My parents were obsessive about keeping our 1950s ranch house spotlessly clean, well repaired, and orderly. They seemed to be afraid of everything. But why? Sadly, we often don't figure out the reasons for our parents' craziness until they're no longer with us.

I've included a photo of the house in 1954, the year my parents' built it. Here's a picture of me giving my dad a shave and haircut (without a blade in the razor or a pair of scissors, of course).

Could the Shah of Iran have been Jewish? Maybe. What interests me even more is how family legends get started, what they mean to us, the amazing ways in which our family stories intersect with larger social movements and historical events, and how much we ever really know about our fathers.

I've included a photo of Sidney Polivy with Episode 3. Here's a photo of Sidney (on the left) and my father (on the right) in India during WWII.

Could the Shah of Iran been a hidden Jew? According to my father's old army buddy, Sidney Polivy, he was Sidney's cousin. I'm including a photo of Sidney so you can compare it to portraits of Reza Khan and his son Mohammed-Reza that you can find online. The resemblance is striking. Listen to part I of this episode and see what you think ....

In "Thin Air," I look back at someone who worked for my family when I was a kid--someone who was murdered--and try to figure out what was really going on in her life, what everyone turned a blind eye to, what they just couldn't imagine being true. Sometimes we need decades to make certain connections--in this case, the ties that connect a parakeet named Ish Kabibble to our family's cleaning lady, Helen, and my discovery of what it really means to become a writer, whose stories we are called upon to tell, and why.

I mention two stories you might want to look up, Gustave Falubert's "A Simple Heart" and Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods."

Who makes it out of high school alive? Why? At what cost? And what do we owe to those who get left behind?

Join me as I read the first essay in my collection Maybe It's Me. If you want to own a hard copy of Maybe It's Me, you can buy it online at Bookshop.org, at your favorite bookstore, or, if you must, at Amazon.com. You can find out more about me and my other publications at my website, www.eileenpollack.com.