My Grandmother would bring back Gemini and Apollo mission felt pennants (remember those?) from her trips to Florida and give them to me which I hung on the bedroom wall I shared with my brother. Little did she know the seeds she was planting. And she was my step-grandmother who was a very involved family member after grandpa died unexpectedly and quite an opinionated Hungarian-American. She taught me the meaning of the word "baloney". God I miss Grandma Elsie. At the tender age of ten I was the one who answered her emotional phone call when grandpa died on the couch of heart attack or pulmonary embolism. I could barely understand her through the tears and quickly handed the phone to my dad. Those were dark days and he had a funeral attended by hundreds with three nights of wakes.

Thankfully my mom was great friends with her and kept track of her until she died. I was very fortunate to visit her towards the end of her life with my third wife so she could meet this iron lady and experience her presence. She was divorced early in life and raise her son working at Marshall Fields in Chicago when being a single mother bringing home the bacon wasn't very common. She paid for it with knees that had fairly dissolved by the time she was elderly. She didn't give a shit what people thought of her and forged her own way through life. Pretty ballsy for a woman in the forties and fifties. She has always been one of my personal heroes. Every now and then when I'm faced with some difficulty in life, her voice comes back to haunt me in a very good way, putting me back on track.