Each month, Bunny shares with you episodes from her life. These vignettes first appear in blogs and are collected here.
Vignette 1 (first published 30 April 2026)
Kitschmas Memories – 2012
As children we had those bubbles with a snowy scene inside. You would shake them, and glitter would fall like snow on the quaint plastic towns. They were just small enough to fit into one hand. But not this one. This takes two hands. The bubble is circular and looks more like a clairvoyant’s crystal ball than a child’s toy. This is one of those pricey gifts for grownups which infantizes them.
Every December I place it on a corner of a windowsill partially covered by a curtain. It’s there for a passing glance. To gaze at it for too long makes me morose.
The scene is of downtown Chicago with its famous buildings cramped together as if on the same city block, which of course, they are not. The Chicago River snakes along a couple of metal bridges crossing the turquoise painted waterway. One of the bridges has a tiny commuter train on it. If I examine it with my reading glasses, I can just make out the Chicago Transit Authority logo.
When you lift this glass globe with its heavy ceramic base and flip it over, there’s a wind-up key. A couple of good turns and the music box tingles with ‘My Kind of Town.’
This adult toy was a present from my sister from whom I have been estranged for over twelve years. She always sent her siblings interesting and expensive Christmas gifts. Receiving them made me smile no matter how frivolous they were. I would think in those moments that she’s not so bad after all.
Sometimes I wonder if her Chicago-themed Christmas presents were her way of making me nostalgic for the city I left over 30 years ago. Were the Chicago Cubs porcelain coasters, Chicago silver bells and a stuffed lion from the Art Institute of Chicago all about trying to make me regret having left? This reasoning only works if we remembered our childhood in the same way.
Or was she flaunting her money, reminding me of the wealth she married into? She’s always been competitive that way. Whereas such things mean nothing to me.
I don’t miss receiving these gifts from her. And I don’t know why I take the snow bubble out of its box every year.
But I do. This toy that isn’t really a toy.
The snow bubble is like a baby’s head, about the size of my sister’s head when she was a baby, and I was five.
I shake the snow bubble hard. It doesn’t scream like she did.
The little glitter flakes slowly descend on uncertain memories.
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Vignette 2 (first published 29 May 2026)
Obsessive Love – 1965/66
Childhood memories are slippery things. My earliest was being in my grandmother’s arms, waving goodbye to my mother as she left our apartment building one morning and walked down the street in the direction of the parish church and the train station.
I say our building because we owned the three-storey structure, with one seven-room apartment on each floor. Later, I would be told that my grandmother paid for the building. Later still, I’d hear that my father used the GI Bill to secure a mortgage and that Grandma had nothing to do with it.
How old was I? For Grandma to hold me in her arms, I must have been three or four at most. I wasn’t a baby – I didn’t stay in her arms for long – but I needed to be lifted to see out the windows in the sun parlour, to watch my mother’s chubby form walk away and turn briefly to wave. I’m sure she smiled, her even white teeth framed in coral-pink lipstick. She always wore lipstick when she went to church or downtown – for what would later become work. That and face cream were her only makeup.
Her mother, my grandmother, wore cherry red lipstick, beige foundation to hide her freckles, green or blue eyeshadow, and black mascara over brown lashes. She regularly powdered her nose, always carrying a compact. On that day – my earliest memory – Grandma must have been around fifty-seven and more blond than grey. Even though we were indoors, she was likely wearing stilettos. Unlike her daughter, grandma was bony and long-legged, and in stilettos she looked like a stick-insect. This was the 60s, and she only had them in four colours: red, green, yellow, and black. In the 70s, she added white and tan. I only ever caught her in house slippers once. Outside, she wore those stilettos most of the year – except during Chicago’s brutally cold, snow-packed winters, when she switched to high-heeled boots and somehow managed to walk at pace while the rest of us were plodding and sliding along behind her.
