From as far back as I am able to remember, I loved to sit and listen to my mother, Anna, and her sisters, Regina and Mildred, talk for hours on end of their childhood and what it was like for them growing up poor on the streets of Manhattan. Of all the times I sat with them, my favorite times were the ones we spent in my Aunt Regina’s kitchen at her summer bungalow out on Long Island. Around midnight, each sister took her usual place at the table and there they would sit, and talk, and sip tea until dawn. Even as a babe in arms, I just couldn’t get enough of their stories. Through my tenderest of years, my mind was their naked canvas where each of them, in their own animated way, took center stage and painted for me the most vivid pictures of the story of their lives and their world in another time.