Irv was raised by a very religious mother.  I have no idea if his father was religious, his father’s wishes never seemed to come into play.  The home my father and his little brother grew up in was ruled by the strict orthodox laws of Judaism, in their most brutal and austere form.  The family was kosher, and regulars at the little synagogue at the narrow, church-like, white painted First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill where the father swept the floors for a few copeks a week.   The poor mother, who could often not feed her family, insisted on giving charity every week, which she paid out from the coins in her little Tzedakah (“justice” “mercy” “good deed” “fairness” “piety” “alms” or “charity”) box.  

The synagogue sent Jewish transients to their house to board there overnight, as a way of generating a little income for the poor family.  These were Jewish hobos who traveled looking for work during the Depression.  Apparently many were drunks and they’d piss out the windows or literally throw their shit around like drunken chimpanzees.  When they caused too much of a ruckus Irv’s mother would scream for him to run and get Eli, who lived nearby.  Eli would come over and bodily throw these bums out in the street, administer an enraged warning or a thrashing, depending on the needs of the situation.  

In the army corporal Israel (his name was actually Azrael, but the army didn’t make such distinctions) remained as kosher as it was possible to be as a grunt.  He lived on side dishes during meals when they served pork.  As an adult he kept more or less kosher, although not strictly so, by any means.  He ate Chinese food, for example, but always beef or chicken.   He didn’t stop his wife from frying up some bacon for the kids whenever she liked, though he was never tempted to taste it.  “I’m so hungry, I could eat pork!” was one of his stock phrases.  He never did, until, one night, and to my great disappointment, somehow, he tasted a little Szechuan pork and found it delicious (which it was).  He never tasted it again, to my knowledge.

He explained the laws of Kashrut (“kosherness”) to my sister and me in a memorable way.  He summed them up as laws of mercifulness.  It was exceedingly cruel to boil an animal in its mother’s milk; this was the reason Jews didn’t eat diary and meat together.  Kashrut insisted that animals must be slaughtered as painlessly as possible, he explained.  Though years later I’d see a chicken slaughtered in this manner by a farmer in Israel  and the way it ran, without its head, plowing the dirt with its neck, did not make it look like a very painless way for a living bird to become a delicious chicken dinner.

As a boy Irv was taken to the small shul regularly and no doubt endured the endless services there, rising, being seated, rising, being seated, rising.  I can picture his mother looking on from the women’s section of that sexually segregated congregation, boring a hole in the side of her son’s neck with her stern gaze.  I imagine the services in that tiny synagogue must have been as dry and stultifying as some of the worst services I’ve endured over the years.  My father’s religious upbringing was devoid of joy, as mine would be, to the extent I endured my Hebrew School days.  

He never tried to impose his religious views on his wife.  She was a proudly secular Jew and had no use for the superstitious rituals of the orthodox.  It went beyond that, really, she couldn’t refrain from colorfully expressing her complete disdain for their ignorant ideas, rigid ritualism, small-minded prejudice, and mostly, to her, their mind-numbing, self-righteous stupidity.    

My mother came by these views honestly.  She got the beginnings of them from her mother, who had fallen under the spell of the Marxists who came to the Ukraine right after the revolution and established a Jewish Youth Group for the Jews of the Vishnivetz area, spreading the message of cooperation, universal brotherhood with fellow workers and hope for a much better future in a world justly ruled by workers.  Of course, this movement lasted only a short time.  Within a few years all of the Jewish fellow workers in Vishnevitz would be slaughtered by their Ukrainian fellow workers, at the urging of their fellow workers from Germany.

My father, to his credit, never challenged my mother on any of this.  Partly, I suppose, because he agreed with most of it.  For her part, my mother never gave him any grief for going to synagogue on the High Holidays, though it was understood that she wouldn’t be caught dead rising and being seated hypocritically during the endless proceedings.  My mother also participated robustly in the Passover seders every year, usually as the host and chef for two large gatherings.  The story of the exodus from slavery to freedom was meaningful to her, even if all the rituals and prayers were a little tiring.  

The moral and ethical essence of every religion is how mercifully its adherents apply the mostly merciful teachings of their holy books.  The good of all faiths share a similar worldview, it has often been noted.  Their god teaches them to love justice and mercy and to help others as much as they can.  Their teachings command them to overcome their worst impulses, exercise restraint and strive to be better people.  There are many religious people who are wonderfully compassionate examples of a higher spiritual awareness.  

