PINOCHLE.(life story of nonagenarian who immigrated from Poland)

My father and I have convened on the West Coast to videotape the oral history of my ninety-four-year-old grandmother, Rose Leyner, who was born in Stralisk, Poland (where as a girl she rode around in a horse-drawn hay wagon), emigrated to the United States in 1914 and lived on the Lower East Side, graduated to New Jersey, and now resides in Studio City, California, in what my father vehemently describes as not a nursing home but an assisted-living facility. (For my father, a trial attorney, a rigorous taxonomy is both a tactic and an ethos.) To fortify ourselves, we have taken my grandmother to a highly touted sushi joint on Ventura Boulevard.

Rose has just ...