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My parents, Daniel and Sophie Trupin, have been married 65 years. Because of his failing eyesight, my father asked me to write this.

My mother was born near Warsaw in 1903. She came to this country when she was 5 years old with her mother and siblings to join her father, where he had homesteaded in North Dakota.

She wrote an account of her childhood ("Dakota Diaspora," University of Nebraska Press, 1985) when she was 70 years old. She has been legally blind since she was 17 years old and unable to read since then. When she wrote her book, she touch typed. An editor found the first draft needed almost no changes.

My father's mother abandoned him when he was an infant. He lived for 10 years in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He was a newsboy, selling papers for a penny apiece.

He graduated from New York Law School in 1928, and practiced pro bono. After my parents were married, he entered New York City's civil service in 1936 and was license inspector in the Department of Consumer Affairs until 1970, when he retired as chief inspector.

He also worked for the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, as a teen recreation worker.

Since his retirement and move to Berkeley, he has been a dedicated worker for the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center and for the Berkeley Gray Panthers, finding nothing too menial nor too ambitious to tackle.

Over the years he has read many works of literature to my mother. Recently Haggadah Press has published some of his poetry, "I Knock at Every Door."

My parents' marriage has improved with age. They credit its success to acknowledging their different temperaments, but common involvement in raising a family. To maintain the balance of power, they argued a lot. Now they've worked out the wrinkles.

They are now living in a retirement building. They are both still gregarious and exceptionally hospitable, as they have always been. They have friends of all ages who continue to visit them and they continue to change and grow.

They are the parents of two children, Robert, a physicist and Joella, a pre-school teacher.