Other deeply religious individuals take time out from other good works to put non-believers to the sword, excommunicate them, burn them as heretics, torture them, disembowel pregnant heretics and send their unborn children to hell with them.  These murderers always believe they are doing God’s will, as insane as it indisputably is, for example, for followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, to kill each other over the language the other Christian sect chooses to pray to their mutual Messiah in.  

Jesus, I always imagine, is weeping in heaven over the behavior of the more insane of his followers and the trillion dollar church industries claiming to carry out his merciful teachings while endorsing many forms of human cruelty.   It’s unfair to judge all religious people on their sometimes rabid leaders or on the acts of a few million of them over the centuries, perhaps, but– hell, life’s unfair.

“Well, as President Kennedy said, ‘life’s unfair,'” my father used to say.

Dig it.  Whatever else you can say about the incomparable adventure that is life, it is unfair.  The most important ingredient of a religious life, or any life, for that matter, it seems to me,  is love.  Without love you get the Crusades, violent Jihad, the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years war, etc.   I can hear my mother snarling about the murderously self-righteous of all religions, ignorant fuckers happy to kill to prove how all-merciful their imaginary  God is.

My father shed most of the trappings of his religious upbringing over the years.  By the time he was in the hospital, waiting to die, he expressed no religious feeling at all.  I asked him, that last night of his life, if he wanted me to say kaddish for him after he died.  He shrugged, told me it meant nothing to him one way or another if I chanted the mourners’ prayer of praise to God (in Aramaic, a language nobody alive understands) for thirty days after his death, or for a year, as the orthodox do.  He assured me he really didn’t give a shit about kaddish, or any other religious matters.  I believed him.  

The following story illustrates the depth of my father’s final belief about religion as well as any story I can think of.

While he was becoming increasingly bitter and pessimistic during the last years of his life, he came to more and more regret the lack of intimacy with those he loved, as he sadly reported from his death bed.  He explained that he had never seen affection shared in the home he grew up in. “I had no idea how it was even done,” he croaked.   He was always affectionate to animals, playful with young children he encountered.

 “He always loved small kids and little dogs, probably because they posed no threat to him,” my sister once observed, astutely.

As often happens in life, my parents found an inventive way to find the love and intimacy that was so hard for them to achieve with their own loved ones.   Interacting with strangers, being loved unconditionally and showing the children of these strangers unconditional love, was a blessing they shared with a young couple who had repudiated their own parents when they were born again into fellowship with Jesus.

My parents had been volunteering to help teach reading for the first grade class of the teacher who had taught both of their grandchildren.   They had both been impressed by this dedicated teacher’s kindness, and the way she instilled care and cooperation in her young students.  They went to read books to the children in the years after their grandchildren attended her class. They also helped the children crack the code of reading, working with them one on one or in small groups.

“She’s a lovely woman,” my mother told me once, “and she has created a very kind atmosphere in the classroom.  The kids really treat each other remarkably well and I have to credit that to her.”  I could tell there was a punchline to this compliment on the way.

“But I have to say, in terms of teaching the children math, and reading, or anything, really, besides how to treat each other– which I’ll grant you is also very important– she seems to be a moron.”  And she described with illustrations the parochial stupidity of this very kind woman.  

“Plus,” said my mother, laying down the trump card, “she’s a born again Christian.”

My father was uncharacteristically subdued in the face of this opinion.  He basically agreed, but to him, it seemed, the social development piece was more important than the lack of skills this experienced teacher imparted.  

In any case, at some point they met the parents of one of the more learning challenged kids.  My mother had told me about this kid she was working with, beautiful, and very sweet, but seemingly incapable of grasping anything when it came to reading.  The letters of the alphabet seemed to mystify this little sweetie completely.  To my surprise, my parents soon became close friends with the parents of this young born again Christian girl, often visiting them at their home. 

They were very loving to the young girl from school and her younger siblings, bringing them presents, spending a lot of time with them.  My sister contrasted this to their less effusive relationship with her children, their only grandkids.  Another of those surrogate situations, clearly, trying to get right with strangers what was difficult or impossible to accomplish with actual loved ones.  I heard some stories about this young born-again couple over the last few years of my father’s life.  

For one thing, the couple did not talk to their own parents.  Their parents and they had disowned each other, they were no longer in contact.  Their parents, clearly, were determined to go to hell, and there was nothing the young couple could do about that.  The time they spent with my parents was clearly cherished by them, they always made my parents feel at home, and treasured.  My mother chuckled over what a good-natured imbecile the husband was.

