Status Updates From Misfit: Growing Up Awkward ...

Max would be moving into his in-laws' home until a school in Newton, Massachusetts, was finished being turned into a condo.

Nana Lil was a homely woman, her profile reminiscent of my favorite drawing, the hag who also looks like a fair maiden. But my Lord, there be no angle that turned this hag fair. She had a large fleshy nose grown at an elbow-macaroni arc and a chin hell-bent on shaking hands with that schnoz.

I played on five different basketball teams that fall and winter: a Peabody Jewish Community Center League team, a USY (United Synagogue Youth) team, the St. Adelaide's Church team, and Higgins Junior High's eighth-grade team and its freshman team. The quality of my teammates was in indirect proportion to the number of days of Rosh Hashanah its players observed.

My mother who had on numerous occasions boasted herself a Jew in name only" couldn't have named ten commandments if you spotted her nine plus "Thou shalt not..." and fired a pistol.