When I look at the people I came from, I can draw a thick black line down the center of a page in my head. On the Golding side, my father's side, I have relatives who were highly educated, successful, ambitious, well-read; people who studied hard and made lots and lots of money and listened to classical music. These people generally had little sense of humor and found it difficult to relate to children. On the other side, the Reidbord/Silverberg side, there were people who operated a small general store and lived upstairs, listened to "ragtime," "ran numbers," had very little education and ambition, laughed their heads off over the craziest things, made jokes, had dogs with funny names, loved their children.

I'm not a very good Golding. I have a lot of respect for them but I am not among them. I don't make tons of money. I take after my mother's side of the family; many of them enjoyed making things with their hands and that's true about me. Once, for six years, I worked in a business established by my husband where we made molds and reproductions of artists' works.

If you look at a map of Pittsburgh and move your finger north along the Allegheny River you'll come to a small place called Woods Run. That's where my mother's family lived; that's where their general store was, established by my great-grandmother. She had four children, one of whom was my grandmother; there were two other sisters and their brother, Harry. All of his life Uncle Harry, called "Unc" by the children, lived with his mother and sisters and never worked or got married. He would sometimes help in the store, waiting on people, and he ran numbers which was an illegal lottery-type of betting. As part of this betting, he would give my mother a nickel to take a closed envelope to a bar several blocks away. Today this would be considered child abuse.

My grandmother and Lil, her sister, lived like two lionesses I saw once on National Geographic. My grandfather died, before I was born, of a heart attack at 44 years old and Lil's husband ran away from the family and never came back. So the two sisters lived together, helped to bring up each other's children, pooled the little money they had, and ran the store after their mother died. If you look at a picture of an elderly Alan Greenspan and imagine a curly brown wig on his head, you would see what the Silverberg sisters looked like. "Unc" looked like Georgie Jessel.

Not your "Type A" personalities. If "Unc" did well playing the numbers he didn't help to pay the electric bill or purchase a sack of groceries--he would buy all the children roller skates. In the stock room at the store, located behind the counter, many happy hours were spent in playing poker and gin. A customer would come into the store and stand at the counter, expecting to be served, finally coughing or clearing his throat to get somebody's attention--then my grandmother, Lil, "Unc," and usually somebody who lived across the street would have to stop playing cards. They rolled their eyes at each other and said: "Godamnit! There's another one! Whose turn is it to get up this time?"