“They were arguing with us once about evolution.  You know, born-agains believe that humans and dinosaurs lived together 6,000 years ago, when God created the Garden of Eden.  I was laying out the theory of evolution, and the time frame, the millions of years over which all these changes took place, all the scientific evidence and Lisa kept shrugging it off as secular humanist propaganda.  When God is on your side, you know, the sky’s the limit in what you can believe and God will provide the facts, if facts are even needed in a life of blind faith.  So Lisa is making these ridiculous arguments and she calls on Hector, who was in the kitchen, for some support.”

“And Hector sticks his head out from behind the kitchen wall, with a banana in his hand and half of it in his mouth and says ‘you’re not going to convince me that I came from a monkey.’  And he looked exactly like a monkey.  Even Lisa cracked up, it was too perfect.”

“He did.  He looked like Curious George,” said my father “except without the curiosity.  He’s a delightful guy, but as closed minded as they make them.” 

This closed-mindedness, the ultimate fatal flaw in anyone who’d cross my father’s path, it was the one thing impossible for him to tolerate, seemed no obstacle to a loving relationship with this young couple.  It was kind of mind blowing, but at the same time, having no dog in the fight, I felt glad they at least were sharing this love with people.  A net gain for all involved, I figured.  

My parents never reported any overt attempts to convert them.  They spent many a pleasant time with them.  I never met them, or was particularly interested in meeting them, but I regret that now.  They would play a disturbing role in my father’s final hours and I’m sorry I wasn’t on hand to do as Eli would have done with guests in his aunt’s home who insisted on their God-given right to fling dung.

When my father was suddenly hospitalized, six days before his death, they came to visit him at the hospital– on the last, or possibly second to last, day of his life.  I wasn’t there when they arrived, sleeping late the day after our long conversation on the last night of my father’s life, as far as I can recall.  My sister was there, unfortunately I was not.  My father was very weak, hardly able to speak.  They arrived with a group of people from their church, including the kind but stupid first grade teacher my parents had volunteered to teach reading for.

According to my sister, who cannot be doubted in this account, they formed a circle around my father’s bed.  They prayed to Jesus to accept his soul and they had my father, a lifelong Jew, secular humanist and lifelong scoffer at the doggedly defended superstitions of other religions, agree that he would allow Jesus to be his personal savior.  

“They made him accept Jesus Christ,” my sister told me in horror, “and he did.”  

I tried to reassure her that he’d been too weak to put up a fight, that he was trying to be kind to them, but the image disquieted me greatly too.  I told her I wished I’d been there, to kick them out of his hospital room.  The nerve of those fucking fanatics!  

“He accepted Christ as his personal savior,” my sister told me, aghast.

I suspect the old man was philosophical about this acceptance of an imaginary savior.  Maybe he was hedging his bets.  I’m sure when he looked into those expectant, loving faces he thought, “yeah, what the fuck, sure, Jesus, yeah, OK.”  He probably nodded, which caused a ripple of horror to go through my sister.  She was in too much grief at the moment to do more than cringe in horror.

The proof of the depth of their dedicated, if superficial, Christian charity would be seen soon enough. Not once did they visit or contact my mother, the grieving widow.  Not in the days immediately after my father’s death or at any other time during the last five years of her lonely life as a widow.  They did not seem to give a shit about saving my mother’s soul, now that my father was tucked safely by the bosom of his personal savior.

My father, with his large, funny persona, had apparently been the drawing card to this loving relationship.  It would not be the only time my mother would be abandoned by those dear friends who had been so close with the couple.  My father, for his part, would not be in the least bit surprised by this betrayal by avowedly religious people.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to bum you out yesterday with my reflections on friendship,” said the skeleton.  “I mean, realistically, what are your odds of being caught in a lifeboat with a group of friends?  More likely you’d be there with strangers, and we all know all bets are off when it comes to killing and eating strangers.”  

You didn’t bum me out, though my one-day editor might wonder what it had to do with your life, why it’s in the Book of Irv.

“Well, it reflects my lifelong feeling about the transience of friendship, and how, in the end, and all along the way, people always do what’s best for them, no matter how much guilt they might deal with after the fact. That’s the essence of being comfortably middle class, Elie, –not that anyone can be truly comfortable in the insecure middle class, mind y0u, the future all riding, literally, on the twitch of a roulette wheel– finding a way to deal with the guilt of not really being in the fight, it’s like survivor guilt.  On the one hand, you worked hard, you feel entitled to the comfort you’ve earned.  On the other hand, even though you didn’t take your money from anybody’s hand, or food out of anyone’s mouth, there’s a certain terrible sorrow you can’t consider too often involved in living in a world like the one we live in. Your success proves you personally were not doomed, but there are literally billions, all around, who are.

