Letter from the Editor #4

My own childhood "weddings"; Halloween as a (so-called) grownup; Revisiting some ancestors on Dia De Los Muertos; Fun with thyroid nodules...

Readers,

Writing these letters to you has become one of my favorite endeavors. Thanks for reading! Check out the rest of the series here.

Tomorrow I’ll have a personal essay/open thread combo platter for you, featuring Catherine Gigante-Brown. It’s a good one. I can’t wait to share it with you.

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Before I Was a “Child Bride” at 23, I “Married” My Neighbor at 4 and 7.

Did you all get to read Vincent O'Keefe’s Monday personal essay? It’s a short piece about many things—fortunately he’s an economical writer—including his first “wedding” at 4, officiated by his older sister. In case you missed it, it’s here:

Scattered Pictures #3: My First “Wedding”

It reminded me of my first two “weddings” to Huck, a boy down the street from my childhood home, who remains a dear friend.

I suspect “getting married” is a grown-up thing a lot of young kids try on, an extension of “playing house.” For me, though, it was likely also a function of being the daughter of a popular wedding officiant. Because of that, I attended more than my share of weddings as a kid, and from a young age became enamored of them.

Our first nuptials took place the summer of ‘69—my own Summer of Love, I suppose—just before we both turned 4. (Huck and I are three weeks apart.) It was in the back of my house in the Harbor Isle neighborhood of Island Park, New York, adjacent to Long Beach, where I was born, and later lived. For some reason we both wore my mother’s nightgowns.

A couple of months later, side-by-side on my family’s couch, we’d watch the first episode of Sesame Street together.

Our second nuptials took place the fall when we were 7. We were best friends who did everything together, and I remember us scheming the idea one day when we were hanging around, then asking my dad to officiate. My dad treated the service like a real wedding, with some funny lines thrown in. (“Repeat after me: With this ring, you are my thing.”) Much of the neighborhood joined us for it.

I had just the right gown for the occasion: the year before I’d played the role of “Daisy White Petals” in the first grade play, for which my costume was a long white dress. Huck wore a suit he’d gotten for who knows what family occasion. And my little sister, then 3, served as our maid of honor in a Holly Hobby-style nightgown.

It’s probably no surprise that in real life I would go on to marry too young the first time around, at 23-and-a-half. It was a much better decision the second time around, when I was 39. That one has stuck—Brian Macaluso and I just celebrated 20 years.

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Halloween and Dia De Los Meurtos 2025

There are years I feel too old to dress up for Halloween, and years I don’t. More often I’m just too lazy to come up with a clever costume.

Brian likes the holiday more than I do—although I like giving out candy to trick-or-treaters. He swears the first year we lived upstate I was so excited, I practically ran down the street after kids yelling, “Does anybody want candy?!”

We’ve dressed up in goofy coordinated costumes a few times. My favorites? Our first Halloween together, in 2003, when we were “software pirates,” with mesh bags full of floppy disks; and the year we were Dr. Joel Fleischman and Maggie O’Connell from Northern Exposure (twenty or more years after that show ended).

This year we didn’t dress up for Halloween. But the next day, Dia De Los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, we sifted through old family photos with cousin Seth Masket, who was visiting. I took out my all-time favorite: our grandfather’s siblings at Mt. Hebron cemetery for the unveiling of their father’s (massive) headstone. The outfits! The grim expressions! I love this photo so much, I have it prominently displayed on a shelf in my office.

Who are these Jewish gangsters? Oh, they’re some of my grandfather’s many brothers, a sister, and a nephew. My grandfather, not pictured, must have been taking the photo.

That night Brian and I went to a 60th birthday party/masquerade for which we were instructed to dress in all black, and wear masks. I wanted to find an ornately decorated opera mask, but didn’t leave myself enough time. At the last minute I paid a visit to our local Spirit of Halloween pop-up and got Brian a black and red devil mask, and me a pack of four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle masks in different colors. I wore the red one to coordinate with Brian.

P.S. My biggest Halloween bummer: At 12 I dressed as Mary Hartman, but everyone mistook me for Dorothy. Here I thought I was being so cool and adult, referencing an off-beat show my mom would sometimes let me stay up late to watch, and no one got it. (There are unfortunately no photos from that night.) But looking at this photo of Louise Lasser in that role, I can see why I had people confused.

Louise Lasser in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

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Fun with Thyroid Nodules

Something I’ve learned running this magazine is that while you can be young at heart, you can still be old of body. And as I climb in age, my corporeal form, like most people’s, keeps doing more and more old people things.

Among them: developing a cluster of nodules on my thyroid. Every year since my mid-50s I’ve had to have a sonogram of my neck to determine whether they’ve grown. If they have, I’ll need to undergo a biopsy to make sure they’re not malignant. If they are…well, ptoo ptoo ptoo, as my Jewish gangster ancestors would say.

A few years ago I underwent the biopsy. Oh, did it suck. First came all the worrying, for weeks, about the big C.

Then, when the day arrived, without the benefit of anesthesia, they stuck sharp needles in my neck, painfully poking multiple holes. Afterward I waited entirely too long for results, and was finally told—get this—they hadn’t captured enough cells to make a determination as to whether my nodules were cancerous. That didn’t stop them from sending me a bill for $1500, which, thanks to my marketplace plan’s $4700 deductible, I had to pay out of pocket. Even though they failed to capture enough cells.

My doctor later told me that some 95% of thyroid nodules are benign, so he wasn’t worried. Oh, great. Thanks, bud. Could you not have told me that before I signed up for this and lost sleep worrying?

During my sonogram this week I told the technician that story, and guess what? The same thing had happened to her. “It’s actually pretty common,” she said.

Fantastic. I can’t wait to toss another $1500 at having holes uselessly poked in my neck.

I won’t know the results of my sonogram until I go see my endocrinologist in December. Wish me luck managing my worry between now and then. (Actually, I’ve grown so accustomed to worrying about the state of the country and the world, I suspect I can get through this.)

How about you? Do you have thyroid nodules, too? Have you undergone a biopsy? Did you…get results? Surgery? Please tell me all about it…

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Okay, that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and subscribing. I’m grateful! 🙏💝

- Sari Botton