I LOVE PASSOVER. And while it’s not strictly in our religious heritage, we celebrate it yearly with friends. The meal we prepare is not always possible to perform during the proscribed days (everyone is so busy), and the music is not exactly traditionally keyed (one singer brings a decidedly Motown bass line to the otherwise melodic solemnity), but no matter. It is the traditions of the annual meal that inform me, including, as they do, the ancient questions that are repeated and pondered again. One of those questions only I ask, and ask of no one but myself, as I am reminded of my personal all-time favorite man of faith, and quietly reassure myself that it’s just fine that he was imaginary. Meet him now.

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WRITE IT DOWN. I tell this to my memoir students all the time. Carry a notebook, index cards, write on your hands if you must, but write it down.  Keep notebooks in car, next to your side of the bed, in the kitchen; tuck an index card into your back pocket, jacket pocket, jeans pocket. And carry a pen.  And they do, and then right around the third class, someone asks, “Write what down?” Ah, what good students. I was waiting for that.

I’m always grateful when the question is asked. After 11 years of teaching, and more than 500 students, you’d think I might be tired of it, but I never am, because what we write down versus what we do not need to write down is about as important a distinction you’ll need to grasp to write well about your family.

The first thing to know is just because someone is going to dispute it, does not mean you don’t write it down. Margaret and I have lots of topics on which we do not agree. We’ve made lists. (Here’s hers).  We’ve disputed one another’s facts. She even thinks I make things up and that I have done so ever since I had an imaginary friend. No matter. We write things down, she and I, always have, scribbling away, as you can see here, when we were first thinking about what TSP should be, writing, writing, always writing.

But what do we write? Key phrases, the look of a room, bits of dialogue are good places to start. For instance, many of us have just enjoyed (endured?) the Spring high holy days—Easter and Passover—during which we got together with family. Ah, family. Why have them if you can’t write about them? My sister and I have felt this way since birth. Right, Margaret?

And yet, when I wrote about the holidays recently for TSP, it was another sister I wrote about, a non-biological one, but a sister, all the same, the piece written from notes I took at the time of the event that were stored by subject in a file. Among those notes were the details of my daughter’s imaginary friend, along with details of a Passover spent at a generous sister’s home. I had jotted down a few things that night in my notebook. For instance, to remind me what she cooked, I wrote down, “homemade tortellini.”  That detail tells us that it was not traditional Passover fare that was served that night, and is important to the story, since it heightens and adds to the theme of the non-traditional. So: details. Details are good.

How were your holidays? Now is the time to write down details of them so that next year, as these days again approach, you’ll be essay-ready with your version of the tale. It was those notes of Passover at a sister’s gracious home that allowed me to share mine with you.

What’s in your notebook?

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PASSOVER IS HERE, and we look forward to our yearly Seder, blended as we will be into another family’s gracious celebration. It’s easier these days since there are only three of us to accommodate at their Seder table. It wasn’t always like this. And when it wasn’t, I got my first best dose of just how accommodating a sister can be.

When our daughter was 5 she had many outstanding qualities. Foremost among these was that she was relentlessly literal: If you said pink, she didn’t see cerise or fuschia or mauve. She saw pink. Anything to the left of that was “purplish-pink with a little red on top.” Anything to the right of that is “kind of tannish-pink with some extra white.” And anyone who didn’t see it that way was color blind.

So it was along such literal lines that my daughter approached the definitions of what makes a holiday, who celebrates them, and why. It was very important to her to know who of our friends and relations celebrates which holiday, and just how they do it. And, in the spirit of equality, she wanted me to provide for them all. This included her imaginary friend, Bibi Geggy. He’s Jewish. He’s also divorced, and at the time in question was dating two women (one, an Irish-Catholic named Rosie Davenport), and he’s a man who travels everywhere with his sister, Acalcia, and his dog, Walter Fleischman.

But don’t get me started on his lifestyle. Since I’ve written about Bibi Geggy before, I won’t repeat myself. Anyway, why would I, when just about every day Bibi raised so many new issues in our lives, including holidays.

 Bibi is a man of faith and, our daughter insisted, he needed to celebrate Hanukkah. Having no real idea how to do this, I called upon a sister. Granted, she’s Italian and a Catholic, but the lovely man in her life is Jewish, and I knew she honored his religious traditions.

