Blog: Family

May 24, 1924 - March 1, 2008

Gloria Alpert, my grandmother, died early Saturday morning. She had been in the hospital since mid-January after a difficult heart valve re-replacement encountered complications.

Raised in Brooklyn, she met the love of her life, Eugene Alpert, at summer camp at the age of 16. Two years later, they were married, and remained in love until "Popop," as his grandchildren called him, passed away almost 60 years later.

In addition to being a loving grandmother, wife and mother, she was a sculptor and feminist activist, among other activities. One of her stone sculptures graced my apartments in California and New York.

Gloria became involved in feminist politics after moving from Lynbrook, Long Island to Boca Raton, Florida in 1977. As President of the Palm Beach County chapter of the National Organization for Women, she assisted with and testified in a groundbreaking NOW case against abortion clinic blockers under Florida's RICO law that stopped Operation Rescue's intimidation of women. She was honored with the Susan B. Anthony Award in 1991 for her efforts, and in later years founded a feminist scholarship fund for young Florida women to be able to attend college.

We love you Grandma, and we will miss you greatly.

I haven't been able to post for a few days, because I was up in New York to see my grandma, who had heart surgery. She's ok so far, but nothing is certain yet.

I posted some of these pictures a while back, but forgot to link to them from the blog. This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving with Stef's family on the actual holiday, then traveled to Boston the following weekend for Thanksgiving with my family and our annual Hanukkah-Christmas celebration with family friends. My parents visited DC two weeks later, followed by Christmas with Stef's family again, for a wonderfully family-packed month.

For my dad's birthday in April, we had a nice family dinner at a nice restaurant... so he was very surprised when a Sunday evening trip to a New England Revolution soccer game, organized by my mom, turned out not only to include Jamie and Erika and my grandmother, visiting from Florida, but also about 20 of his closest friends, plus me and Stefanie visiting from New York. While up there, Stef and I also took the opportunity to spend a beautiful afternoon in Boston.

After relaxing for a week on the Vineyard, I went home to Acton to see my mom in the Acton Community Chorus spring concert, featuring music from the '50s and '60s. The next morning, I watched my dad's Sunday morning soccer game before we spent the afternoon playing bridge.

November is a time to be thankful for the wonderful family and friends that make life special. (Only a small subset are depicted here.)

At Jamie & Erika's wedding reception I took 406 pictures. Here are the best 63, edited for your enjoyment, and concluding the wedding weekend picture panoply. You can see the best of the pictures from the entire weekend here. Once again, mazel tov to the world's best brother and sister-in-law!

Jamie and Erika's wedding day started out more leisurely for most of the family members, but not for the bride and groom - Jamie had to sneak in bites of a sandwich while we were taking the official wedding pictures. The pictures were followed by the signing of the ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, stating that Jamie and Erika had entered into their union this day on "Kerem Martha".

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts marriage certificate is completely gender-neutral: it has two sides, "Party A" and "Party B", with spaces for "Party A Sex" and "Party B Sex", as well as "Surname After Marriage" for each Party (useful for Jamie and Erika, who are both changing their names).

I don't have pictures of the ceremony itself as I was in it, but after I finish getting up my pictures from the entire weekend, I'll post a few of the best from others who did capture more.

At a destination wedding, the rehearsal dinner is a much larger production than at more conventional weddings: everyone is from out of town, so everyone is typically invited, and it's like throwing a second wedding party, though shorter and without dancing. Instead, for entertainment, we watched a slide show which I assembled, featuring incredibly adorable pictures of Jamie and Erika as babies, plus family and friends, all the way up to the present day.

We also played the "shoe game." For those unfamiliar with this game, the bride and groom sit back to back on chairs. Each holds one of the bride's shoes in one hand and one of the groom's shoes in the other hand. (And this game could certainly be played with non-heterosexual couples, as long as the couple ensured some shoe style diversity.) The emcee (in this case, bridesmaid Jodi) reads various questions, like "who eats more?" and "who is the boss in the relationship?" Each member of the couple holds up the appropriate shoe indicating his or her answer. When the two disagree, hilarity ensues. In Jamie and Erika's case, the answers to the above sample questions were undoubtedly "Jamie" (as you can see here) and "Erika" (as you can see here), respectively, while other questions yielded disagreement and a few, like (if I remember correctly) "who mentioned marriage first" left both uncertain as to which shoe to select (a good thing, in the case of that question!)

Hooray for more wedding pictures!

After brunch on Saturday of the wedding weekend, we caught a few rays at the beach before the Alpert family and friends headed inland to set up for the rehearsal dinner at the Sailing Camp Park, a wooded park with a rustic lodge building overlooking Lagoon Pond. I had just put the finishing touches on my photo slideshow tribute to Jamie and Erika, and spent the afternoon at the park nervously checking the video and audio systems and running through the show to ensure the timings were all right.

As the sun set I joined the wedding party on Fuller Street Beach, the site of the wedding ceremony, for the rehearsal itself. Fuller Street is a popular beach for weddings in September, but nobody is allowed to reserve it - you simply have to show up and claim some space. As we arrived for the rehearsal, another couple who had gotten married earlier were on the beach with their photographer to get a few pictures in such a beautiful spot.