When I met my beautiful wife Dona, it was love at first
sight. For me. Not so much for her. In fact, it took a lot of energy to finally
convince her to marry me. And through it
all, my staunchest ally and greatest supporter was my mother-in-law to be, Ada
Young. She had my back. Sorry Dona, I guess you have Mom to blame.
And so we became a family.
Ada and Jay lived in Forest Hills, and when we moved to Plainview, it
was an easy drive for them to come visit, which they did very often, and we
were very close. I can still picture Jay
sitting in our rocking chair, with the newspaper and the little nub of a pencil
he always carried, reading every article and underlining things and writing
notes in the margins. To my dismay, he
always did this before I had a chance to read the paper. And all the while, Ada would be busy cleaning
and cooking and, most importantly, looking after our children...she really was
a second mother to Elissa, Lauren and Evan, and that’s how they will remember
her.
When Jay and Ada eventually bought a place in Florida, and
sold their home in Forest Hills (or should I say Dona sold their home, of
course) they became snowbirds and began to spend the warm weather seasons in
our home...in fact, that’s where Jay passed away one summer’s night in
2008. But Ada stayed on, and we became
even closer.
Now, you’ve heard about various aspects of Ada’s life, and
I’m not going to revisit them...I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about
some of the special time I spent with her in her later years.
It partly began with a remarkable event in the spring of
2009: for the first time ever, a female member of my household sat and watched
a baseball game with me. Ada did this
because she wanted to spend time with me, and knew that I enjoyed it, and so
she asked questions about the rules, and the players, and she became, to some
small extent, a Yankees fan.
This all changed, however, the day she discovered The Game
Show Network. From that point on, the
two of us spent many evenings together, many hours together, often while Dona
worked, agonizing over that most important question in life: deal...or no
deal? She loved that show, but nothing
could match the happiness she felt when Steve Harvey and Family Feud would come
on. (By the way, my brother-in-law
Russell, the dentist, swears that Steve Harvey’s teeth and mustache are fake,
but that’s another story). Anyway, Ada
and I watched together every night.
Once, I remember, she actually began to answer most of the questions
correctly before the contestants did, and I turned to her and said “Mom, you’re
getting really good at this game”, and she looked at me and replied “Not
really, I watched this episode this morning”.
My mother-in-law was a good-hearted, happy person who liked
to laugh and to bring joy to the people around her, which she did quite often
and quite well. She will be greatly
missed, and remembered with love forever.
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