My dear student Rabbi Julie Pelc Adler just sent me the above in an email. She and her husband Ami had received a box of his old childhood books from his mother for their soon-to-be-born baby and one of the books was The Other Side of a Poem – my first book published in 1977.  It had been signed by his grandmother who wrote the lovely inscription above. Julie emailed me:  "It was incredible to think that when Ami was 6 years old, living in Minnesota, his grandmother in Chicago found your book, edited in California, fully 23 years before I met you."

I'm so moved by this. What a tiny, loving world it is sometimes. Full of beauty and laughter.

And a PS to this: I had recently reconnected with the wonderful illustrator of the book, the painter Harry Bertschmann, and was able thirty-five years after our book was published to email him the above story.