There is a certain place on the left side of the neck that marks a person as a violinist, a pressure sore from holding the instrument against tender skin. It’s where the hard spruce of the violin ribs contacts flesh, a lumpy red chafe mark the size of a quarter that comes from the effort of keeping the instrument from falling to the ground.

One afternoon, after my mother had fallen ill for the fourth or fifth time, I pulled out all my eyelashes, one by one. I was thirteen.

…and I can feel the blindfold tight against my eyes, and it is one a.m. and I am crossing Flatbush Avenue not seeing, not thinking, soon not being…

I’ve always done my work at the kitchen table, an oversized, blonde, oak pedestal table that was one of the first pieces of “grown-up” furniture my husband and I bought for our new house almost thirty years ago.

I still remember the warm buttery taste of Flako Cup Cakes, which I made with my mother from a mix in a box. In 1963, even in Greenwich Village, cup cakes were two words. It was always Flako, never Jiffy or Duncan Hines, and I never knew why.

“The future isn’t waiting,” a Buffalo billboard says. Pictures of towering children outside the empty offices of Upstate Youth Empowerment Now aren’t waiting.

That summer before my mother lost her mind for the first time, I started to learn a violin concerto.

So all of a sudden, my dad swung the car off the road onto a little parking area and told me with great excitement and glee that we had just arrived at the most wonderful and amazing place in the whole world, called Flat Mountain, a place thousands of people drive for hours and hours to get to but often can't find at all, and weren't we so amazingly lucky to find it right here right now!

Nadia Ghent painted a stunningly vivid portrait of her father Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia’s life with her father that distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie recognized as essential to his nature.