I thought I'd start the New Year by capturing some stories about Charlie. These came from David and Megg's wedding, where I got to catch up with Alice and Michele and Dana and Jeannie. It was wonderful to see them all.
Charlie wrote Michele letters when she was away at college. Alice said this would take 3-4 hours, with Charlie sitting at the typewriter with a hat and gloves on because the house was so cold. The letters would say that Nana was fine and everything was okay. Charlie would include some words from the dictionary for Michele to learn, some Yiddish words, and some knock-knock jokes. After Charlie died they discovered that the joke book had check marks for the jokes he had already used.
Michele said Charlie loved reading to little children. He started reading to her kids when they were basically newborns. Lexi remembered Charlie reading to her, which she loved, and said Charlie was the only older adult who didn’t intimidate her. Here are a couple of pictures of Charlie reading to David, taken at my house when we still had the beloved blue and white loveseats. (Some things you should never throw away.)
Someone (Jeannie?) said that Charlie didn’t talk about the holocaust until Shindler’s list came out. She asked him why, and he said that he wanted them to grow up in a normal environment – he didn’t want them to grow up with that hanging over their heads.
Other stories: Charlie kept the house at 63 degrees all winter. Alice said he and she and her mother would be in the same room, and her mother would say, "Ask Charlie to turn up the heat." And Alice would say, "He’s right here, ask him yourself." And Charlie would say, "Mrs. Steiner (he never called her anything but Mrs. Steiner) put on another sweater."
Dana’s version of this story was different. She said “Nana was the only one who could get my father to turn up the heat. She said it and he did it.” My guess is that both are true.
Alice said she once asked Charlie why he wouldn’t get air-conditioning in his car. (Charlie never had a car with air-conditioning.) He said, he never wanted to be too comfortable.
