I do not have memories of Bobbi taking me for ice cream or to the park. My recollection of her table is being served half-year old cake from our engagement party! Other than money, which was of course appreciated, her gifts tended to be something like the New England Federal t-shirt which I use for exercising, advertising the very modern innovation of banking by phone! We hang on her few emotive moments, such as her excitement when Zvi was born, or her upset about my illness, and we were astounded when she even called us! Ok, sometimes she called from the bank when the bank let senior citizens use its Watts lines as a promotion, but at least she expended this freebie on us!

Of course, what dominated her life, and her interaction with everyone around her, was music. While the egotism that was tied to the music, her demand for attention as a performer, robbed her family of attention and affection, her all-consuming focus on music was precisely her statement that she was a human being, that she was somebody. And despite our wistful wish that there had been more warm cuddly moments, we must admit that she was not an anonymous, interchangeable family member, part of the wall-paper of our lives.

Music is a transcendent human activity. Whales do not produce fugues. Bobbi became devoted to music at a time when women of her class did not have many acceptable ways of individuating themselves. In her father's house and in Tel Aviv she was the piano maestro, the pinnacle of European culture. Not that she was conscious of her motivations—she never struck me as particularly self-aware—but the piano was for her a rebellion against the expectation that she would become a wife and a mother and run a good kitchen. Boiling water was about her forte.

But her focus on music was not only about herself. She genuinely wanted to share music and its performance with others. Everyone should play an instrument. If anybody showed even the hint of interest in an instrument, she would encourage him or her to take it up. The first time I took Debbie over to Bobbi's house, Debbie had to audition by playing a Chopin nocturne. She taught legions of students, and somehow touched them in ways we do not understand, as witnessed by the Bnei Mitzvah and weddings of former students to which she was invited most weekends.

Therefore, while Bobbi's music was in many ways a barrier from normative human relations with the people closest to her, in her way music was her expression of being human.

And one more thing—they say that to live a long life one should choose long-lived ancestors. We are hopeful.