Mi Familia

    In the begining:

    The objective of this page is to show a connection and relavence to the world outside of my family and me.

    Most of the images are from a while ago before we all seperated

Here is a beautiful portrait of my mother as a young girl.

Her face looks apprehensively towards the future as if she senses things to come, and does not like them...

She will change deeply through the transformation of the next few years, from high school senior babysitting her brother while man lands on the moon, to a hippie mother, college dropout on her way to California.

Her favorite color is forest, Emerald green.

A little later, still prior to my birth, but in college we see her as she might have been if life did not change her circumstances greatly.

She will be completely swept off of her feet shortly, but for now a lie in the sun.

My mother the honors student:

    My mother received straight A's in school, but was distracted in college due to the unrest of my father, who was still reeling from the death of his father, a strict military man of purple hearts who granted him little leniency.

    The orderliness and precision of my mother's life would greatly attract my father, and he would climb up into her dorm room every night. Shortly thereafter they were married, and then I was born.

Here's a picture of my family visiting my grandfathers siblings in Rockaway.

Although this is a small sampling of the extensive Habib family one gets an idea of the contrast.

I believe this is a picture of Laturu el Habibi, my great grandfather former servent to the sultan.

My great-grandfather spoke six languages, none of which were English, as a tax collector for the sultan in the straits of Gallipoli.

Those six languages would be most likely his native Lindo, Spanish, Turkish Arabic, French, Greek & Russian.

He was a proud man but due to his difficulties with English was never able to rise above "hat clerk" in New York City.

As a result the family bounced around between the Lower East Side and the South Bronx until the eight children were old enough to bring in salary, at which point the house in Rockaway Beach, Queens was bought where Uncle Meyer still lives today.

This summer 80 relatives gathered to celebrate Meyers 85th birthday.

Rockaway Beach was a paradise for the young Habib children

A place to get away from the stress and strain of New Jersey and school work, and hang out with the other Habib children of Grandpa's 8 siblings.

There were a lot of fun and games, and swimming in the ocean, courtesy of Uncle Meyer. You can't swim like that in the ocean there anymore.

The Two Matriarchs

       The woman on the right is Laturu, the mother of my grandfather from Turkey. She kept the family alive on dented soup cans through the depression in the South Bronx.

      One of my favorite stories of her is during an illegal bridge card game when the police came in and she hurried to the stove and threw a chicken in the pot and started screaming at the police in Turkish when they arrived. 

        She was a marriage maker in Turkey, rumor has it she smuggled my Great Grandfather into the country as a woman. She had just had her final child Micheal shortly before this image was taken, he was 17 pounds and she had him in under two hours!

       She won a prize for this, but the cost on her body was too much perhaps, she had a heart attack and died while Michael was a child, he was only a few years older than Glenn.

      My grandmother also had Glenn in her late 30's.

I know little of Alex,

     This picture is the first proof to me they actually dated. Her yearbook was the other. She should have married him instead of my father, but she felt sorry for my father after his father's death.

    As his signature in my mother's yearbook shows he still cared for her. He was an honors student like herself involved with year book. My mother and father went to a mixed high school, evenly black and white. It was a great time of social change.

     I know that my mother still thinks fondly of him, as when I found his signature in my mother's yearbook when I was young she refused to answer questions about him either to myself or Larry my step-father, she only smiled and laughed.

    I wonder if I would still have come to be her child if they had married, somehow I think so, I am so similar to her I think I would always have been part of her life.

This picture shows the strange symmetry of Glenn and I's relationships as half wise siblings, although he is my uncle, not only did his mother, my grandmother work as second mother to me, but my mother in the begining was as a babysitter, a second mother too him.

This ensured that like true siblings we would have rivalry regarding our feelings towards these people, for instance if I was mad at my Mom he would defend her, and when he asked questions regarding Grandma, I grew defensive.

Glenn's kindness is that he also cared for me in protective fashion