I spent a year, during law school, in the romantic embrace of a deeply damaged soul I think of affectionately as The Nazi Doctor.  She was tormented by a sense of her inadequacy that could never be lessened by any of her many accomplishments.  She was a surgeon, a pilot, a wine expert, fluent in German (her father had been German, a very unGerman German, according to her, kind of a free spirit– free enough to have two children with a black woman, anyway), she also spoke Spanish and Arabic and could understand French, she was a gourmet cook, an expert skier, on and on. Nothing she ever did, no matter how brilliantly, convinced her she was anything but inadequate.  That someone so hard on herself could also be so tender always surprised me, and touched me greatly.

“So, are you two thinking about getting married?” my mother asked me over the phone, toward the end of that year.  

“I don’t think so, mom,” I told her, “you know, she has a lot of great qualities, and I love her, but it would be like marrying my father with tits.”

“Oops, I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear that,” said my father, who at some point had silently picked up an extension down there in Florida.  

“It’s not the way it sounds,” I hastened to reassure him, though, of course, it was exactly the way it sounded.  In making my peace with the good doctor I had also been trying to resolve things with her psychological doppelganger, my father.   My relationship with the doctor featured some tremendous consolations, unthinkable, even disgusting, in connection with my father, but even those, in the end, weighed little.  A life intimately connected with someone like that as a partner was unthinkable, to anyone who gave it more than a passing, purely emotional, thought.

My father had his own version of the doctor’s tender touch.  The doctor touched me with infinitely delicate, butterfly lightness, the way she touched her beloved cat, Nachtl, who died while I knew her.  The gentleness of her skilled hands I can still feel, and the way it made me momentarily forget how damaged her soul was.  My father was not a toucher, but he could be similarly disarmingly gentle.  It did not happen all the time, or even often, but it happened enough over the years to show that he was capable of it.  His was at his best in an emergency, when, always calm, he could be very comforting.  That is part of what makes him such a tragic figure in my eyes.

He had all the qualities to make a great friend:  intelligence, sensitivity, honesty, humor, understanding, loyalty.   These are the qualities that make a great father too.  It was beyond him, most of the time, overwhelmed as he was, to exhibit the totality of these qualities to his children, or even to his wife, the love of his life.  

My mind suddenly flashes on that black and white photo of my young father, before he met my mother, locked in that whacky wrestling embrace with the blond haired Christian woman in Connecticut.  I’ve never seen him looking happier, more mischievous and full of life, than in that photo.  The shot must have been snapped some time before Eli was dispatched to break up that relationship in no uncertain terms.  Eli, not a man to trifle with, went on behalf of his beloved aunt, Tante Chava, my father’s mother.

Tante Chava, for her part, had never recovered from her older brother’s life shattering betrayal under similar circumstances.  She was being courted by a Jewish postman, with red hair like hers, and had no doubt never been happier than with the prospect of a life in America with this cute young man who loved her.  

“Well, that ape, my father’s second wife, wasn’t going to lose her little slave, you know what I mean?  If she’d got married to him she’d move out and there would go the full-time housekeeper.  So they busted that up right away, and, of course, it broke Tanta Chavah’s heart.  They eventually arranged the marriage to your grandfather, but, of course, there was no romance there.”

My mother, during her college years and intermittently afterwards, was a poet.  She saw the world through a poet’s eyes, with a natural talent for exaggeration she kept until the end.  On her tombstone I had them carve the Hebrew words for “heart of a poet.”  When she died I looked in vain for the blue journal I remember seeing as a kid, the book that contained her handwritten poems.  I eventually found a very small packet of poems, including an extremely passionate one to a lover.  I sent it to my sister.  

“Oh, my God,” she said after she read it, “that was hard to read.  That definitely wasn’t written to the D.U.”   It occurred to me then that it must have been written to Art Metesis, the flamboyant bon vivant who swept my mother off her feet, and stole her heart, and possibly also her maidenhead, before her strong-willed mother stepped in to put an end to that intoxicating romance.  She would not have this headstrong, dashing young man as a son-in-law.

This dizzying set of interlocking tragic thwartings of love and lust is only known to me because I paid close attention.  As much as anything else, I have had to become a sleuth, the only way to make sense out of perplexing circumstances otherwise so hard to understand.  I needed clues, and whenever I found an important one I filed it away in the permanent collection where I keep my most important memories.  

When my father told me, at the very end of his life, that he didn’t know how to express love because he’d never seen it done at home, I understood more than I could explain to him in that moment.  He did his best, which is what I told him, seeking to give him a little comfort as he tried to make his way from this world with a bit of grace.  I assured him that everybody was here, those he tried to love were all around him.  By this I suggested that we’d all got the message of how much he loved us.   

“Well,” he said weakly, and hopefully, “when you guys needed something, I like to think I was always there for you.”  A long silence follows this remark on the recording.  I wasn’t going to lie to the man, and was at a loss for another comforting thing to say about that particular point.  After an extended moment he says, wait, let me go to the primary source.

“…you can’t be sure about that,” he said, philosophically, pausing to catch what was left of his failing breath before going on to other matters.

When we put together the final puzzle of a man’s life, the most essential pieces, it strikes me now, involve how content he was with his life, how much joy he took in the things he loved, how he loved the creatures he loved, how he made others feel, the kinds of relationships he had.   The wealth he acquired, or failed to acquire, is a much smaller piece than the effect he had on those he came in contact with, it seems to me.  

My father was born under a series of bad signs, without question.  He did not have the wisdom, like so many famous self-made people we read about today, to choose to be born into a wealthy, or even middle class family.  His parents were extremely poor.  His mother, angry, religious and intolerant.  Also violent.  His father, utterly powerless.  The world must have seemed to him a very bleak place in the years before he was stationed, at 21, in a bucolic spot in recently defeated Nazi Germany.  

His little brother, who my father always said regarded the world through rose colored glasses, would get excited watching a guy load a soda machine.  “Oh, you should have seen it, Irv, it was so cool! He had all these different flavors, in different colored cans, and he rolled them down these wire racks, it was fantastic,” his brother would say.  My father rarely wore such glasses, and, anyway, those rose colored glasses didn’t really help my uncle with his uncontrollable rages.

With the odds stacked against him, I can see what Eli meant about how far he’d come.  The “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill” can be googled today, as a friend recently did, and quickly linked with his thesis adviser at Columbia Graduate School, one of the most admired historians of the twentieth century.  Neat trick, Irv!  He rose, by merit alone, through the teaching ranks to lead a small team of idealistic men and women who intervened to make peace in riot-torn New York City High Schools.  He parlayed his night job, director of a small regional office of a Zionist youth movement called Young Judaea (whose website informs us is the nation’s oldest such youth movement) into the national directorship a few decades later, after he retired from teaching.   He gave his children the unworried middle class existence he’d never dared to imagine as a reluctant-to-bathe wretch in Peekskill.

It’s probably unfair to dwell too long on how content he was.  Contentment, after all, in some measure flows from a baked in genetic disposition, innate capacities for happiness vary greatly.  Though our choices in life play a role, a certain amount of external luck is also undoubtedly involved.  