“You read the New York Times every day and once or twice a year they make an appeal to your conscience, show you pictures of wretched, doomed children.  You cry and open your checkbook and send some money.  It makes you better than most people, and, really, what is anyone supposed to do about institutional poverty going back ten and twenty generations?

The skeleton paused to consider what looked like a couple of vultures, turning lazy arcs in the sky to the north of the cemetery.

“What did your former buddy the judge tell you about contracts?  You make a contract with somebody when things are at their best, you are full of hope for the partnership.  Then, later, when things turn to shit, you hope the original terms are fair to both of you– or, actually, you hope the terms are construed in your favor and totally fuck the other party.  He said it of friendship, right?  You give your friend every benefit of the doubt, though over time the doubt may overwhelm and smother the benefit.

“Did you ever foresee a day when someone you shared so many good times with, someone you trusted, confided in, considered a good friend, would become a stranger?  I doubt it.  It seems unimaginable, doesn’t it, that you would end up with nothing but malice for your old friend Andy.  He’s dead to you, as you yourself freely admit.  Yet for many years, decades, in fact, such a thought was unthinkable.  Now you understand how things worked out with Harold.

“The seeds were there all along, in the crisp light of hindsight.  Was Harold a genius, literally?  I’d say he was.  Was he one of the funniest people I ever knew?   At one time.  But you see, Elie, as you yourself have learned, someone is only funny as long as they do not appear to be an arrogant sadist.  It’s a fine line we walk with other people.  That’s the point.  It’s like that great line from that Isaac Babel story you love, go get the tattered book off the shelf, it’s worth quoting accurately.  I’ll wait.  

Babel’s narrator writes:  A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time.  The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist.  The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.  

“It’s like that with friendship too.  If you have to turn the lever a second time, all bets are probably off.  And we are born into this world like Babel’s phrases, both good and bad at the same time.  In the end, I’m afraid, it’s like your friend’s father always said, ‘you’re born alone, you live alone, you die alone.'”

Those are the words of a pessimist, dad.  Pessimism is something to be afraid of, in the end.  

“Well, you can get out the rollers and the drop cloths and paint a nice patina of cheerful, hopeful bullshit on everything in your life, believe the best of everybody.  Or you can be ready.  In a heartbeat, Elie, it all changes”

The two vultures were now perched on the top of my father’s double wide headstone, looking oddly interested in the conversation, turning from my father’s skeleton to me.

Look, obviously I hear what you’re saying.  

The vultures kept looking at me, they did not seem satisfied with my response.  

“You’re struggling today, I understand.  Bringing in prop birds, a sort of macabre Heckle and Jeckle.  I get it.  This must be hard work, Brownie.  All I can say is keep going.  You must not rest until my story is told.”

Tell us more about Harold.

“Harold and I met when we were both starting teachers.  We taught in a very tough New York City Junior High School in a terrible neighborhood.  You know there are more assaults in Junior High than anywhere else.  The hormones kicking in makes that age group prone to lashing out.  They don’t know what’s happening to them, and they are still really kids, but suddenly the girls have breasts and the guys are starting to grow mustaches.  This school was a full-time battleground, the kids were poor, mostly from the projects, and the principal, as you’d expect, was a completely incompetent hectoring bureaucrat.  

“I remember meeting Harold in the teacher’s room.  You remember the preps, right?  You’d get 45 minutes off, it was in the contract, every day you’d get your prep period. You’d never prep anything, you’d spend your whole 45 minutes wondering how you got into this shit hole which seemed to have no bottom and infinite shit flying at you from every direction.  So I guess Harold saw the look on my face, and he comes over laughing and we start to talk.  He was a life saver.  

“I remember I asked him how he coped with the angry, savage, vicious students and he took me aside and told me his secret.  In hindsight, it shows what he was like from the beginning, I mean, can anyone condone this kind of behavior?  But at the time, I remember feeling admiration for his guts, and finding his hard-boiled way of telling the story very funny, even though there’s nothing at all funny about it now, now that I hate the guy.  He was showing me his style, and how little he gave a fuck, and these both struck me as very cool at that time.  

