Esther Cohen

My Romanian grandmother, one of my favorite people on this planet, dead now for 50 years, was a festooned fabulist.  She never walked out the door without wearing her earrings, no matter where she was going: supermarket, drugstore, visiting her next door  neighbor.  All her pairs were gold because as a girl in Rumania,  gold was what people wore. Her daughter, my mother, kept true to this rule:  I don’t think I ever saw her, even once, without wearing a pair of earrings.  Hers were more eclectic -some were costume, some were not.  They all dangled.  My mother never wore studs.

Even though we lived in a small factory town where earrings were not the norm, and girls in my class didn’t wear earrings, I  asked for earrings as soon as I could and my mother said OK.  She brought me to a man named Mr. Cuomo, who owned a local jewelry store.  He was an older Italian man, deliberate and careful.  He used a long needle and an ice cube.  He put in my first pair: small gold studs.  

I couldn’t wait to find a dangling second pair, and as soon as I was able, in sixth grade, I took a train to Greenwich Village, home of many earrings.  I spent a whole day in an earring store on MacDougal Street, talking to the owner, a woman named Claire, who claimed she herself owned 1,000 pairs.  That day, I bought the first of many many dangling pairs. 

Like my mother and my grandmother, I’ve never been earring-less.  Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot: India, Africa, China, Thailand, Bali, Brazil, Morocco, Egypt, Mexico.  Wherever I go, I buy earrings.