It is with a sad heart that I report the passing of my mother, Connie Levens, on January 18, 2022. She was eighty-seven.

Connie spent the first part of her life in East New York, Brooklyn, and for some years was a dressmaker at 530 7th Avenue in Manhattan. Then my father Jim came along, followed by me and my four younger siblings, and instead of visiting Coney Island on hot summer days as pictured below, it was a rocky beach on the north shore of Long Island where we sought refuge from the summer heat.

My mother's manner was surely one of the gentlest I have ever known. She was extremely devout, attending Mass online when she could not be present in-person.

"There's a car for sale in the King Kullen parking lot," she told me, three weeks before I started college. "Why don't you go have a look at it?" Three weeks before commuting daily to a local university and I hadn't thought of a means of getting to and from the school every day.

It was she who first taught me how to drive. Our 1964 Pontiac Star Chief frequently and unpredictably ran at high idle. "As soon as I take my foot off the brake," I said to her, my second time behind the wheel, "the car takes off. I'm scared." "It does that sometimes," she said in the passenger seat. "Don't worry about it."

We had little money in those years, and though in-state colleges are relatively inexpensive, we struggled. It was she who battled and fought to secure grants to help with tuition fees, filling out the forms, attaching all the required proofs of income and expenses. I graduated without debt.

Some of us referred to her as the Patron Saint of Grand Central Station East. Let me explain. I am one of five children. We all had friends, some of us, many. We'd gather in the house, in the kitchen, the living room, the backyard. We fixed each other's cars in the driveway on weekends, in the street, sometimes double-parked. We were a family of auto mechanics. We'd talk over emptied half-gallon cartons of Friendly's ice cream as my mother sought to make sure we had a proper dinner, always at the ready to cook us up a meal. The house seemed as busy, the commotion just as great, as 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue at rush hour.

Two things you could always rely on my mother to achieve, aside from her acts of love and adoration and care for her children and my father, were her burning of the stuffing every Thanksgiving, and her accurate prediction of television movie endings. She would almost always foresee, before the final scene, what would ultimately happen.

When my own kids were young, Friday night was Movie Night. We'd typically rent a VHS tape from BlockBuster and fall into the drama. Very much aware that their grandmother was the queen of divining the resolution of a movie, they would ask me, as the show approached its close, "What do you think Grandma Connie would say is going to happen?"

Above is Kellie, my daughter, sharing one of my favorite moments with my mother. I love the connection here, the priceless, happy expressions. Though not absolutely certain of what they were smiling about, I can wager an educated guess. There was probably a movie playing on a TV out of frame to the left, and I'm convinced that what just transpired on the screen was something my mother said moments earlier would happen.

I suppose it is obvious to add that this humble literary journal would not be here without the presence and care and kindness of you, Saint Connie Levens, now looking down upon us all in new and extraordinary ways.

—  Joey