Monday got off to a rocky start, the tile man hasn’t shown up yet, Maria got a bit grumpy and launched into a biting critique of my dish washing, which she was was “horrible.” In an outburst that perhaps signals another phase in our previously happy three-year marriage, she said she had to re-wash all of the dishes I did, they were greasy and had pieces of food on them. This followed my suggestion that she wasn’t the most domestically-inclined person I knew.

I didn’t take this personally, she came up last night with three pairs of cleaned socks, and said, “see! socks,” tossing the laundry basket on the floor. I think the outburst was a response to her disappointment in Joe the Tile Man, who stood her up again today. She was eagerly awaiting Joe on Friday, and then again, first thing this morning. You see?, I said, he’s not the right guy for you. Writers are more dependable than tile men.

I deny that I can’t wash dishes well, she just has this idea that my housekeeping chores are not always meticulous. Maybe she is controlling, I suggested (not a good idea.)  I pouted and retreated to skim through my new book – Maria got it for me – “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean,” a book that has astonished me and raised whole new questions about my identity.

My grandmother, a stout Russian peasant immigrant with royal airs and a fierce devotion to me, had some fixed ideas about the world.

1. Christian women don’t make good wives. They can’t clean or cook and their husbands look gaunt and starved. (I see she might have had some insight on that one.)

2. Richard Nixon was a dybuk, an evil spirit. She spoke almost no English, knew nothing about politics, but didn’t like his shifty eyes.

3. Jewish boys do not commit crimes. No Jewish boy has ever committed a crime, she said. What about Meyer Lansky, the architect of the modern mafia, I asked her one day? He couldn’t have been Jewish, she said, probably a gentile they gave a Jewish name to so they could blame the Jews for what he did.

4. Jewish boys do not play baseball, they do not run around and hit balls with sticks, or throw footballs at one another. They study to become engineers, doctors, lawyers.

My grandmother’s views of the world were unshakeable, fixed in granite, she never changed one of them. I thought of her while reading this morning about Moses Cohen Henriques, who was Bar Mitzvahed in Spain in 1616 and not a dozen years later was running a pirate ship in the Caribbean, seeking revenge on the Spanish Empire, which had driven the Jews from Spain. Henriques was a different kind of Pirate, he discussed his targets thoughtfully, gathered intelligence in great detail, abhorred any more violence than was necessary and was generous to his captives, refusing to sell them as slaves but releasing them at the nearest safe port.

His great claim to fame was that he was the only pirate in fifty attempts over two hundred years to capture a Spanish treasure galleon, taking it’s incredibly valuable cargo without harming a soul on board. He also went on to be a friend and adviser to the great Pirate Henry Morgan.

This is a different kind of Jewish boy than I ever heard about, and in his honor, I am getting a Jewish Pirate tattoo Thursday on my birthday. It is a Star Of David with some skulls embedded in the points. Maybe I will be fortunate enough to get to show it to a rabbi. It is, of course, already controversial on Facebook, where many people abhor tattoos and some think the tattoo would evoke the Holocaust. Not for me. “What does Maria say,” asked one horrified woman. “Sure,” she said, “why not?” This seems to her a perfectly normal thing to do.

I am celebrating this unexpected bit of cultural identity and I will also be thinking of Grandma Cohen (perhaps I am related to Moses, my grandfather was a Cohen). Jews can grow up to be pirates, and I can not imagine that Captain Moses Cohen Rodriguez’s wife gave him a lot of guff about the dishes. I guess I am no pirate. We’ll get back to that later.