The question of how content anyone is reminds me of the old snap quiz from Philosophy 101: would you rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied?   A trick question, since it doesn’t stipulate that the thing that gives satisfaction will be snatched away in the time it takes you to answer the question. You know, take the food, and randy companion, and mud away from the pig and… that’s a pretty miserable pig.  Leave Socrates alone on a chilly desert island, he still has his fabulous imaginative brain to keep him warm.  

I think of the faith in a better world my father carried like a torch through the first half of his life.   He was very interested in Tikkun Olam,  repairing the world, making this planet a better, more fair and merciful place to live.  I know he leaned way to the left as a college student and throughout my childhood, well into my young adult life.  I regret I never got his story of attending the Peekskill riot of 1949.  

He would have been 25 that summer, a student, either a Syracuse undergrad (where he was sympathetic to the arguments of campus Communists — note*) or Columbia graduate student.  He went to the Peekskill gathering, I’m 90% sure.  The concert was organized by Commie rabble-rousers featuring Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson, among others.  It was organized as part of the post-war push for brotherhood, human equality and the end of racism– all principles the Second World War had ostensibly been fought over.

The first time they tried to hold the event local Klan types assaulted the crowd while law enforcement stood by smiling, stuffing Red Man chewing tobacco into their cheeks, spitting long brown jets of the toxic spew.  Cars on the narrow road to the site were ambushed, overturned, windshields smashed, young idealists beaten, hit in the face with rocks the size of fists, by fists and also baseball bats.  Was my father there that day?  I will never know.

Several days later they reorganized the event and held the concert, with proper security in place.  Young men in t-shirts stood shoulder to shoulder forming a human wall against the return of the men who hated the push for brotherhood, human equality and the end of racism.  Mobs of haters generally prefer to terrorize the unprotected, and it was, in retrospect, foolish of the Leftists not to have organized security to repel people who were violent in their opposition to radical things like integration of the races, justice and liberty for all Americans.  The second concert went off without much violence.

Which one of the concerts was my father at?  No idea.  Maybe both, maybe one, possibly neither, though for sure he’d returned to Peekskill for it.  All I have to go on is a dim memory of my father mentioning it and the purple prose of Howard Fast giving his  forgotten account of the long-forgotten episode in the fight for freedom and true democracy.  These prose are contained in a book, Peekskill USA, that I am turning in my hands now, its cover confidently predicting it will become “one of the enduring classics of American reportage.”  Indeed.   Like my father’s early, deeply left-leaning political beliefs, an artifact, a mere nostalgic after-trace.

I think of my father with great sympathy now when I look back over the eighty year expanse of his life.  His loss of faith, as he looked around him at the lack of real progress, the erosion of his hope, the increasing fatigue brought on by years of driven over-work, endless battles with his ungrateful middle class children, the ascendance of an aggressive right wing in American politics, these things beat him down.  He certainly felt increasingly trapped by fate and in the end, died convinced his fate had been sealed by the time he was two.

Let us look at the things he loved, then.  He loved soul music, deeply.  He would mimic Sam Cooke’s phrasing with impeccable accuracy, tunefully and with a decent voice, in the snippets he sang to my mother at the dinner table. He loved the animals we always had in the house, dogs, mostly.  He was their primary caregiver, always.   He loved justice and mercy, even if he didn’t always practice it with his wife and children, or with himself, for that matter.   He loved a good laugh, and gave more than he got.   He loved to wrestle with the political problems of the day and did it hands on when he still had the strength to engage with it.  He was an avid reader of intellectual periodicals and a fierce advocate for his beliefs, though this fierceness faded until, by his final decade or two it would become hard to see more than a flash of it.

How he loved the creatures he loved, outside of the dogs, is a more difficult area to assess.  How he made them feel, also problematic, and it varied greatly depending on who you spoke to.  He lamented, hours before he died, that he never saw affection expressed in the home he grew up in and therefore had no idea how to do it.  Yet, over the course of his life, he was loved and admired by many people.  I need only to picture the shrewd, intelligent faces of longtime friends Arlene and Russ, turned to take in every word Irv said, nodding with great satisfaction or bursting out laughing, or both at once.   They loved him and he loved them.

Russ once had my family meet him and Arlene at an Italian restaurant he’d discovered on Northern Boulevard.  He assured my father that, unlike many Italian restaurants, this one did not serve dishes that were like “congealed snot”.  Outside the restaurant Russ, a much smaller man than my father, grabbed his old friend, pulled his face toward him and kissed him on the lips.  My father recoiled, laughing.  As we all laughed Arlene informed us that Russ was high was high as a kite on demerol for the gall stones that were torturing him.

“Admit it, you loved it, you son of a bitch,” Russ barked to his old friend.   

He loved and was loved by people throughout his life, in spite of his insistence that he didn’t know how to show affection.  He always managed to convey his feelings, quite dramatically.

(to be continued)

* in law school I read a case that defined the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment’s right of free speech.  An utterance that amounted to an unambiguous “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”, wrote the unanimous court, was never the sort of speech the framers of the First Amendment thought worthy of constitutional protection.  The famous case where the fighting words doctrine was laid out is the 1942 Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire where the plaintiff was a loud mouthed crank who challenged a New Hampshire town marshal (“Goddamned racketeer”, “fascist”) who was trying to get him off a soapbox, if he didn’t like what he was saying, to basically make him get off his soapbox, where he stood on his phantom First Amendment legs. The cop didn’t, in fact, like what Chaplinsky was saying, nor his attitude, and these things would eventually result in the entire State of New Hampshire being sued by Chaplinsky.  And Chaplinsky eventually finding himself immortalized on the wrong end of a 9-0 Supreme Court decision during the early days of America’s involvement in World War Two.

What does this have to do with my father, you ask?  Somebody is clearly mistaken, and it may well be me, but when I discussed this case with my father (and it’s unlikely to have been Chaplinsky, I think now, reading on Wikipedia that he was a Jehovah’s Witness and not a Communist) his face lit up and he recalled the campus crank from Syracuse, his roommate had a passing friendship with the guy.  He was a Communist and a semi-professional rabble rouser, not even enrolled at the university, and had stirred up some shit on campus with his no holds barred invitations to exchange political fisticuffs.  My father chuckled as he remembered it, as he was always fond of this kind of thing and had obviously been fond of it then.    Could it have actually been Chaplinsky?  No idea.  Wikipedia does an excellent job on the Fighting Words Doctrine:

The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’ those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”

I remember being impressed as a young man by my father’s command of various subjects.  He could expound, fluently and in great detail, on any number of matters.  He was a voracious reader who remembered much of what he read (and heard) and could authoritatively call up various arguments and points of view at will.  He generally spoke without notes.  He taught me the importance of being well-informed about multiple sides of an issue to really be able to talk about it productively.  

