Family Matters!

About the Book

Pure happiness is a Walt Disney, M-G-M myth, which is why their beatific output has been so universally embraced for decades. It’s what everyone wants but will never attain. Ozzie and Harriet were a lie! I have selected incidents from my life that reflect both the laughs and the sad underbellies of my familial connections and interactions. There are good people, and there are good people doing bad things, knowingly or not. There are mean-spirited people. There are pathetic people. There are smart and unintelligent people, both making good and poor choices. And there are failures. Yet I would wager that if you could have polled the characters herein, 95% of them would say they had happy lives. Perhaps that reflects our miraculous human faculties for self-delusion, survival, and finally, eternal hope. Some memoirs do not directly mention their author, yet the very narrative can often tell much about the writer—I’m sure many of mine do. Most of the people in this memoir are gone and thus defenseless in the face of what my memory has directed me to put on paper. Obviously, my recollections reflect a certain personal bias. But whatever transpired during their lives with me, I wish almost all of them peace.

About the Author

Steve Kates, a native New Yorker residing in Florida for the past 26 years, came to writing after a lengthy career in the advertising agency business in New York City, and various positions in South Florida, retiring in 2000 as Chief Operating Officer of Fit America, Inc. in Deerfield Beach. He then returned to his first love, writing, and was a film critic and features writer for ten years at the Boca Raton OBSERVER. Kates heads a small company devoted to editing, ghost writing and private writing seminars. He is also a Board member of the Institute for Learning in Retirement in Boca Raton, where he teaches, pro bono, seminars in Memoir and Short Story writing. His first book of short works, LENGTH DOESN'T MATTER was published in 2014, followed by IN OTHER WORDS in 2015. He and his wife, Linda, an Interior Designer, reside in Boca Raton, as does their daughter, Elizabeth and her husband and two daughters. Their son, David, lives in Sands Point, New York with his wife and two sons. Steve and Linda enjoy extensive world travel, family and tennis.