What she posed was the option of a ninth night of the great festival. Now, even nonobservant Jews know that there are only eight nights of Hanukkah, but it seems that much like the 29th of February, the ninth night of Chanukah comes around only every so often. Together we assured my daughter that the holiday celebration would include the usual traditions: the latkes, the Hebrew prayer, the lighting or relighting of the menorah—and, of course, the empty seat, this time set aside not for Jehovah, but, rather, for Bibi Geggy.

The men wore yarmulkes and my dear sister-friend, Michele Santucci, served her famous homemade tortellini.

 The night was a smashing success. In the car home our daughter consulted with Bibi Geggy, who reported that he had such a fine time at Hanukkah and that he has hoping to be back for Passover. He was.

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Amanda Blake's 'Charlotte and Her Imaginary Friend'

LIKE MOST PARENTS of a teen, I worry about our daughter’s future romantic relationships. So far, she’s done quite well. Her first love who was not her Daddy was someone who would make the heart of any mother just soar: Tall, Jewish, part of a large family, he doted on the needs of my child and encouraged her to eat her vegetables. But there were problems, not the least of which was that he was imaginary.

We were driving home from school when I first heard about him. My little girl said that she had a new friend.

“How nice,” I said, half-listening in that end of the day kind of way.

“He hangs out by the playground,” she told me.

I listened a little closer.

“He talks to me all day,” she said. “Only me.”

Now she had my attention. I had read the books. I knew I was not supposed to show them any fear, no matter what the topic. But I also read the news and I didn’t like the sound of this at all.

Tentatively, I asked, “Do you know his name, sweetie?”

Her eyes locked onto mine in the rearview mirror.

“Of course,” she said, like I was denser than overnight Playdoh.
“It’s Bibi Geggy,” she said.

“Geggy,” I said? “Bibi, you say?” I scribbled it down while still driving.

“He brings his dog,” she told me. “It’s a really nice dog.”

“What’s the dog’s name?” Something made me ask.

“Walter Fleischman,” she said, and then she clammed up. Couldn’t get another word out of her all the way home.

There were no Geggys in our local phone book and no Fleischmans of any spelling. The next day her teachers told me that of course no one hangs around the playground and that certainly no one had been talking to our child day after day.

Perhaps another mother would have figured it out sooner. I mean, his name might have given him away, but remember for a moment the likes of Bebe Rebozo and Bibi Netanyahu–now there are two names kids could really love–and experience, like I did, the joy of the plain old fun at the sound of something. Bibi Geggy. What a great name.

My child was delighting me, making me laugh. And not from a pratfall or some cutesy kid thing, but from deep within the vast magnitude of her imagination.

My child was delighting me, making me laugh. And not from a pratfall or some cutesy kid thing, but from deep within the vast magnitude of her imagination.

When I called my sister I got my reality check. The conversation went something like this.

“You had an imaginary friend.”

“I did?” When? I was genuinely stumped by this suggestion.

“Ah, Andy?”

“Andy Hattenrash? He wasn’t imaginary.”

“Yes, well…”

Perhaps my daughter originally intended to keep Bibi around for a short while; maybe he arrived packed-and-ready-to-go after a month or two, but with just the eensiet bit of encouragement from her mother, my daughter’s friend stuck around long enough for us to get to know him real well, and I don’t regret a minute of it.

Pablo Picasso is well known to have said that he spent his adulthood trying to get back to painting like a child. It’s always been one of those quotes thrown into feel-good books and make-art-from-the-science-side-of-your-brain books but it never meant so much to me as it does when I ponder Bibi and what his extended family brought to mine. And there was an extended family. There are babies–sometimes five, sometimes 10, depending on the day, whom he cared for with his sister, Acalcia; at some point Walter Fleischman found honest work as a police dog in Schenectatoad before finding Mu Shu, his soulmate, and being transferred to Queens; Bibi took up with the ever-unsteady Rosie, who wanted to have children, and then he broke it off with her, a decision we all came to agree was best for everyone involved.

And along with his own concerns, it came to be that some issues that were presented to our family got processed through Bibi and his.

