18. Dear Friends (1985–2005)
1 For my New Yorker Talk piece on the occasion of her birth, and some of the Oliveresque speculations to which that birth led me, see the SourceBook.
2 Although I cannot reproduce the piece’s lyrics here, they are very easy to google up, and one might want to do so in tracking what follows.
3 All of this might have something to do with the family legend regarding the origin of our last name, Weschler, which is actually quite unusual; take a look in any phone book and you’ll see how there are all sorts of Wechslers, a name that straightforwardly derives from the Yiddish for “money changer,” as with all those “Wechsel” signs you see at European airports. But what’s with our spelling? Well, goes the family account, Weschler is Yiddish for “dyslexic money changer,” which in turn, by simple Darwinian selection, accounts for why there are so few of us.