This advice echoed what I later learned in law school (along with only using the passive voice when the facts were against you and you wanted to distance yourself from them:  ‘admittedly, the victim was stabbed’– as opposed to ‘admittedly, my client stabbed the victim’) — anticipate the strongest arguments your adversary can throw at you and be able to make the finer points of those arguments as strongly as your own, in order to learn best how to counter each one.

 Although my father was often an adversarial man, engaged in one long fight his whole life and rarely losing a round, I am not speaking now of how he used this skill in an argument.  I’m trying to describe his ability to analyze issues and synthesize his opinions from an understanding of multiple points of view.  It was his habit of looking at multiple sides of a question that made the deep impression on me.  He was aware, even as he generally saw the world in black and white, that there were all kinds of factors that went into making us believe what we believe.   He could articulate alternate theories to almost anything he said.  He saw the other side and could point out quite accurately why they believed they were right, then he’d show you why they were actually wrong.  

My father’s ability to clearly see the other position no doubt was an important component of what made him so formidable to argue against.  But what impressed me was his repeated demonstration of the importance of seeing multiple points of view for anyone seeking to understand something on a more than knee-jerk level.  Seeing things from multiple points of view is always better than having one unalterable, random view of the thing, if you want to understand it fully.

An example from the universe of music.  I have played guitar for many years and only recently, since taking up the ukulele a while back, have I started seeing the fretboard from another angle.  Seeing it differently has allowed me to notice new possibilities of an instrument I’ve played for more than forty years.  

The uke is basically a little guitar and anyone who plays guitar can easily, and with no introduction, make music with a ukulele.  But, while many things are applicable, there are certain things you can play easily on a guitar that are not immediately transferable to a ukulele, all of the root chords that use the guitar’s bass strings, for example.  So if you want to get proficient on ukulele you have to learn to use other positions, also transferable from the guitar, but not ones that would ordinarily come to mind.  

For guitar players, picture a first position D chord, slid up two frets (one whole tone in the scale) becoming an E chord, one more it’s an F.  Then picture the minor versions of these chords, the minor 7th, minor 6ths and so forth.   These are chords there is no good reason to play this way on a guitar, but which are indispensable for the ukulele player.   After mastering these on a ukulele the positions do turn out to be quite handy in arranging things for guitar. Now you are looking at the fretboard from the point of view of the high strings, locating positions from that vantage point rather than the way we all learn to find our positions, from the bass notes up.

This new view raises a number of new possibilities, along with different, sometimes very convenient, ways to finger the familiar chords.  So it is with anything we can understand from another point of view.  It is ironic, and also a blessing, that my father, during a largely adversarial life he regretted having lived in such rigid, uncompromisingly dualistic terms, taught me this deep lesson.  

“De nada,” says the skeleton.

My father was always very skeptical of sales related raps, advertising and its identical cousin political propaganda.  He would point out the obvious bullshit in the things that ran on television, the weasel words, the false, boastful claims that were just this side of illegal to make.  He had a great disdain for braggarts and I remember his delight reading me Darryl Knowles’s quote about Reggie Jackson “there’s not enough mustard in the world to cover that hot dog.”

He brought home the Remco Johnny Reb cannon one year at the designated time for a big gift, after my constant clamoring for it whenever I’d see the amazing, perfectly targeted ad on TV.  The dramatic battlefield scenes of young soldiers dragging the heavy cannon around, loading the barrel with the ramrod, firing at the wooden fort, helpless against its might, left my young jaw hanging.  His reaction to my bitter disappointment when I took the plastic piece of crap out of the box was great.  He looked at me like “what did you expect, man?”.  The look also said “I rest my case.” 

At its best, a good ad would give him a grim chuckle, though most often the whole exercise of this institutionalized bragging seemed to disgust him.  He himself was neither entrepreneurial nor self-promoting and I think he instilled a deep distrust of self-promotion bordering on ethical objection in both of his children.  Be honest, above all, was what he imparted.  Candor, unmitigated by careful calculation, we learn later, is the kiss of death in many business contexts.  

“I have to be completely honest with you, although, of course, I’ll get up to speed on your case quickly, I’ve never handled this kind of case before,” is the last thing a prospective client wants to hear from the lawyer he has just anxiously told his life-draining legal worries to.  

Wrong!  You absolutely don’t have to be honest at all, if it will potentially damage your business.  In fact, you are an idiot if you believe you have to be completely honest about being insecure, unsure, hesitant.   There is a way to finesse this lack of experience that sounds much more confident.  Like pausing, smiling and making no mention of it.  The impulse to lead with honesty can often be deadly in business.

“Capitalism runs on confidence,” says the skeleton grimly. “You could call it a con game in the truest sense, a gigantic ponzi scheme, it’s all based on gaining the customer’s confidence, exploiting their insecurity and their greed, or whatever it takes.  They are selling, more than any other single thing, the possibility of wealth.  It’s all a crap shoot, of course, something nobody can predict, it’s right there in the required fine print crafted by their legal teams, but the person people give their money to is the confident actor, the charmer who never shows fear.” 

If your reflex is to flinch every time your mother calls you by her pet name for you, if your father cannot protect you, or himself, it will be hard not to show fear.  Showing poise and confidence at all times will always be an act to someone whose first reflex is fear.  

“Well, that’s a little harsh and simplistic, Elie, everyone is an actor.  In life you have to be an actor,” says the skeleton. 

Of course that’s true.  And, speaking of actors, I find myself distracted now, wondering, for example, why I am not working on my father’s life as a screen play, leaping over the possible big $5,000 pay day for this book I’m working on, if I can succeed in selling it, when Hollywood will pay fifty times that for a movie script.  What could Hollywood be looking for, in the life of this one-time great idealist who watched his dreams of a better world erode over the decades in the trenches, became in the end a fairly bitter, anonymous old man?  Where is the story?  That can’t be it. Certainly you’re not suggesting that millions of Americans would fork over fifteen dollars a piece to see that depressing trajectory enacted on the screen.

“Well, let’s be honest about it, Elie, so far today you’re sitting around talking about the dodgy ethics of capitalism with a skeleton, not the kind of thing that puts fannies in the seats, if you know what I’m saying,” said the skeleton.

I do indeed.  More than you know.

“Do you know what Morgan Davis is, on the street?” my father asked my sister and me, one evening during a lull in our ongoing dinnertime wars.   My sister and I looked at each other, back at him, shrugged.

“Mogen David wine, ‘come on, man, we got us a bottle of Morgan Davis, let’s go’,” he said with a small cackle.  We laughed, too.  

I think now what a great demographically targeted ad that might be for the popular kosher wine.  

Look, obviously even my truth-bound father realized that somebody who told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth all the time would be intolerable.   He was a student of history, and politics, and also, not a sociopath.  Only a monster with no concern for the feelings of others insists on the absolute right to tell the truth all the time.  Can you imagine the damage somebody who is nothing but a strict truth teller could do to those around him?  

Besides, as we have already observed, there is nothing as simple as a “truth teller” except in the mind of an eight year-old.  There is only the relative degree of truth in the stories we tell each other, and ourselves.  Some versions are more truthful than others, more concerned with the hidden depths of the story than the shiny surface of it.

