My name is Teresa, and I am 64 years old. I’ll be 65 in October, and I was born in 1958. And I represent the great borough of Queens. And I want to put that out there for Arthur, who thinks Brooklyn is better. Yeah, Brooklyn is better, but I love Queens. I loved growing up in Queens. It’s the most diverse borough or area in the whole world. There are more people from more places. I don’t have a story, but I’d like to comment on the fact that my life has been very good or very bad. And like Alva had said, she’d like to concentrate on the good. So I’d like to concentrate on the good, which was my mother’s side of the family. 

And I’d also like to comment about Arthur being alone. I’ve been alone most of my life. I had a family. I don’t have any children due to circumstances I don’t want to get into. I never got married. Although if anybody knows anybody, I’m interested now!

But anyway, I grew up in an Italian family where my mother and aunt, her sister, were the most wonderful people anybody could ever know. And I was very fortunate to reap the benefits of their wisdom and knowledge. Now I could talk about jazz and old movies and food from my mother, and I would make food from anybody that would give her a recipe. She’d make it taste even better. And I have such fond memories of my mother and my aunt. My aunt was twelve years older than my mother. She would have been 100 years old this Sunday. And she was by far the greatest person I’ll ever know. She sacrificed her life to raise my mother and, myself and my brothers. 

And I just reconnected with my sister from another mother a year ago, and we’ve gotten very close. So now I have a new family that I didn’t have before, even though they don’t live around here. But it is difficult to be alone when you’re older. And I don’t have any family left except for my sister, who now lives in Georgia. And like I said, we only reconnected and didn’t grow up together, so it’s a different dynamic. But it’s very great and interesting. I have two nephews, four great-nieces, and one great-nephew, which is, to me, so great. And I love this Life Story Club because I can relate to almost everything everyone’s saying. 

I mean, my mother and my aunt, I grew up with a very strong faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I grew up Catholic. I grew up in East Elmhurst, where I still live, and the friends I made in grammar school at St. Gabriel’s Grammar School are still close friends today. We don’t get together as much as we want because people have moved to many different places. However, we still connect through Facebook phone calls and text messages. That’s been so great. 

And I love where I live right now because there’s a community called the Naturally Occurring Retirement Community I’ve been part of since I turned 60. And that’s how I found out about the Life Story Club. I’m very blessed to have the friends and the connections I have now because being alone is difficult, but it makes it so much better to have people you can connect with whenever you can connect with them. That’s so true. That is so true.