That day, her stilettos must have given her – and me in her arms – an extra three inches to look through the panes of glass onto our street. I could see across the way the near-identical three-storey red-brick building, nestled among other such buildings, all with front lawns, all with one tree – following Dutch Elm disease, only nascent maples and a few sturdy old oaks lined our street. From the sides, I could peer into the sun parlours of our neighbours’ apartments, separated by narrow gangways about two yards wide. On one side lived the Novaks, the Williamses and the Marino’s- on the other, the Steins, their in-laws, and children.
Many moments like this marked my childhood – waving off my mother, staying with my grandmother. But this one stood out. My younger sister must have been asleep in her crib. My older sister and brother were at school. My mother wasn’t going to work – she didn’t return to work until I was five. This moment mattered because Grandma was stressed and worried. I sensed it the way children – emotional sponges – do. A few years later, I realised that was either the day my mother went to see the priest to report that my father ‘was hitting her,’ or the day she caught the el (Chicagoese for ‘elevated train’) downtown to see a lawyer and begin the legal separation from my father. Later, my mother would tell me that when she went to the priest – speaking as if it had only happened once – he asked her what she had done to deserve it. So, a man could hit a woman if she deserved it? That was, according to mother, what set off the divorce process.
That morning, I played with my dolls and later coloured in a Disney colouring book, probably the Mary Poppins one, my favourite. My grandmother made Danish chocolate fudge – dark, thin, and melt-in-your-mouth fudge that left a grainy, sugary layer on your tongue. The kitchen air filled with bittersweetness as she sat across from me at the table and waited for the fudge to harden. She had a cigarette in one hand – from the two packs of Winstons she smoked each day – and a felt-tip pen in the other. In a stenographer’s notebook, she busied herself writing, smiling at her own loopy script. A couple of years later, I would understand what she was writing as this was one of her usual pastimes. My mother’s full name – first, middle, and maiden – never her married name. Grandma would write ‘Joyce Agnes Larsen’ over and over. One line per full name. About twenty lines per page. When one page was full, she’d take a protracted drag from her cigarette, sometimes light a new one, and flip to the next blank page and continue.
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Vignette 3 (first published 26 June 2026)
Mrs Goldstein – 1967
My first teacher was tall and thin with a mop of grey curls and cats-eyed tortoise shell glasses. At least I think she was tall. At five, everyone appeared tall. But she definitely was thin, and that’s important because I could never figure out why I kept accidently calling her ‘Mom.’ The slim Mrs Goldstein resembled my grandmother more than my mother, but I never called her ‘Grandma.’
Mrs Goldstein would hug us when we cried and sing us to sleep at nap time. I don’t remember crying often, especially around adults. This was a direct reaction to being called a cry-baby by my grandmother. I had cried when my parents separated – or half-separated. My father refused to leave our apartment. My mother responded by bringing all four of her children to her mother’s apartment one storey up.
We lived with my grandmother for a couple of months, and saw my father once a week, usually on a Sunday. Then, one day he left. My sister, Franny, told me in whispers that he had found another woman and that he would come back some day. Brian, our older brother, told us that we would probably never see him again.
‘Says who?’
‘Says grandma.’
That ended the conversation. Even at the age of five, I knew that grandma would know because grandma knew everything.
One time I cried in front of Mrs Goldstein. A boy – whose name I’ve long forgotten – called me Bugs Bunny because of my buck teeth. I’d already taken plenty of teasing. When adults weren’t around, Brian would jut out his two front teeth to talk to me. I didn’t like the nickname, but I loved the cartoon, so I tried to think it was funny.
Mrs Goldstein didn’t. She snapped, ‘That’s not very nice.’ And that’s when the tears came. If she said it was mean, then it must have been. She dabbed my face with a handkerchief that smelled of flowery talcum powder and pulled me into a hug. That hug felt warm and real. It wasn’t like the apology hug Franny had to give me for slapping my head – or like the dutiful hug my mother had to give me when she came home from work.
Everything about my mother going back to work as a secretary felt dutiful. She had to do it to pay the mortgage on the building – so we were told. The story was that he left without agreeing to pay alimony. He would only pay child support and his children’s medical and dental bills, nothing more.
He also left without saying goodbye.