For instance, a friend walked out of a bad marriage and came to stay with us. She was in rough shape.

About two days into her visit my daughter asked me, “What’s divorce, Mommy?”

I explained it.

“Well,” she said, “Bibi Geggy is divorced.”

Didn’t know he was ever married.

“Oh yes. To Acalcia.”

“His sister?” I was a little alarmed.

“Well, they were married,” she explained, almost whispering, “but now they are traveling as brother and sister.” And she nodded very knowingly.

The otherwise-intelligent book I once used through my child’s development was full of admonitions about providing other outlets for her imagination, not letting her get too dependent on the imaginary friend’s existence, and how not to let him take the heat for any of her bad behavior.

That book missed the point of our Bibi. He was never held up against her bad behavior. He was always held up to mine. He was patient, made perfect banana-clam cookies, led a daily parade playing the trombone, and never rushed dinner or bath time to get back to work, or so I was told on a fairly regular basis. That means he was a good listener, a creative playmate and available even on deadline. He still sounds like a much better parent than I am.

And because of that Bibi and me, well, we got along like peanut butter and jelly. I mean, who doesn’t need a role model? I did. Still do. And even though one day Bibi did get packed off with the pacifiers and the pull-ups, he continues to remind me—well into adulthood as I am—to appreciate the rewards of thinking like a child.

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Thanks to painter Amanda Blake for the art used here of Charlotte and Her Imaginary Friend. A show of Amanda’s work is a must-see in the TSP Galleries.

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Me, at about the age of those precious school-bus years w/Andy Hattenrash.

WHEN WE LEFT OUR HEROINES, one was standing in our parents’ bedroom, holding a photo in her 9-year-old hand. She just wanted ice cream and, as a result of that hunger, came away with a whole lot more than she was after. It would take her little sister—me—14 years to come to the same conclusion that Margaret did in that instant: that our mother was having an affair.

But what preceded that incident? Before things tilted as they did, there were nearly 10 years of existence for Margaret, including—though in no way limited to—having me arrive in her life.

There were friends, of course, some of which you heard about in my 25 Random Things list. (Margaret’s is here.) And then there were best friends.

Always a social creature, I had lots of friends, though my absolute-finito-ideal, all-time-favorite-friend was Andy Hattenrash, who in kindergarten was my very best friend in the whole world.

Andy, like me, was 5, and as far as I could tell, the only difference between us at that age that mattered was that he smoked cigars. That’s how I remember it, and how I told it back then. And I told it a lot.

Our father was a famous sportswriter, a profession that carries an equal love for the hard play of others and for telling stories. My sister and I learned early to do and value both, especially if we wanted his full attention, which was hard to get, since his schedule kept him away from home most nights as well as every Saturday. Rarely home for dinner, on those fine long nights when everyone sat down together, I’d tell an Andy story, always including his cigar, and the great joy he took from smoking it on the schoolbus. And always, everybody laughed.

Andy and I rode the same bus, which is where and when he mostly smoked, not being allowed to do so at home. And I’d sit beside him every day, kind of protectively since I was a tomboy and he wasn’t, and the kids might have picked on him if I wasn’t there, a bookend between the riff-raff in the aisle and quiet Andy, while he always rode tucked up against the window.

‘He was mute. Not totally mute, but something was wrong with Andy’s speech, and his soft sounds were hard to figure out unless you paid the real close attention.’

He might have just wanted to look out at the scene all the way home but I wouldn’t have it. I talked to him. He was mute. Not totally mute, but something was wrong with Andy’s speech, and his soft sounds were hard to figure out unless you paid the real close attention I thought it was my job to do. It’s not the slightest bit odd to me that my best friend didn’t speak. I don’t recall that he had a need to since I was so comfortable doing all the talking.

Like me, Andy was a redhead, though unlike me he was the delicate sort, the hothouse-flower variety, whose veins seemed to pulse through the gossamer skin and whose eyelashes, the color of old cellophane, did nothing, as awnings go. I was the other kind of redheaded kid.

I could locate today where Andy lived and what his living room looked like and the Vanilla cookies and warm-ish milk his mother served us on the few times I was invited to play. And that’s important to this tale—that I think I can still find the house—since Margaret swears that Andy was imaginary.

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