My grandmother came to our house on Thursday nights. She was there when we got home after school and she stayed to have dinner. She couldn't drive, but by 1962 our family was able to afford a second car so my mother could drive her back and forth. Before we got the car my grandmother came in a taxi.

When Thursdays came and I knew my grandmother would be there, I walked home from school with my friends Arlene Stein and Naomi Nudelman, then at a certain point I would leave them, fly down the street, burst through the front door, throw down my school books, and fling myself at my grandmother.

Every other Thursday night my father didn't come home from work until late; he was a member of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Chemical Society and during a period of time its president. On those Thursday nights it was just the four of us--my mother and grandmother, my sister Judie, and me. I always feel guilty when I think about this, but those Thursday nights were especially enjoyable. I loved my father--we all loved and respected him--but he was strict about table manners and which subjects could be talked about during meals. So when he was not there we had a different kind of fun; we were more relaxed.

I could tell my grandmother anything. She sat and listened to me talk about school, friends, classmates, and clothes. She was 50 years older than I was but she understood how it felt to be my age. There was one particular situation when I valued this ability especially.

At school all the cool girls had a certain kind of purse. It was made of a soft, black material that looked like leather but wasn't, and it had a very long handle which consisted of the same black material, braided with fake gold chain. I longed for this purse so much; I actually physically longed for it. Now that I look back after 50 years, I can see what it represented--being accepted into the "in crowd," knowing what was cool and what wasn't. The word spread through my family and reached my (paternal) grandparents; I was going to get the purse for a Hanukkah present. So all the Golding clan was together on the first night of Hanukkah and it was my turn to open my present which I knew to be the soft black purse with the long, braided handle. I opened the box and there I found a purse; but it was made of beige fake leather and was shaped like a bucket. Yes, it had a long braided handle but who cared? Carrying it would be worse than nothing; everybody would realize that I wasn't smart enough to know what was cool and what was not.

I can't remember if I actually cried tears of humiliation and disappointment right there in front of my family, or if I saved them until I was alone. But my parents were not sympathetic. Purses were purses, what was the big deal? But my grandmother alone understood the depth of my misery. She knew all about what it meant to be fashionable because although she wore dresses of gray, black, and brown in the present, she was quite fashionable when she was a young woman. She was young during the post WW I period when the young women were "flappers," "bobbed" their long hair, and wore tight dresses with fringe which flew around when they danced "The Charleston."

I have looked for that purse for years, in department stores, second-hand stores, boutiques. It's not out there. So I moved on. But when my son was a boy and growing up, I asked him: "Michael, is there something special you would like, a special shirt or jacket or anything else, that would make you feel really good?" He looked at me with this incomprehensible look on his face and said "No, Mom. I have everything I want."

Thanks, "Gram."