Hot Tea and Sponge Cake at 10:00 P.M.

My mother and father were an embarrassment to me, up until high school. They were much older than my friends’ parents (my dad was forty- seven and my mother was forty- four when I was born), and they were from a different background, too. My mother, Minnie, was born on the Lower East Side of New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from…