For Bayara Manusevitch
for being the only woman to survive Stalin, Hitler and the Harvard tenure process;
for her Armenian father, shot as “an enemy of the people”;
for her unthreatening first husband, shot as a threat;
for her third husband, a violinist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra;
and not so much for her second husband, whose existence we discovered from her obituary;
for persuading Senator John F. Kennedy to help her mother gain freedom from the Soviet Union;
for her dingy walls littered with framed photographs of writers and musicians;
for decades of widowhood and hours on her porch listening to symphony after symphony;
for luring our springers onto her lap with carrots and gentle words;
for that tenacious cat who adopted her with his owner’s permission;
for, when she fell or needed to be freed from her elevator, the way she greeted the men and women of the Belmont police and fire departments like guests;
for her mournful looks as her Italian slipped away, which left her with only three languages;
for publishing a memoir to kick off her second century;
for the grit and joy of her every day.
A.M. Juster