“He told me that when it got really bad he’d get very quiet.  He’d walk over to the door of the room and pull the little shade down over the window in the door.  He’d glance out the window to make sure nobody was outside who was going to be a witness.  Then he’d roll up his sleeves, take the kid who was challenging him and beat the shit out of him.”  

Nice.  

“Yeah, and the thing was, as you learned with some of those very tough little kids in Harlem, they were too macho to report him in most cases and also, he found, it made them respect him.  It actually proved to the kid, in a sick way, that you cared enough about him to deck him.”

Sean Pedroso, I thought, but did not say.  

 “Look, I realize how little you remember about Harold.  I mean, you must have been ten or eleven when he put a price of $75 on our friendship and I told him it was worth much less than that.  Tell them the story about that rainy day when he swooped by in that little shitbox he used to drive, the one he rebuilt over and over.”

I was on 190th Street walking toward the turnpike, I was a little ways down the street when the sky opened up and it started to pour.  Suddenly a horn honked, the street was still a two way street back then and the car was headed to the turnpike.  I looked over to see Harold leaning toward the passenger window, calling for me to hop in.  

He gave me a big smile, asked where I was going, and took me there.  

“As skinny as you are, I figure you could dash between the raindrops, but why work that hard when we have this motorcar here?”  Glancing around the interior of that little car I realized at once why my father called it a shitbox.

The ride lasted maybe two minutes, and I thanked him, probably made my way back through the rain, but I remember that short ride fifty years later.  It clearly made a big impression on me, those moments with my father’s friend the genius.  

I also remember him calculating a distance once by asking me how far it was to the horizon.  There is a specific distance over flat ground.  It might be 26 miles.  He knew the number and described how to figure out how far this distant point was by estimating its relation to the distance to the horizon.  For all I know, it was complete bullshit, but I remember I took it as proof that Harold really was a genius. 

“You never heard him quote long passages in German, or speak Italian, or play the oboe?  Harold was literally a Renaissance Man, he was a genius many times over.  He was also, I came to understand, an insane, petty and merciless prick.”  

So I came to understand.  

The buzzards gave each other a look, shook their heads, stretched out their great, stinking wings, and took off.  

Yeah, I’m out of here too, dad.  

“Have a blessed day,” said the skeleton, as arch as he was when he was alive and walking among us.

“Well, look, Elie, it’s easy enough to be sociable and make friends if you have the tools. I had the tools: I had decent looks, you know, when I was younger, I was droll, I was well-read and could discuss current invents, I knew history, I followed sports. I was irreverent, engaging and plain-spoken, things that come off as charming and will make you seem interesting in a social setting,” said the skeleton.

“Plus, and this will strike you as funny, probably, but I had the most important qualities too, I was very sensitive and empathetic.”

I always realized you were sensitive, though the empathetic part is a little funny, of course. Even though I saw your empathy in action many times, just not toward us very often.

“Well, one can’t be everything to everyone,” said the skeleton. “But, on a deeper level, remaining mutual friends with somebody always requires a certain suspension of belief, on both sides, about the entire reality of the person you’re choosing to stay friends with. You know we are all admirable and despicable as human beings, and to your credit, recently, you try to focus on the admirable, whenever you’re not busy speaking ill. I feel it’s a losing game, in the long run, but I think it’s great that you’re trying to sustain this benevolent view of the flawed people in your life.”

Pater, I take your life as a graduate seminar in how to live my own life. If I learn nothing from the history of your troubled quest, I am doomed to repeat it. Do you hear me, there in your permanent dirt bed?

“Loud and clear, my son. Look, I understand what you’re trying to do. I already told you I admire the effort you’re putting in. Maybe you really have become a better person than I was ever capable of becoming. I hope so. Still, since you’re apparently giving me my say on this subject, I’ll say the following:

“It’s easy, as we have noted, for anyone with a little wit and just about any amount of native charm, to gather a group of friends in his life — everyone is constantly looking for friends, after all — providing he’s willing to be an actor and pretend, at times, that things are other than they actually are, fundamentally. My take, of course, is ultimately pessimistic– we can pretend all we want that we are actually intimately close to these loving people but if it comes down to the lifeboat after four or five days on a flat sea, these dear friends are looking around to see which of their closest friends is ripest for the picking.

“It’s like that great cartoon in Playboy, in one of the magazines I hid in that cabinet down in the basement that you were always so paranoid I’d find out you were intently inspecting. (What, did you really think that as I was poring over those fascinating articles in the basement bathroom that I’d be looking for forensic clues that my teenaged son had been poking around in those glossy mags?) Anyway, you remember the cartoon, obviously, on the lifeboat, all the scraggly survivors are perusing menus and the waiter, like Jeeves, in the impeccable tuxedo is standing attentively by, towel on his forearm, poised to take their orders and the guy asks the waiter “how is the cabin boy prepared?’

