As Mother's Day approaches I dig deep into my memory bank in search of pictures of my mother.

She came to this country at the age of 8 or 9 from Baligrod, Poland. She was the oldest child and her brothers Leib and Ephraim were also born in the Pale. Her name was Baila Lockspeiser. She soon became Beatrice.

Her first home was the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She spent her early years on the crowded, pushcart-filled streets. She attended school on Rivington Street and always insisted she never missed a day of school and her grades were all A's. When she applied for citizenship, 60 years later, a researcher from the Immigration Department showed me her report cards. Every word was true.

Each of us is creating a "paper trail" that we may or may not be aware of. There are numerous documents on every living person in the USA that validate their existence.

Beatrice quit school at about 12 years and began working in her father's dry goods store on Havemeyer Street and South 2nd in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and stayed there until she married my father. She was a born salesperson and she loved moving merchandise off the shelves. It was almost a quest.

After her marriage, the couple took off for the wilderness of the Bronx. They opened a dry goods store (what else?) on 174th Street between Vyse and Bryant Avenues. The Oklahoma Sooners in their land rush were no braver than my parents moving to that faraway borough during the big depression.

I entered the picture in October 1934 but I do not have many memories of the bad economic times. My sister Sandra (a redhead) arrived eight years later. The store provided for us all.

They stayed in that establishment for four decades until my father died. At that point my mother sold the store and moved to Pelham Parkway, which was the Bronx equivalent of settling on Upper Park Avenue.

My mother found a job in another dry goods store on Allerton Avenue - Joe Tuchman's. He paid her miniscule wages, because no one told him that my mother would have paid him just to be a salesperson and move merchandise.

Her former customers loved to continue to buy from her in her new store. Many widowers of former customers became ardent swains of my mother. She was cute and vibrant and a good catch.

The gentlemen callers were lovely guys. Unfortunately all their names started with "J." When Jack passed on, Joe popped up. My kids and I confused the two many times.

They came for breakfast. My mother was famous for her oatmeal. (I was never let out of the house in the morning without a hot cereal - farina or oatmeal.)

A typical conversation between Jack or Joe and my mother:

J or J: "You made me too much oatmeal!"

Beatrice: "Eat it! It's good for you!"

J or J: "It's a portion for a horse!"

Beatrice: "Just eat it and keep quiet."

J or J: "I'll bust with so much oatmeal! I'll choke."

Beatrice: "Eat as much as you can or I will have to throw it in the garbage!"

These conversations would go on for 45 minutes. They were duplicated on Friday nights over my mother's chicken soup. All good-natured but the conversation never stopped.

Let me step back into the past, for it is soon to be Mother's Day and I started thinking about my mom, Beatrice Greenberg.