“A fool’s vexations are presently known but a prudent man concealeth shame,” says the Book of Proverbs.  What precisely is the excellent counsel of these words of wisdom?  Does it mean keep your mouth shut if something causes you shame?  Does it mean a wise person will hide any part of the truth that does not make him proud?   Shall I go into that dark booth and ask the smiling priest what it means, father?

I stumbled on the Book of Proverbs during a service somewhere, in some god-forsaken chapel where something was being celebrated, or lamented, at, (to me, anyway) always tedious length.  I have never been to any kind of prayer service where I could resist the mounting urge to take at least one very long bathroom break and, also, usually, a long, thoughtful tour of the empty building and the surrounding grounds.  I can’t sit still while people are praying, rising and being seated on command, murmuring earnestly in unison.  How my father managed to get through that long day at Hillcrest Jewish Center every year on Yom Kippur, on an empty stomach, no less, I will never know.

So in between “please rise” and “please be seated”, I’d sometimes search the back of the prayer book (where Pirkey Avot, “Sayings of the Fathers” was often to be found), or scan any Bible that was nearby, for whatever words of wisdom might be hidden there.  The Book of Proverbs, unsurpassed for pithy, fortune cookie-like aphorisms, was a favorite.  I’d sit and surreptitiously copy down any proverb or Saying of the Fathers that struck me as profound, troubling or both.  I’d noticed early on the withering looks my attempts at drawing pictures during the service always produced in the people around me, which is why I copied out these wise phrases stealthily.  Another favorite I recall jotting secretly: “As a dog who returneth to his vomit, so is a fool who repeateth his folly.”

The fool in all these examples, I quickly realized, was the person who refused to fear the Almighty, our eternally merciful, jealous, vengeful, petty God, the one who created us all in His image.  The basic idea is that only a disobedient fool does not fear the wrath of the loving Father who created us all, the giver of life, the bestower of every blessing.  It is apparently praiseworthy to be God-fearing, and foolish, prideful, and worse to have any hesitation to remain wisely afraid of the all-Merciful.

A prudent man, moreover, does not delve further than prudent into quibbling, faith-eroding questions like: why does the all-powerful, merciful Creator of the Universe allow the constant slaughter of innocents by people we may call Hitlers, large and small?  The answer is given conclusively, if also unsatisfyingly: God is all-merciful and in His mercy He gave man Free Will.  If man chooses to act like a violent asshole with his Free Will, how is this the fault of our all-merciful Father?  This wonderful shifting of blame from God to man for all the evil bad men do to good women, children, other men, animals, the earth itself, is called Theodicy, a kind of pious idiocy, it seems to me, but that’s only my opinionated opinion.

What my father’s opinion was on this subject, on the subject of religion in general, our’s in particular, I can’t be completely certain.  I know as he was dying I asked him about saying Kaddish for him.  Kaddish is the Aramaic prayer of praise to God and life that a first born male utters several times a day for a solid year to honor the departed parent whose soul has gone on to the World To Come.  I was prepared to say it for my father if it meant anything to him.  He waved it off, shrugged, said it really meant nothing to him.  

Since he was dying when he shrugged the Kaddish off, I said it every day for a month after he died, just in case, though I didn’t do it as required, in the presence of a minyan, nine other Jewish men, for a total of at least ten, the quorum for a real, honest-to God prayer service according to the rabbinic tradition.  For all I know, it may actually be one of the 613 actual commandments in the Bible, like the requirement to throw stones the size of your fist at adulterers and homosexuals until they are dead.

Which is why Jesus, the famously merciful Jewish rabbi of the never violent Christian tradition, stepped between a mob of true believers and an adulteress about to be stoned to death, according to the plain prescription of the Word of God, and said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Why Jesus, a man without sin, didn’t start things off, is not recorded.  Of course, that’s not the point.  Nor did I know, as I asked my father if he wanted me to say Kaddish for him after he died, that he would, a few hours later, apparently shruggingly accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

What is meant by “a prudent man concealeth shame?”.  This curious admonition stood out to me among the proverbs, many of which are transparent commands to stop thinking so much and do what God and your superiors tell you, even as Pirkey Avot also warns a Jew not to become too intimate with the ruling authorities.  There are seeming contradictions in all these words of wisdom, and debates about the meaning of many of them, but that phrase translated as “a prudent man concealeth shame” always intrigued me, and, because I’ve always been a bit foolish, also vexed me.  

I was prone, as my father was painfully aware, to making many of my vexations presently known.  Wherefore, then, was I imprudent in not concealing the parts of them a prudent man would have concealed?  This vexed me, of course, as it does now.  It also vexed my father, who tried, as a general rule, to keep his vexations to himself except when he exploded from time to time.

My sister used a wonderful phrase that explained a lot about our father.  He was “shame-based”, she said.   He was also a prudent man, by and large, and, in accordance with the Proverb, took lifelong steps to conceal his life’s basis in shame.  Wherefore shame?    The simplest explanation is deep and dire poverty, a poverty so terrible it stood out in stark contrast to the widespread poverty of the Depression, so degrading it required its own singular adjective whenever he spoke of it, which was not often.  Grinding poverty.  

The other half of that shame no doubt involved the mother who cruelly whipped him in the face from the time he could stand, and sent him to Public School in Peekskill without a word of English so he could start off on the right foot, as a big, unwittingly hilarious dummy, the “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.”  

I knew about the grinding poverty, of course, but the rest of it I only learned of as a middle aged adult, and only because I sought out still living primary sources like my father’s seventeen years older first cousin Eli.   Without the rest of it, I would have had no chance for a glimmer of understanding about my father.  I write these words now, the way Pat Conroy tells readers he always wrote, “to explain my own life to myself” as, in this case, I try to explain my father’s life to a reader who never knew either of us.

My sister, I was surprised to learn recently, does not remember our father’s insistence on truthfulness.  Honesty, to him, as I remember it, was not only the best policy, it was the only policy.  Truthfulness, as we’ve noted here, as becomes clearer as I head toward old age, is sometimes a tricky business, not as straightforward as an eight year-old might believe.  

“If you tell the truth, we can deal with whatever it is,” I remember my father telling me.  “A lie will only make things worse.  Lies only complicate things.  If you are honest you don’t have to worry.”  Thinking of this now, it’s a foolishly oversimplified thing to tell a kid, on several levels, even if also a noble one.  At the time it made a big impression, and it has stayed with me for the rest of my life, so far.  But there are several problems with it.

For one thing, a lie will not “only make things worse”, it will also, sometimes, make a bad thing seem to disappear.  New Liars become committed liars once they see, to their great relief, and later to their occasional thrill, how well lies can work. People willingly believe them and a terribly worrying thing, a shameful thing, has been made to go “poof!” There’s a palpable sense of relief when the concerned party relaxes their face and smiles, so glad to hear the bad thing they suspected never actually happened (even though, if the truth must be told, it actually did happen).