“No matter how highly you think of them, if you are brutally honest, you can see the faces of your friends who would be the last ones alive on that drifting lifeboat. Most of them would, to their credit, be chagrined as they chewed their ceviche d’Eliot but only the most noble of them would hesitate, if they had to eat you to survive, before tucking into your sashimi. Some would be elbowing the others out of the way to get their share, it’s human nature, the same thing that allows us to march off in columns chanting and slashing with broad swords.

“And I say this as a compliment, you probably would be about the last person on that lifeboat to dig in. I don’t think you’d ever have the heart to eat, for example, Sekhnet sashimi, even to preserve your life. I mean, we can never really know what we’d do in that situation, of course, until we’re in that boat. But I think, if we polled your friends, they’d agree, you wouldn’t be elbowing your way to the trough, you’d take a lot of coaxing before you’d consider eating the dead Sekhnet just to stay alive.

“They might finally marshal enough arguments (assuming there was more than enough to go around), ‘look, she died of a heart attack, she’s already dead, she’s going to putrefy anyway, there aren’t enough of us to finish her before the sea vultures and sharks start swooping in, waste not want not, it’s a sin to waste food, she’d want you to eat her, think of how exceedingly generous she always was, she’d be happy that you lived on because of her, she’s actually quite delicious,’ and they might convince you in the end, but you’d be crying as you ate, and certainly not fighting any one for her scraps.”

Maybe so. Though it doesn’t make me a better person than any of them, just more squeamish about where I draw the line.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said the skeleton.

I had good friends you always despised because you considered them slick charmingly insincere self-promoters. or morally deficient in some other way. You predicted they’d do very well, materially, and even feel guilty when certain facts of their lives were presented too openly, and you dismissed them as human beings. Already judged and found guilty for their future adult selves, even at nine, thirteen or fourteen. It always shocked me a little.

“Well, you’ve done the same yourself since then, made the same judgments I did. It’s only where you are experientially at that point in your life that allows you to see certain things. I’d seen these guilty avowedly liberal types many times over by the time I was an adult, people who could literally exploit slave labor and enjoy prostitutes, young boys, whatever the insupportable vice, and then be disarmingly guilty and philosophical about it when confronted.

“Guys like Thomas Jefferson, to this day one of history’s most beloved and gifted spokesmen for freedom and human equality. Don’t you think the Author of Liberty would blush to the roots of his red hair to be told, plainly, what a despicable fucking hypocrite he was, along with what an undeniably eloquent, beloved opponent of tyranny and slavery in all its forms? He’d probably dash right out to the stables for a vigorous ride, return with the horse bloody and wild-eyed, his slave groom calming the hysterical animal, as every one of his biographers seems to have noted about the Sage of Monticello, our gentlest, wisest founding father.”

Don’t get me started on the fucking Author of Liberty, dad. But you know the funny thing, you’d probably have been friends with him if you were a Virginian back then.

“Yeah, maybe. If I wasn’t, say, a Negro,” said the skeleton. “On the other hand, manumitted Negroes were not allowed in Virginia a day beyond the one year anniversary of their manumission, so I couldn’t have actually been a Virginian and a Negro back then anyway, except during that short window, which would have been too quick to have become real friends with the famously cool Mr. Jefferson. It took him years to form his lifelong friendships.

“Look, I know you’re better off loving a warm, humanistic, well-read, thoughtful, funny person, instead of despising them because they may also be, of necessity, a slightly insincere self-promoter, or even a complete hypocrite. Better to love a very lovable guy, even as you realize his lucrative livelihood, even if motivated by the highest ideals, is a bit… well, you wouldn’t want to do it.”

Or we can just say “judge not, lest you be judged” or whatever that phrase was.

“Who said that? Jesus, the imaginary messiah of the eternally warring Christian sects?” said the skeleton.

I have no idea. I can recall, word for word, five hundred jingles and TV theme songs from childhood, but I couldn’t give you a single accurate Shakespeare quote or even one of my favorite proverbs.

“Well, that’s just one more reason why Donald Rump is going to be the next president of these Untied States,” said the skeleton. “Hah, it’s funny, that still looks like a typo, even though I said, and meant ‘untied’.”

Hitlerious, dad. I’m outta here, yo.