WISHING FOR CHRISTMAS
IT DOESN’T SEEM that long ago, the Christmas of my eighth birthday. We had recently moved to 194 Poplar Street in New Haven, Connecticut. It was our sixth move that year. Our new home was a four-room apartment on the second floor of a rundown Victorian house. We shared a bathroom at the end of the hall with three other families. It was 1939, and the Great Depression had made all our lives much harder. We were poor, we knew it. But we didn’t know how poor we were until our father sat my sisters and me down on the couch in our living room to have a talk. I will always remember the sad look in
