On a day like today, we can only look within ourselves, our hearts and minds, and reflect on how we can make our country and this world a better place for all.

The Parzen family is praying for all those affected by the wave of violence that continues to plague our nation.

G-d bless the victims of this week’s tragic events and their families and G-d bless America.

Above, from left: Sam Greenhouse, Sir Ronald A. Fisher, unknown, Carol Parzen, Ingram Olkin, and Emanuel Parzen (my great uncle) in 1961 at the meeting of the International Statistical Institute in Paris (image via ProjectEuclid.org).

My father’s father died when my father was very young.

My paternal grandmother, née Levy, was remarried soon thereafter to Rabbi Maurice Parzen, whose family had immigrated from Łódź in what is now Poland (I believe that the family name comes from the village of Parzeń in current-day Poland).

The Rabbi’s brothers included Ben Parzen, who would become one of the world’s leading electrical engineers and inventor of an oscillator that could withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear fallout (his greatest invention, among many others). He died in 2005.

The Rabbi’s youngest brother was Emanuel “Manny” Parzen, a world-renowned statistician and pioneer in kernel density estimation, a field which is often referred to as “the Parzen Window” in his honor.

Uncle Manny died on Saturday, February 6 in Florida where he lived with his wife and my aunt Carol.
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Tracie P, my goodness, we’ve been married for 6 years!

Today, January 31, marks the day that we were wed in La Jolla. Happy anniversary, my love, and thank you for what have been — by far and beyond — the best six years of my life.

As I was mulling over what I wanted to write in my happy anniversary blogication to you, I started to think about the word best, the superlative adjective, an absolute used to describe something that surpasses all others like it.

These years have been the best: our coming together, our engagement, marriage, and first home; our children and the business that we have built together.

Now that Georgia P is 4 and Lila Jane is 2 and a half (and no longer a toddler), a new chapter of our lives is beginning to unfold.

In the wake the frenetic, hectic, and often exhausting but always exhilarating early years of child rearing, you and I are beginning to take evenings out again. We’ve begun to travel a bit — two days here, three days here. And we’ve begun to have a little more time to ourselves at home.

These years certainly have been the best of my life — until now.

“Until now” because I know that we have many “best” years ahead of us, too. They won’t surpass those that came before them, no. They will be remembered, I am sure, side-by-side with years past, like time in a bottle, as rich and as rewarding and as fulfilling as the first chapters in our book of life.

As I look back today on the last year of our life in marriage, I remember that even the toughest moments of the last 12 months have been eclipsed by the joy that you bring into all our lives. And I know that I can face any challenge or adversity that may lay ahead because I have you by my side, the best partner I could have ever hoped for and the most beautiful woman I could have ever dreamed of.

I love you Tracie P — mother, wife, lover, and partner. Happy anniversary!