It all started with my mother.  No, seriously, I mean my impression of women.  My mother could do things no one else could do.
 

When as a three year old, I hid under the covers in my bed, which was after all, huge, like a whole other country, she could always find me.  I was impressed with her uncanny ability to locate my body and tickle it even in the middle of this vast expanse of bedding and mattress.  Once, I left a pillow under the covers and hid in the closet.  Believe it or not, she found me anyway.
 

Combined with these amazing psychic powers, which enabled her to always be able to discern whether I was telling the truth, she was also very strong.  There is an expression in Yiddish which describes her arms in those days – “mamedik”, which is sort of a tautology because it just means “mother-like”.  But I, at any rate, could not put both my hands around them.
 

She lugged large bags of coal around in the basement and could easily shovel a load into the furnace.  Later, she described how she had worked in the coal mines in the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.  She explained that she was one of the weaklings.  The Russian women, with their thick strong legs were the ones who could push and shlep the coal cars like the men.  She could only shovel the coal onto the conveyor belt.
 

When she gave birth to my brother in the Caucasus, on a collective farm, she had to walk to the hospital, climb up the stairs to the delivery room, give birth and after a few hours, take her baby back to the little hut she shared with her sister-in-law and baby nephew.  Not bad for a weakling, but she reserved her own admiration for the Georgian women who didn’t even bother with the hospital.  They just went into the fields by themselves and gave birth in a convenient haystack.
 

She did acknowledge that she was physically agile in those days.  When she and her sister-in-law earned money by selling some sandals in a deal they worked out with their neighbour, she was the one sent to the city to buy some potatoes.  One little detail.  They were in the mountains, they had no cars, they had to wait several days for the truck to make the trip and the only way to get to the city every day was by train, which unfortunately did not stop at their settlement.  This is how the men did it.  They waited at a particular curve, where the train had to slow down and jumped on to a freight car.  On the return trip, they jumped off at the same location.  My mother decided that if they could do it, she could.  And she did.
 

She always laughed when she described how she kept on tumbling down the hill when she jumped off the train on the way back.  The potato sack acted like a peculiar weight that kept her doing somersaults down the slope.  “Anyways,” she said, “I got home faster.”
 

But the most amazing thing was to go shopping with her.  She always seemed to carry two full shopping bags, one in each hand, which she swung to clear a path. 
When we got onto a street car, she would push her way to a seat and fend off everyone with her right arm until my brother and I could catch up to her.  In the bakery trying to get to the counter for rye bread, she bulldozed all the other women out of the way, even though they were also carrying shopping bags and using them in the same way.
 

When she got older, she developed a tremor in her right hand and arm, which the doctor claimed was due to overstraining the muscles.   I can believe it. 
 

So, nowadays, when I see a woman swinging shopping bags as we jostle in a line up to buy things, even though I feel a tender pang in my heart, I make sure to get out of the way.