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Your father was very sick from emphysema, and you were talking about your mother and Aunt Rosie.

See, Aunt Rosie, my parents were always concerned about money, saving money. As I am, I guess. I remember, see. You left the light on, my mother would say, “What's the matter? Edison doesn't make enough money?” That kind of thing.

This is very familiar sounding.

So they were concerned about money, so when we left the house gradually, Phil was the first one to leave, then Jack left, and then I left. Henry remained, and it became a question of, “Why do you have this big house in Boro Park?” Upstairs it's a two-family house, downstairs was Tante Rosie. Tante Rosie was always saying, “Why don't you come down and talk?” Over my father's objections, my mother and father moved down to share the house and rent out the upstairs. Tante Rosie used to have chickens in the basement who laid eggs. So the relationship, my father hated her. It was a terrible thing for him. It was also a sign of -- to share a house with someone you didn't like was a terrible thing. He was unhappy and miserable, and he was suffering from emphysema.

One Sunday the whole family got together in Long Beach, where Jack and Lisa lived, and on the way home my father, who drove, lost his way and he drove -- and Tante Rosie and my mother were in the car -- into the channel. They fished the car out. My mother and Tante Rosie were okay, and my father was badly hurt, a leg was broken and his chest badly mauled. I remember going out to St. Joseph's Hospital in Rockaway every night to see him, and he virtually had lost the will to live. He died. He was about seventy-four when he died.

When was that?

It was about the early Sixties. We had gone through a lot of stuff by that time. Then my mother lived with Tante Rosie for a while, then we convinced her to go into a home in Long Beach, and she was there about two years. She was not very happy there. I don't why she should be. We would see her from time to time, we'd talk on the phone regularly. And then she had a stroke and died. Everything has a grim gallows humor about it. At her death, both of the sons, the Jeffers, had competing funeral parlors, and I remember outside the street where she died, they came, and there was this big debate of who's going to get the funeral. They were saying it was not for the job, but for the honor. So I remember we decided that one would