Brian, Franny and me were at the Saturday matinee at the Granada Theatre watching The Absent-Minded Professor with Jerry Lewis. How I hated everyone laughing at his buck teeth. Being 13 at the time, Brian was in charge of the money for the movie and the ice creams afterwards. When we arrived at our street, it was nearly five o’clock. From some fifty yards away, we could see a policeman leaving our building and climbing into a police car that had driven off by the time we reached it.
Our mother was waiting for us to return. Something about her was different. Her voice was tired and robotic. Her eyes hardly blinked. She held Tina on her lap and handed the wiggling two-year old over to Franny while asking us about the film. In the conversation that followed nothing was said about the policeman. Brian and Franny exchanged glances. I knew not to ask. Soon we were gobbling down chocolate cake grandma had made – even though we already had ice creams and hadn’t eaten dinner yet.
While our mother was washing dishes and out of earshot, our grandmother told us that we would not be seeing our father that Sunday because he had left. No explanation. ‘Your mother is upset. Just leave her be.’
‘So, when can we move back into our apartment?’ Franny asked in a timid squeak.
Grandma bristled. ‘Maybe in a couple of weeks. We have to exterminate the place first.’
Later Franny – two years older than me and therefore an authority – explained that you exterminate to get rid of bugs and that our father’s habits brought in cockroaches. But Brian didn’t believe it – ‘Dad was spic-and-span.’ He spoke in the language of television commercials. I was baffled by this, unable to calculate even the remote possibility that grandma was being untruthful.
Summer vacation had just started and for the first and only time, the three of us were enrolled in summer day camps while Tina stayed with grandma. I didn’t say anything to anyone about my disappearing father – grandma’s phrase. I was ashamed for reasons I didn’t understand. I wished Mrs Goldstein were around. The camp leaders were college students, good at refereeing sports and handing out Band-Aids, but little else. Mrs Goldstein on the other hand knew how to hug. No wonder I called her ‘Mom’ by mistake.
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Vignette 4 (first published 30 July 2026)
The Year Was ‘68
Someone had died.
The news voices pulled my mother out of her office‑bedroom and into the living room, where the black‑and‑white Zenith stood in its wooden cabinet like an altar. She stared at the screen and suddenly tears slid down her face. I’d never seen her cry. Not the howling or whining we children did, but a strangled effort to keep everything inside. It sputtered out anyway – little eruptions between hiccups and words.
My grandmother was absent from the scene, upstairs in her apartment washing and painting her walls and ceilings as she did twice a year to erase the yellow nicotine haze left by her beloved Winstons.
My mother wiped her face and fled toward the kitchen. Pots clattered, and the big ceramic mixing bowl hit the metal table with a thud. I stayed fixed on the screen. My older siblings, Brian and Franny, kept saying ‘wow.’ They told me both brothers had been assassinated. I imagined it happening one after the other on the same day, until I grew older and learned about JFK, Jackie’s pink suit, and the suspicion that still clung to the case.
Tina, three at the time, burst into the room and in her lisping speech announced, ‘Mommy made chocolate chip cookies.’ By the time the cookies reached the living room, our mother had eaten about a third of them. She was still chewing but no longer crying.
For me, it was a year of emotional memories.
A couple of months later, the Democratic National Convention took place miles away on Chicago’s South Side – and in our living room, on that same Zenith TV. The news showed angry demonstrations and riots. With so much coverage, I sometimes confuse what I lived with what I absorbed through the television.
I woke early and parked myself in front of the cartoons. Brian crept into the apartment. His wide, guilty eyes told me he’d been out all night. At fourteen, he was hanging around older hippies, smoking weed and – I suspect – firebombing police cars outside the convention. His eyes locked on mine as he pressed a finger to his lips. I nodded. He winked and flashed the two‑finger peace sign before tiptoeing to his room.
For that monumental moment, I felt my brother loved me – though he would never use those words.
’68 ended with two unforgettable scenes, both beginning in the living room with the four of us lined up on the vinyl sofa, and both spreading into every room of the apartment and into the rest of our lives. Mom and Grandma stood before us, arms crossed. I was sure we were in for a whopper of a scolding.
