore, although I quickly realized that some folks thought I hyphenated my name, and one of my relatives wrote Danielle Rotella-Adams for more than 15 years on my birthday cards.

When I became a mom in my 30s, I wanted my two boys to have middle names, mainly so they didn’t have to deal with the whole “NMN” hindrance. Call it a family legacy or call it lazy for not wanting to scroll through that huge baby-name book a million more times, but both of my sons have Rotella as their middle name. Sleep-deprived and exhausted, I filled out my firstborn son’s birth certificate at Women’s Hospital two days after he entered the world on a sweltering late August day in 2007. I carefully made sure the stern administrator sitting next to me could clearly read my handwriting so there would be no question that he had three names. I love that we share this name, even though, now, as teenagers, my sons may cringe at having an unusual family name. They’d probably rather have something more common there — Peter, Joseph, Andrew or, frankly, anything that isn’t Rotella. 

My 40s took me on a wild ride. With two young boys at home, I went through a divorce, became a single mom, helped care for my own mom after her dementia diagnosis, lived through a pandemic and shifted my career. Don’t get me wrong, there were bright spots, too. It’s also when I met Tom, watched my little sister get married and become a mom, celebrated one brother’s engagement and another’s path to college — a true whirlwind.

Now, at age 50, I’m writing a new chapter at the halfway point of my life — and with a new name. You guessed it, Tom and I are now newlyweds, and I get to switch around my name boxes yet again. Despite the hassle of filling out oodles of online name change requests, there’s a newfound excitement I feel each time I hit “submit.”

Yes, a lot has happened since that fifth date with Tom eight years ago, when I first imagined him being the one I could spend the rest of my days with. Just last week, we walked into GIA’s entrance and were greeted by the smiling host, who asked if we had a reservation.

“Guerrieri,” I said confidently. His eyebrows raised in confusion as he quickly peeked back at his reservation list, then back at my face, my pronunciation clearly not jiving with the name he read.

“It’s pronounced, ‘Gary-air’ and rhymes with ‘derriere,’” I added. The name is nothing like its spelling, but it has distinction and sophistication – exactly how I hope to mark my next 50 years.

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The Light That Binds Brightly

Reflections on traditions

By Ivan Saul Cutler

With warm, fond memories, I cherish my youth, especially those sweet middle childhood years in Compton, the vibrant working-class suburb of L.A. My family, the Cutlers, was the only Jewish family on McDivitt Avenue. We lived happily among many wonderful neighbors and friends.

Religious differences — Catholics, Protestants and Latter Day Saints — made no difference because Jimmy McAuley, Jimmy Hoffman, Craig Lee and Wayne Stiglbauer were my friends, my buddies. Yes, in those halcyon days of my youth, all of us guys were typical boys, doing what boys did together — playing sports, having newspaper routes, riding bikes, goofing off.

On one late-1950s, sunny, Southern California Christmas Day, I arose early. Of course, I knew what day it was. Even though no gift-bearing Santa Claus ever visited my home, my vicarious thrill to see and share their gifts was real, and my friends knew it.

Yes, I couldn’t wait to see what gifts they’d received and join in playing with their new toys and games, while righteously dismissing clothes as a real present.

Just as I was ready to dash out the door, Dad gestured gently with his hand to stop. “Son,” he said in his thick Lithuanian accent, “today is a special holiday for our Christian friends. Your buddies need to be with their families now.”

He was right. Thanks, Dad, for forever imprinting that lesson on my heart that’s been guiding me in life. Respect and honor are the Cutler holiday traditions and best gifts instilled by my immigrant father, Harry.

Now, almost 70 years later, Dad’s no longer here, but I’ve embraced those enduring values and then some. Back then as the Jewish kid in the neighborhood, I could rejoice in the distinct year-end holiday differences of Hanukah and Christmas, yet savor the exhilarating similarities of the radiating light of my heirloom Menorah (an eight-branch candelabra my Grandfather Meyer Cutler handmade in 1936 for my father and his two brothers) and my friends’ glowing Christmas trees, which I helped decorate every year.

My father’s respect-honor ethos teaching remains bright, illuminating and enhancing my diverse relationships with all people I encounter. It’s my father’s enduring gift of wisdom — the presents of presence — that keeps on giving all year.  

Hanukah (dedication in Hebrew), the bright eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, commemorates the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 165 B.C.E. (before the common era) by the Maccabees after its desecration by the Syrian Greeks.

Hanukah’s brightness usually occurs in late November or December, depending on its coincidence on the Hebrew lunar calendar, 25 Kislev, corresponding this year to December 15 to 22, with the first candle kindled on December 14.

Although Hanukah is a post-Hebrew-Bible (Torah) holiday, the metaphor of bright light in the year’s shortest days warrants sharing and receiving its fortified reflection in Christmas brightness. For years, a joy of the season has been kindling the Hanukah candles with non-Jewish friends, especially when the leader candle (Shamash) and all eight candles are burning brightly on the eighth night. The glow from everyone’s eyes confirms the warmth of engaged humanity.

Again, this Hanukah, I happily return to that Christmas Day on McDivitt Avenue, when I couldn’t wait to check out the new toys under my friends’ trees. I can still hear Dad’s voice echoing clearly in my mind, even though he’s been gone for more than 46 years: “Wait until this afternoon or tomorrow to be with your friends. You have plenty of time.”

I did then and will continue to.