When either my conscience or appetite was particularly insistent, I’d spend my lunch break with Oma

“NU?Tell me sumsing nyew.”

Diminutive, brassy hair stiffly coiffed, Oma was serving me her specialty: Gruenebaum’s rye bread, fresh from the freezer, lightly toasted and schmeared with Fleischmann’s salted margarine.

Oma lived diagonally across from the school I attended from preschool through 12th grade, the school my father, too, had attended from preschool through 12th grade.

I can’t say I enjoyed visiting Oma in her dingy, ground-floor apartment, but I knew she relished my visits. I was, for seven years, her only granddaughter, and I was named after her mother. So when either my conscience or appetite was particularly insistent, I’d spend my lunch break with Oma. She’d usher me from the front door to the kitchen, shutting each light behind her as we went. Frugality was a living member of the family.