‘Okay,’ Grandma said.
Our mother blurted out, ‘Your father is very ill in hospital – cancer.’
Franny, sitting on one side of me asked, ‘Is he going to die?’
‘Yes,’ Grandma said sharply. ‘It’s for the best. You’ll understand someday.’
I thought about the last time I saw him in our apartment washing dishes while listening to the baseball game. ‘Can we go visit him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ my mother and grandmother snapped in unison.
Franny and I shifted back into the sofa. Tina was on the other side of me, staring at Franny and me blankly confused.
‘Doesn’t he want to see us before he dies?’ Brian’s voice was sounding deeper by the day and that day his bass-baritone questioning clearly frightened Mom and irked Grandma.
‘Okay, we’re going to have to tell them the truth,’ our grandmother said.
‘Mother, please,’ Mom whispered, shooting her a pleading look.
Grandma kept her eyes on us, stunned on the sofa. ‘He’s in a psychiatric hospital – no visitors!’
Mom bowed her head.
I looked to Franny, but she had turned toward Brian. No one spoke.
Mom slipped out of the room. Seconds later, the refrigerator door squeaked open.
Grandma stood tall in her stilettos. She uncrossed her arms, pulled a pack of Winstons from her shirt pocket, and lit a cigarette without looking away from us. Silence stretched through several drags. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, her eyes flicking from Tina to me to Franny to Brian – then back again to trembling little Tina.
Finally, this female drill sergeant spoke, ‘It’s a stain on the family. You – are – not – to – repeat – this – to – anyone. Ever!’
Apparently, this was more shameful than the separation and divorce. More shameful than his running off with another woman, which by this time we knew from Grandma was because our mother didn’t want to have any more children. It was Tina’s fault for being born. According to Franny, our father’s captivity in a ‘nuthouse’ explained why our aunt Alma in Denmark no longer visited or sent birthday cards. She was either ashamed of her brother, or ‘maybe she was crazy too.’
Brian shook his head and made it a habit to walk away anytime we tried to talk about our father when Mom and Grandma weren’t around.
A week later – same sofa, same characters, different clothes (except for Tina, who lived in her red pullover in the winter), Mom and Grandma in the same stance in front of us with arms crossed.
Mom spoke her rehearsed lines in a clear voice, sounding like a schoolteacher. ‘I’m sorry children. Your father died this morning. His girlfriend said that he didn’t want a funeral. His ashes are going to be scattered in the sea.’
My mother was a widow. She never spoke about him or cried over his passing the way she had for Robert Kennedy, a complete stranger.
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Vignette 5 (first published 27 August 2026)
The Cocktail Party – 1971
My grandmother wiped down the ebony coffee table with spray polish one last time, knowing the slightest smudge would catch Millie’s attention, and a prompt jokey remark would follow. Grandma could never be the butt of jokes.
Her living room looked like a Hollywood set from a Rogers and Astaire film – glamourous white stuffed sofa and chairs blended into the soft beige wall-to-wall carpeting, a crystal chandelier dangling from the ceiling, end-table lamps with squared shades in an Art Deco style. The paintings were mostly impressionist reproductions – a Monet and a Manet and two Cezanne’s – along with a watercolour my mother painted in her youth of the Lake Michigan coastline from our Chicago neighbourhood.
A half-lit cigarette in her hand, my grandmother walked the long corridor back to the kitchen where the radio was still playing the Saturday afternoon opera live from the Met. Like the living room, the kitchen was nearly all white except for a couple of hand towels and matching oven gloves with a sunflower motif. That morning, she had placed four stemmed cocktail glasses on the table to reclean and buff the water stains off the way bartenders do. Everything needed to be perfect for the girls.
In a large pitcher, Grandma measured out five shots of vodka – no, make that six. Elsa had complained last time that the martinis were a bit weak. She added tonic water and a shot of vermouth. Picking up one of the stem glasses, she poured in a thimble-sized portion of vermouth and swirled it around, barely coating the surface. This would be Rosalin’s, which she would fill with cherry Kool-Aid, calling it a Shirley Temple and adding what she always said, ‘In just a few more years, you can have the real stuff.’
