Your cousin the brain surgeon

My mom’s cousin just died at 96:

https://www.denverpost.com/obituaries/herbert-jay-rothenberg-md-denver-co/

He lived quite the life! Throughout my childhood, my grandmother would tell me about my mom’s cousin, the brain surgeon.

I finally met him when I was an adult and he was clearly not a brain surgeon. My mom and I always assumed my grandmother had garbled the story (she went straight to work in New York after getting out of a DP camp and didn’t get much of an opportunity to learn English, so she was always getting stories kind of wrong.)

At some point, I mentioned this brain surgeon thing to his sister. She said “your grandmother didn’t get it wrong; our mother always lied and said he was a brain surgeon.”

If you read Herb’s obit, he was quite the accomplished guy. And it still wasn’t good enough for his mother!