As for lies only complicating things — how does making a bad thing disappear make anything more complicated?  We’ve all heard the old saw about “if you tell the truth you never have to worry about remembering a made up story” but, in a sense, all stories are to some extent made up.  Add to that the plain fact that most of the time nobody follows up on a lie, no day of reckoning ever comes in regard to most plainly untrue things.  And then there’s the matter of liars who actually believe they are not lying, even when they demonstrably are lying.

If you are honest you don’t have to worry?  You can just sit back, I suppose, and enjoy your hemlock, but as for honesty generally removing worries, au contraire, mon frere.  Sometimes, rather than setting you free, the truth will set you up, like a crooked cop bagging up and planting the bloody glove you dropped at the crime scene in your foyer, with your DNA and the victim’s soaked into it.

But as for me, and even as I may be in some ways lying to myself, as my father, I see now, lied to himself, I prefer the truth most of the time.  It’s important to me.  There is a version of every story much closer to the truth than what we get fed most of the time.  There are real issues, with real problems involved, sometimes intractably intricate ones, that can only be solved by honestly grappling with the actual facts, set clearly aside from blinding preconceptions about things like “liberty” and “justice” or “vengeance” or “pride”.

 That our most challenging problems can only be tackled successfully by a truthful investigation and a frank discussion is beyond dispute, but to hear most people talk, particularly here in the USA, USA, it is but one opinion among many.  Like the assholes we all have, there is no shortage of opinions, many of them just as appealing as the average asshole.

Some questions, I’m afraid, are unambiguously straight-forward and the answer is either true or false.  “Were you there?” is an example.  There are only two possibilities, a yes or a no.  Only one is true, although the clever person can answer “yes and no.”

“Yes, I was there, you know, but I was so tired, I just got back from a long business trip, and I was so out of it, that I was in a daze and so I didn’t notice anything around me.  Outside of the fact that I recall I was there, and technically, ‘yes’, I was there, I can honestly say ‘no’ I wasn’t actually there, not in anything more than insensate zombie form, so yes, and no”

“A blind man can see where you’re going with this,” says the skeleton, waking in a bad mood.  This apprehension is common among abuse victims, who often wake up fearing the worst, history about to rear its ugly head and whip them in the face at any moment.

“Oh, you smile now,” they say, “but so did mom before she let loose with that flurry of stinging lashes with the heavy, frayed, coarse, canvas-wrapped cord of the old steam iron.”

I get it, I’ve been there, I’ve woken up there.  I’m not going where the blind man can see I’m headed, not necessarily.  I hadn’t intended to even mention my father’s essentially denying the Holocaust, as to our once large, now brutally culled family.  In fact, I won’t even mention it now.  

My point was actually that my father’s insistence on his son telling the truth was, to my mind, one of the great things he gave me. I always try to be truthful, except in those white lie situations where someone asks me, with a smile of great vulnerability, how her ugly new hair style makes her look.  Does my quest for honesty make me judgmental and intolerant, when I am faced with people who habitually lie?  Well… I can’t lie, it often does.  I’m just saying, it’s more complicated.  It is not that the truth does not exist– it does exist.  There is a version of reality way more heavy with truth than the opposite view, in most cases.  It all depends on how honestly you can look at the situation.

“OK, so you, then, my son, tell me which is the truth, which weighs more heavily on its side of the scale?” said the skeleton.  

“You are a person who never cared about making a living, never competed to try to sell any of your fairly impressive talents, was never content to work in any capacity that did not somehow involve respecting your love of creativity and collaboration, you always lacked discipline and ambition, yet you made a fetish of honestly feeling superior to the need to go to work and to everybody who goes out every day and earns a living.   In short, too scared to compete to get remunerated for your talents and too proud to admit you are a coward, fashioning yourself instead as a humble man of great integrity resisting the gravitational forces of modern American capitalism.”  

“I’m sorry, dad, was there a question in there somewhere?”  

“Is your insistence on doing exactly what you want to do at any given moment: play music, draw, write, pontificate, day dream, a manifestation of a true belief worthy of respect or the outward sign of a lifelong sad, childish clinging to something– creativity for the sheer joy of creating– that never actually existed anywhere, ever?”

Good question.  Tricky question.  One thing I have to say before anything else: the honest answer can, I know it’s maddening to hear your son say it, truly be both things at once.  Were you a great man or a destructive man?   Was Mantle a great hero or a colossal asshole?  

Take the example of Peevyhouse v. Garland, dad.  The upright, supremely fit gay rascal prof in law school, Bratton, presented that eternal either/or (or both) contradiction superbly, better than I’d ever seen it done.  It was the most brilliant demonstration of the lawyer’s art, and perhaps the nature of truth and justice, at least as far as court cases go, that I’d seen up to that time.  

The Peevyhouses owned a farm that they leased to a corporation, Garland, who explored it for some kind of ore or other resource.  The exploration took the form of gouging the surface of the land, a sort of investigatory strip mining.  Garland promised, in the contract, that if they found nothing, they would restore the farm to its original condition.  They found nothing, but didn’t restore the farm.  Peevyhouse sued Garland for breach of contract.  

Day one Bratton made the case for Peevyhouse, the poor farmers screwed by the evil, lying corporation that destroyed their home, their beautiful farm, reduced their once lovely world to shit and then brazenly breached their clear, contractual promise to fix it.   Every student was enraged at Garland by the end of that presentation, ready to decide the case.  A clear, open and shut case of breach of contract.  Bratton told us to hold on to our nooses and be ready for part two the next day.  

Day two Bratton presented the case from Garland’s point of view.  The Peevyhouses were not farmers, nor were they a cuddly family, they were, in fact, rapacious professional predators.  They bought dozens of properties, entered into these kinds of leases for land they never even set eyes on, and had sued dozens of companies under various theories, settling many every year, in fact much more profitably than Garland’s small, mom and pop operation.  The cost to Garland to restore the land, which was unused in any case and of little value to Peevyhouse except as a lever to extract huge settlements in court, would virtually put them out of business.  It was the practice, in these boilerplate lease contracts (Garland had no legal department, Peevyhouse employed a crack squadron of high-priced shysters), to have the clause about repair but, in practice, everyone understood it would never be done.   You be the judge now.

Now you will say this is an example of not being able to decide the case until the evidence from both sides is presented, rather than one about the shades of truthfulness in any assessment of human affairs.  And you would have good point, even though, in practice, the evidence on both sides is almost never presented this completely for people to impartially weigh before deciding what is true, what is fair.  It’s impossible to arrive at fairness without going through the truth, I would say. 

“When did you become such a an agile, wriggling weasel?” the skeleton asked, with that constant grin that may or may not have been expressive of wry intent.  

The truth then, as far as I can see it: most people get their sense of productivity and a good part of their self-esteem from the work they do, the title they hold, the income they earn.  Here in America, as in much of the world, a poor person’s life is, literally, worth much less than a rich person’s life.  The value of each life can be most easily rendered in dollars and cents.  How much is he worth? is universally understood (here) to  mean: what is the total value of his assets?

