It was all over in a split second.

These youngsters were depending on me to deliver a verdict. Decades of conducting business meetings held little sway here. Family squabbles about who should inherit what didn’t matter. It all came down to timing, contact, and sequence.

BEYOND THE TREES BY MARTIN PERLMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 111

Every other Sunday Betty and I took the Buick V8 to Cordova, the newer part of Memphis, for lunch at my daughter’s or my son’s house. If we were at my daughter’s then my son and his family came over.

In summer after a late lunch when there was a baseball game, maybe Mickey Mantle and the Yankees, my sometimes-thoughtful son and my talkative son-in-law, drinks in hand, gravitated to the TV in the den. For my money, if I happened to be in St Louis, I liked to take in a Cardinal’s game.

The women did most, actually all, of the cooking and cleanup. Then they sat in the living room and talked, about what I don’t know.

I’d play with the grandkids, bounce the littler ones on my knee, call them schma…