I saw Andy Bachman,rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, at the fifth grade graduation of our children. “This is a great day,” I think he said. We shook hands. I checked his blog to see if he’d written anything about his feelings about the event. Instead I found this. This is an excerpt, go here for more.

One of my kids has taken to calling me Norman, my middle name, for my mother’s late father, a kindly

gentleman of Wisconsin, murdered in 1939 and thereby truncating my own mother’s youth and grandmother’s aspirations for the Wonderful Life.

“Norman, how was Shul?” she’ll ask.

Or, “Norman, how’d the Mets do?”

She refers to Milwaukee’s baseball team as the Brew Crew. God bless her.

She quietly sneaked this new moniker–Norman–into the family lore, here in Brooklyn, intuiting among our clan here that an oral remnant of a bygone era would somehow bind us in ways even we parents weren’t clever enough to figure out.

From the mouths of babes, as they say.