She took a last long drag of her cigarette and crushed the lipstick-stained butt into a crystal ashtray.
The glasses full, she added a green olive on a plastic stick to each. A plate with some twenty more olives was placed on the serving tray along with a porcelain tube of beef jerky sticks, a bowl of mini pretzels and another of salted peanuts. As she stepped along the corridor, she glanced admiringly at herself in the mirror – svelte in her yellow stilettos. That day she wore a floral dress that cinched tight in the waist and flared out like something Grace Kelly wore in Rear Window.
She positioned the snacks and drinks on the coffee table so that Millie and Rosalin, mother and daughter, would sit together on the sofa. Elsa and my grandmother, the two sisters, would have armchairs for themselves.
A firm knock on the door startled her.
That was me. The scene I’ve just described is from my imagination. I wasn’t really there yet, but I knew it went something like that based on what my brother had told me.
With that thick carpet, I couldn’t hear her walking towards the door, but I felt her there with an ear pressed against it, hoping I would go away. So, I knocked harder the second time. The door flew open.
‘I’m not deaf you know!’
A wave of tobacco smoke mingled with Yardley perfume hit me head on.
‘Hi, grandma.’ I was all smiles, which I knew bothered her.
‘It’s the rat. I should have known.’ There was the usual sharpness in her voice when she saw me alone. Though it wasn’t always that way. When I was much smaller, I was her little hamster. Even after I started to call myself Bunny, I was still her hamster. Somehow by the age of nine, I had become a rat.
I held out the October issue of Better Homes and Gardens with its glossy cover of autumnal colours and a perfectly smiling woman at its centre. ‘I’m returning this. Mom said that she copied out the recipe already.’
She squinted her eyes. ‘And you had to return it today, huh?’
That was the only time I heard her acknowledge what my mother called ‘one of Grandma’s sad days’ – the 22nd of February, the 15th of May and the 10th of October – ‘best to leave her alone.’ I just shrugged and glanced past her into the living room. ‘Are you expecting someone today, grandma?’
‘None of your beeswax,’ she snapped, grabbing the magazine. ‘Thank you for this. Goodbye.’
The door slammed shut before I could utter another word.
Earlier that year Brian had to go to our grandmother’s apartment on one of those sad days because she had blown a fuse. She hated anything to do with electricity. He was seventeen at the time and already quite handy with electrical things. He pretended he hadn’t seen the set up in the living room but reported it to me and my sisters. That was the anniversary of Elsa’s death – Grandma’s sister, who had died of tuberculosis in the 1920s. February 22 was when Cousin Millie died in a car crash. That day, the 10th of October 1971, when I returned the magazine, marked Rosalin’s death. According to our mother, Rosalin had died suddenly, mysteriously at the age of fourteen.
After I told my siblings what I had seen in Grandma’s living room, little Tina looking perplexed asked, ‘What happened to the booze?’
Brian struggled to control his laughter. ‘The ghosts drank it, silly!’
Tina’s eyes and mouth opened wide – the expression she wore for much of her childhood, perpetually frightened or amazed by something.
The following day, I was reprimanded by my mother for ‘spying on Grandma and frightening your little sister.’
‘But I wasn’t spying – and I didn’t scare Tina, Brian did!’
‘Not according to Tina and Franny.’ My mother crossed her arms and waited for a response. She tried to look stern, but her rounded face and pillowy arms would defeat her at moments like this.
I stood motionless, trying to figure out why my sisters lied and why my mother believed them without question. I didn’t trust Brian to admit it. I knew if I said the truth again, it would still sound unbelievable. If I pressed the issue, all three siblings would dislike me more than they already did. A change of topic was needed.
‘I don’t understand why Grandma pretends to have company when…’
‘Enough.’ My mother uncrossed her arms and softened her tone. ‘She’s a Capricorn – that’s why.’
‘Huh?’
‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’
I often thought it strange how my grandmother didn’t have one of her sad days on the anniversary of her husband’s death. But I knew better than to ask about it.
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Paola Trimarco 