Tomorrow my Grandmother, Miriam Telford Ellsworth, turns 98 years old. She had seven children, numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. One of my cousins has a grandchild of her own, so she has at least one descendant in that generation as well. My grandmother was a schoolteacher before she was married; trained in the old elocutionist tradition, she committed to memory many texts for "dramatic readings." She still knows them too! O'Henry stories, for example. I might have inherited my memory from her, since I have memorized numerous poems in my lifetime. A few years ago I learned about 40 or 50 Shakespeare sonnets.

It was at my grandmother's house in Sacramento when I was very young that I read my first poems. I was struck by the coincidence that a poet was named "Poe." Two of Poe's poems also used the first names of two Aunts of mine who also wrote. My father's sister Lenore Mayhew, who has translated Akhmatova and Basho, and Helen Hinckley Jones, the sister of my other Grandmother, who published novels and some non-fiction books on Iran many years ago. It seemed appropriate that Poe should use the names of these literary women. I knew of course that this was a coincidence, but it still impressed me to such an extent that I still remember it vividly today.