It is also possible, I have discovered, to get a sense of productivity, purpose and self-esteem from the things you do every day, if you do them earnestly and as well as you can, if you hone them, even if you are not paid, even if no title is attached. The future is a worry for everyone, and in the end, most worryingly of all, each of us must die.  This is fearful business, particularly in a society that divides everyone into winners and losers and makes no promises of a decent life, or even a dignified death, for the losers.  Who are the winners?  The richest among us.  Who are the losers?  The billions of poor people, who keep breeding like flies. 

I prefer to see a third category, a category it has taken me years to define for myself, is only really coming into focus now, as I careen into the last chapter of this life.  The truth is rarely either/or, as much as we may be conditioned to see the world through a sort of fuzzy black and white dualistic lens.  

If you have enough money to pay your bills, and those of the immediately foreseeable future, and are therefore lucky enough to be able to put aside the faceless, endless anxiety of imagining yourself old and forced to eat cat food, shivering in a gutter somewhere for lack of funds to afford shelter, and you have things you love to do, and do pretty well, and you are content and feel productive doing these things every day, how does that make you a loser?  It doesn’t make you a winner, granted, but there needs to be a third category.  Maybe that category is “lucky bastard” or “conditionally exempt” or something.

“Agile motherfucker,” the skeleton says.  “I have to admit, you may be on to something with this detailed portrait of your father.  I said as much as I was dying– did I not?  How I wished I had not viewed everything in terms of money equaling success, how I defined my worth almost solely in material terms.  Maybe I did teach you something worth knowing, you poor bastard.  You poor, poor fucking bastard.  Good luck stringing out that modest lump sum reparation payment I left you and may your luck letting it ride on the crooked roulette wheel of capitalism continue to hold, though we both know the House will rake the rest of it away soon enough.  Bird Wins, baby*.”  

Peace out, pops.

*note to self:  add definition of “Bird Wins” from intro to Bird Wins

My father was passionately interested in politics and history and was an avid lifelong reader of the New York Times (which he read daily in its entirety) and many other publications.  Against all odds, the “dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill” wound up, a few years after World War Two, in the doctoral program at Columbia University where he was mentored, unhappily, as it turned out, by Richard Hofstadter and Henry Steele Commager (my sister reminds me– I’d forgotten about Commager), two titantic twentieth century historians.  One of them was his thesis adviser (I believe it was Hofstadter) and threw successive pails of cold, dirty water on his dream of becoming a professional historian.  

My father wanted to write his thesis on a theme from the Revolutionary War but Hofstadter was writing a book (one of thirty five influential volumes he’d publish in his illustrious career) on something else, maybe the Civil War, and needed research done for that.  The titan overruled my father’s wishes and assigned him to basically write a chapter for that book.  

He pecked away at it for a while and, newly married and working full-time,  eventually put it aside for lack of appetite, settling for a Masters Degree in History, instead of his doctorate.  His adventure with his famous thesis adviser had made him realize an unsettling truth about poison academia and he was not ready to swallow it.   If he was bitter about it, he said nothing except that one time he explained it to me.  On the other hand, if he was bitter about being whipped in the face daily as an infant, he never said anything about that either, not even once.    

But one thing I learned from him, in addition to a love of history, or a morbid fascination with it, anyway, is the importance of primary sources.  It is one thing to reconstruct events relying on memory alone, but it’s a far better thing to have the actual building materials at hand, materials prepared contemporaneously with the events they describe that refresh your recollection, as they say to witnesses.  Knowing the answer the lawyer asks: “will this help refresh your recollection?” as she hands the memo book to the witness.  And the cop looking up from his notes is a much more credible witness, or is shown to be that much more of a liar, as the case may be, because he’s actually looking at what he wrote the day the guy was allegedly choked to death by his former colleague.

Compare the impact of these two paragraphs, the one I wrote before I realized I had the actual quote from my father, transcribed, and the words of my father himself on the same subject.  You will immediately recognize the power of primary sources.  

My paragraph:

Destined, by the successful, brilliant son and daughter of his Uncle Aren who “ran the family”, to go to trade school with his brother, he escaped into the World War, part two.  “Nehama and Dave ran the family, and they had decided that my brother and I were too dumb to do anything but menial work, so we were going to trade school to be trained as rude mechanicals.”  

What he actually said, eighteen hours before his last breath:

 My life was preordained by my uncle and my aunt, Nechama and Cousin Dave.  If I got through High School my ultimate aim as far as the family was concerned: learn how to write and read and they’d sign you up for the NYA, Sheet Metal School, cause we were too dumb to think about going beyond trade.  All of us had to have a trade, it’s not like, well, you have a brain, we’ll help develop it.   You try to avoid the ultimate fate that life has dealt to us and inside you there’s something that says “there’s got to be a better world than this” but we weren’t permitted to dream beyond making a living.  

Poignant shit to be thinking about as you lay dying.  It actually chokes me up a little, still, because reading it I can hear his voice straining to say it that last night of his life, between gulps of water to soothe his aching throat.  In fact, if I wanted to, I could listen to his words in his own voice right now.  He had the foresight to ask, as soon as I arrived in his hospital room that last night, if I’d brought the digital recorder I’d bought for him.  He was a historian to the end.

But the larger point is, each of us only remembers so much.  What we remember is colored by everything else that has happened to us.  Even immediately after an event that two people were present for, their memories will diverge.  Each will notice different things.  

“Did you see his shoes?” one will say in disbelief about the maniac who just streaked past.  The other will have no idea what kind of shoes the naked maniac was wearing.  But to the first person, the fact that on one foot the guy was wearing a blue sneaker, and on the other an over-sized red, sequined pump, will be the most strikingly weird part of the whole picture.  The other one, staring at the maniac’s face, twitching arms and swinging genitalia, will have no idea how the other even had time to take in the shoes, much less what the shoes looked like.  The first will have a hard time believing anyone could have missed those shoes.

How much more difficult is it to write a full, nuanced history of anything?   Immediately after the Civil War historians generally told the story from the victors’ point of view, as is the general practice in writing history.  Reconstruction-era historians were unanimous:  slavery was evil, had to be stopped, its practitioners violently stood up for their right to continue this evil, we took up arms to stop the wicked insurrectionsts.  We amended the Constitution to ensure the rights of the newly liberated.  Bravo for us, we took the side of the angels and kicked their genteel, slave-holding Johnny Rebel asses!  

Would you be surprised to learn that within a short time there arose an influential school of historians who would swing the pendulum back, write from the point of view of those aggrieved Southerners unfairly deprived of their wealth, their personal property?  Sirs, have you no shame?   I don’t remember  at the moment what this once-famous school of history was called, I discovered these rascals during my research for a long, heavily footnoted article I wrote during law school, but their version of history held sway for several generations.  

Then the pendulum swung back, fair is fair, and another school of historians debunked that revisionist school of thought, quite thoroughly, to my mind.  But then, I am prejudiced.  We are all prejudiced, which is part of the trouble with history.  

And with biography, especially hagiography.  Gandhi, almost always held up as a saintly exemplar of the power of moral force focused through non-violent collective action, had another side to him.  You will look at him slightly differently when you recall what he told the Jews of Europe as Hitler was rounding us up. 

