I was maybe three in these photos, and Papa (my grandfather) and I were close. Always close.

Here’s what I’d say to my toddler self:

This is the man who will teach you the nature of unconditional love. He was there in the hospital when you drew your first breath (in fact, not knowing any better, he walked straight into the preemie nursery and picked me  up, to the horror of the nurses) and you will be there in the hospital when he draws his last breath (in fact, I was there to see him in the ICU waiting room and heard a Code Blue, not knowing it was for him).

When you go to college, he will put on his suit and polka-dotted tie and take the bus to visit you. He was your first love and you will love him forever. Even decades after his death you will hear his loving voice in your head.

This photo below is his eldest daughter, my mother’s older sister, Maria (Mary, as we referred to her) who died when she was only eight years old from something that antibiotics could have cured. If they’d had them. This portrait hung in my grandmother’s bedroom for her whole life. I saw it every time I visited. A mother never gets over a loss like this.

Here’s what I would tell my young self:

One day, many decades from now, a medium will begin a session with you by saying “I see an aunt on your mother’s side who is here to say hello. But…did she die young? Because she’s showing herself to me as a child.”  After you close your jaw, which has dropped open in shock, you will wonder what happened to that portrait and wish you had it.

 Five months later someone will give you a box of old photographs and there it will be: sitting right on top as if it were waiting for you. No, not “as if.” It WAS waiting for you. You’ll bring it back to California and hang it in your office, where it will remind you that there is life after life and when it is your time, your Aunt Mary will be among the first to greet you.

And when you look at it you will wonder, why the hell didn’t I get that beautiful thick, straight hair???

This happy moment in time touched me deeply. My mother looks so happy to be marrying a handsome young Sicilian-American doctor. My father’s smile shows how thrilled he was to have taken this beautiful, stylish, leggy Sicilian-American redhead as his wife.

Here’s what I’d like to say to them:

It will look good to many on the outside but there will be hard years, difficult decades and although you don’t intend it, your children will pay the price. You will stay together, though and finally find contentment together in your senior years. The kids, though, will struggle.

Ah, Tallahassee in 1982 and my beloved 280ZX, chosen for me by my rebound husband, D. Here’s what I’d say to my then-remarried self:

You tried hard, girl, you really did, but you two were better apart. In just two years you’ll drive this car to California and begin a new life as a truly single woman. That car will drive to Santa Cruz, Monterey and Big Sur scores of times, hugging the curves of the mountain and carrying you through some of the best years of your life.

I was 33 and this was my first year in California.

Here’s what I’d say to my 33-year-old self:
 

Trust me, girlfriend, you will NEVER look this good again! So enjoy the hell out of the 18 months you’ll spend with your hot, 23-year old boyfriend and don’t worry that he hasn’t got a high school degree–that wasn’t his purpose with you. And when his mom asks you, and she will, why you, with a graduate degree, are with him, look her straight in the eye and tell her “the sex!”