When I was young I would count the scars on the back of my mother's hands. They were less than an inch long, slightly raised, and paler in color than her skin, almost translucent. Counting them was like trying to count pennies in a closed jar. It was 1954 when nineteen-year-old Arline Leibowitz packed a bag and left her parents and three siblings behind in their Long Island home. She moved into a dorm at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital to pursue her dream. She was a beautiful woman with a radiant smile and bright blue eyes and donned the requisite nurse's uniform with the pride of an optimistic and oft-times idealistic young woman on her own for the first time. Think a post-war country steeped equally in euphoria and agony. Think Florence Nightingale. The uniform was white--white shoes and thick white stockings--the skirt form-fitting, and the nursing cap stiff and fitted to keep her hair in place and to add to the modesty the profession was meant to evoke. Almost seventy years lat......

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