“You must not become like them, you must not become violent.  You must show, through your moral courage, that you are as fully human as they are.  Your moral force will stop them, force them to reckon with you as humans with souls the equal of their’s, they will not be able to keep killing you.”  I’m paraphrasing, as I picture the generally humorless Heinrich Himmler cracking up to read this sage Gandhian advice translated into German.

“Yes, the Great Gandhi is right: show us your moral force, Jews, you will become irresistibly human to us.  Then we’ll have a look at your naked, moral asses as you walk in a quiet, orderly line into the showers.  Nothing to fear, Jews, we get it, believe us.  Just clean up a bit after your long ride, and then we’ll all have appetizers and a good laugh about the whole thing, over drinks while we wait for the waiters to bring us a sumptuous dinner.”

There’s nothing funny about this, you might say.  My father would disagree, though he wouldn’t be guffawing about Himmler’s imagined speech either.  The only defense we always have against unspeakable horror, an admittedly limited one, is speaking of it satirically.   My father the historian taught me that.

I have written another piece on this subject, but, as I recall, it really doesn’t touch what the actual talent for malice is.  It is proving a bit hard to describe.  

Anyone can be malicious at times.  Many people, if not most of us, have good reason to act with a bit of malice from time to time.  Humans, as a species, are pricks, as often as not.   Somebody does something really bad, and does it again, and a third time, it’s natural to feel that tightening in the face, the clenching of the muscles, the desire to return the favor.  Any brute in this moment can shove somebody, snarl, take a threatening pose, say something mean.  Some have no hesitation to pick up a fist or a weapon and carry out their malicious business post haste, in the most immediate possible way.  But a talent for malice is something else.  Talent holds a person to a higher standard, requires something special, beyond the ordinary, something more refined and original than the predictable lashing out.  

The above strikes me as somewhat generic, an intro that probably cannot stand as anything more than a note for the rewrite.  If the reader is to feel anything about it, the talent for malice must be shown in the form of a story (he said in a note to himself).  Otherwise, and as it currently stands, it reads as little more than a didactic high school reading comprehension test paragraph without the multiple choice questions below it.  I will try to supply an illustrative anecdote or two when I rewrite it, but I must continue to grapple here with what the talent for malice actually is.  As with other elusive things, we can get closer to describing it by showing what it is not (he said, pedantically.)

Pat Conroy’s father, who expressed his rage with good old- fashioned beatings, with two hard fists, clearly had no talent for malice.  My friend’s father Stan, who beat the boy like a drum, and sometimes the boy’s mother as well, like a tambourine, and made bank tellers cry— you could see from twenty feet away what a hack at malice this unredeemably angry dick was.  The genius of someone with a talent for malice is to deliver the poison while seeming, to the person he’s poisoning, reasonable, calm, cool, even likable. THAT is a talent for malice since it doubly victimizes, first by injecting the poison and then by having the victim castigate himself as paranoid and vindictive, trying to blame this reasonable, nice person for slipping him the poison.  

A talent for malice leaves the malicious party with complete deniability and, better still, able to pose as the injured party, unfairly accused, standing defiantly on the moral high ground, an excellent spot from which to continue innocently emptying his bowels on the other.  It is not, by the way, a talent for anyone but a desperate person or a sadist to be proud of, but it’s a talent nonetheless.

My sister mentioned that she was an adult close to forty before she fully understood the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her father.  THAT is a genius for malice, that’s how good our father was at it much of the time.   I don’t want to say my father was always a genius at it, or even that he displayed his talent brilliantly all the time, just that he had the talent in greater measure than anyone else I can think of and some moments of brilliance.  

This moment was not one of them, and, knowing well how he operated, I feel bad to this day that I did not do more about it at the time.  My niece was a young girl, probably four or five.  If her little brother had been born by this time he was deep asleep in a crib somewhere.  I don’t recall him being on the scene, it’s possible she may have been about to turn four, though I’d have to run this by my sister to be sure of the chronology since the numbers are not adding up, somehow.  

She was in her pajamas, posing on the staircase, looking adorable.  The next day we’d all go out to dinner and she was finally going to get the little purple bicycle she’d been pining for, the one she’d picked out a few days earlier.  She was very excited about her birthday dinner in a restaurant and her dream bike.

My father and I sat on a couch at the foot of the stairs.  My sister and her husband stood on either side of the bottom step as my sister asked the birthday girl where she wanted to eat for her birthday.  She thought for a moment and picked out a local restaurant.  My father smiled and said he didn’t think that was a good place to go for her birthday.  

She was disappointed, and her mother and father, instead of joining with her uncle to say as one: “let’s go there, that sounds great,” told her to pick out another place.  I sat on the couch next to my father watching my niece slowly wilt on the staircase.  There was no particular reason I could see that this restaurant was any less appropriate than any of the several others nearby.  I said as much, but with no real knowledge of the situation, and , after reminding everyone of the birthday girl’s right to pick her favorite place, didn’t insist.  

“Your grandpa doesn’t want to go there, where else do you want to go?” my brother-in-law asked.   This whole dance was very odd to me, if not unfamiliar, and I watched it with mounting discomfort.  By now my niece was on the verge of tears, nobody, it seemed, had her back.  This was a sickeningly familiar scene to us all.  Nobody had anybody’s back, as long as the power was seemingly in one arbitrary person’s hands. My niece’s unhappiness was something that could have immediately been fixed with a small portion of mercy, or even a dab of common decency, or common sense.  How about just a reason why the place was not going to work?

My father, smiling, then showed a dull flash of his talent for malice.  “You show me a little girl who insists on going to Scampy Shrimp and I’ll show you a little girl who doesn’t get that purple bicycle her grandparents bought her.”  

Talent! you will snort.  This is nothing more than garden variety coercive sadism out for an evening stroll.  And perhaps you are correct to snort.  But it is more complicated than I can explain at the moment, clearly.

My niece accepted an unacceptable alternative and went upstairs very unhappily to go to sleep.  I followed a few minutes later, to kiss her goodnight.  She had been crying when I came into the room and quickly pulled herself together.  I sat at the edge of her bed for a moment and asked if she was all right.  She smiled gamely and said she was.  I turned out the lamp, patted her, told her not to worry, we’d go wherever she wanted, and headed downstairs.  My father and I left and drove back to the apartment he shared with my mother, in nearby Wynmoor Village.

The next day I found out that my niece had vomited not long after we left.  I didn’t blame her at all, hindsight being twenty-twenty. Nothing in the situation seemed hard for me to understand, except perhaps why my father was being such a prick to the little granddaughter he adored.  

When you are punched in the stomach, it’s hard to be mistaken about what has just happened, hard for the puncher to credibly deny, particularly if the punch is caught on camera.  The only discussion after you catch your breath is about whether you possibly deserved the punch or not, whether anyone does.   A sock in the gut is rather unambiguous, if also inelegant.  The person with the talent for malice has no need to resort to such crude methods to extract full malicious satisfaction.  A job done with a subtle, undetectable touch, smug deniability, and the chance to make the other person feel like the asshole again for being hurt, are the keys to this full satisfaction for the talented practitioner of malice.

Here is really all that’s required, if you have the reservoir of malice already and are looking for a tap to turn to let it pour into someone’s drinking cup.  Wait for a moment of vulnerability.  If you know someone well, you will probably not have to wait long.  When you see it, simply say nothing, instead of showing the weakness of empathy, the only thing the vulnerable party really needs.  

This is beautiful in its simplicity and it works every time, I can assure you.  Then you can have your wife shake the kid while she yells, to the rhythm of the shaking: “what-did-any-one-ever-do-to-you-to-make-you-so-fuck-ing-ang-ry?!!!”  Fucking beautiful, really.  You won’t even know what has hit you, in many cases, until years later, and then, only if you’re lucky.  I’ve been very lucky that way.

Talked to my sister just now, for two hours and change, and she observed how much of writing takes place when you are walking around, how the thoughts that  come into your head while you’re doing other things will later be arranged to fill out the body of what you write.  I’ve experienced this a lot lately, focused, as I’ve been, on telling the story of our tragic father as completely as I can.  Sometimes, I told her, I’ll have to stop walking and jot down a phrase to remind me of a story I need to write out about the old D.U.  

This was my father’s method, too, when he spoke at a funeral. He’d have an envelope with a few fragments of phrases written on the back, in his tiny, precise print lettering, each fragment would be a story he would tell in his natural voice, with no need for any further notes.  I’ve made this comparison before, but this is how Django used to play guitar.  He’d learn the rough contours of the song and extemporize the rest as he went.    

At one point in our long talk my sister used a word that made me laugh, reach for a fine-tipped brush and brush the word onto an index card.  She asked if I remembered her husband’s description of our father’s utter mastery in a duel.  I told her I did and we both laughed and she painted the picture again for us to enjoy:  our father, stretched out on the couch, relaxed, reading the newspaper, the sword in his other hand, yawning without looking up, nonchalantly clanking his sword as my brother-in-law flailed away.  And then, she said, the old man would just eviscerate him.

“Eviscerate!” I said, laughing and reaching for my brush pen.

My sister said “yeah, he would eviscerate him, every time,” and I laughed harder.  I’ve described this image earlier in these pages, but without the punchline, that perfect ‘mot juste’.  

Our father would, after reading the last obituary in the New York Times he was reading, casually thrust the point of his sharp sword into my brother-in-law’s stomach and draw a few quick circles, disemboweling him.  He’d pull the sword away and bloody entrails would come with it.

Eviscerate!  My god, if there ever was the perfect word to describe the thing, there it is.

Last night the demons that kept me awake were roaring, with hot, stinking breath, about my vanity, and the folly of trying to write a moving portrait of a dead man nobody knew, as if there was some value to it.  Moreover, at almost sixty, hissed the demons, even the dead man would agree it was idiotic to believe a glorious new chapter of your life could begin by somehow writing and having some publisher buy and promote a book that would make strangers cry.

At the keyboard earlier today I didn’t need to tell these demons to pipe down.  They were nowhere to be seen, not even as an afterthought.  They were as silent and unscary as gargoyles on the facade of some far away cathedral, monsters designed to cow superstitious Christians of the dark ages into submission to the Church.  

Walking up Sixth Avenue afterwards, listening to recently dead Pat Conroy’s incantatory love song to the writers he loved most, even, and especially, a now mostly neglected once-famous writer it was apparently long fashionable to bash, I could not wait to get back to the keyboard, thinking of the unwritten novels of his dead idol Thomas Wolfe, buried in the ground at 37, a ferocious writer who died before he’d lived enough to write the masterpieces he would have surely composed at fifty and sixty, masterpieces buried with him, sadly unwritten.

But, inspired though I was by the trance Conroy’s words put me into, I wasn’t hurrying back to this keyboard in hopes of writing a page of some imagined masterpiece.  It was the matter of a simple thank you note I’ve never written to somebody who did a great kindness a decade ago that urged me on.  

We do not, as a rule, make a point of mentioning such unspoken gratefulness to each other, especially long after the fact, but that doesn’t make remaining silent the right thing to do.  I have a few overdue notes in this category, but this is by far the easiest one to dash off, in the form of an anecdote.   So, because it is the least I can do, which is always my pleasure, let me do that now, after one last horn blast of needless introduction.

I’ve thought of it several times in recent days, out of the blue, perhaps because I’ve been mulling over the life and death of my father, maybe because I intend to hold forth when people gather in June to celebrate my first sixty fitful years on earth, a prospect, my holding forth, that Sekhnet looks forward to with eye-rolling dread.  It is one of several thank yous I have meant to give, but have not given, am unlikely to ever give, except perhaps in a place like this where it is likelier not to be received at all than it is to be read after I’m gone.

I got a call late one morning a few years ago that an old friend’s father had died.  I was, for some reason, not at work that day (dry only to those familiar with my deeply devout Protestant work ethic) and, being less than a mile from where people were gathering for the funeral, dressed appropriately and dashed over just in time to miss the service and catch a ride in the procession to the cemetery.  I had never met the deceased, but I’d imagine he was a funny, warm and good man, since that’s how his son had turned out.  His son is one of the funniest people I know.  

A short drive to New Jersey later I found myself, along with several Yeshiva students, who were dressed identically in black suits and in black hats, carrying the coffin of my friend’s father on our shoulders, over the dirt, to his waiting grave.  He was surprisingly light in his traditional pine box.   The Orthodox burial was a bit off-putting to me, in the way most orthodoxies are, and I recall standing by my friend’s wife and his mother at one point, over where they were forced to stand with the other women, at a certain distance from the men who were going about the serious, manly business of finishing the burial of their fellow Jew.

My thought now is what an honor it was, to be able to silently repay my friend’s kindness in this way.   What kindness, you want to know?  A few years before his father’s funeral, he and his wife had showed up unexpectedly at my father’s funeral, a surprise that touched me greatly.  We’d been friends for a long time, but we see each other rarely and, to my memory, have probably called each other, at most, a handful of times.  Yet there they were as the cantor was chanting over my father’s grave and I was moved to see them there.

But the kindness I was repaying as I carried his father’s body to his grave, and helped lower him in, and throw the first few shovelfuls on his coffin, happened after my father’s actual funeral.  

After burying my father we left the boneyard in Cortland and went back to nearby First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill where a local kosher deli had gouged us for the corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, pickles, cole slaw, the parve pastries and the two or three dollar cans of Doctor Brown’s soda.  My father would have loved the spread, while not neglecting to make a subtle, yet trenchant, comment about the generous mark-up provided as a special courtesy to the mourners.  LIkely also a little reference to the monopoly the synagogue had granted this deli, the only kosher place within miles, for catering all events at First Hebrew.

Directly on the other side of a folding wall from where the food and drink was laid out there was, my friend and I discovered, a small gym with a basket at each end.  While the rest of the adult mourners were speaking well of the dead, hearing stories of his last days, consoling my mother, eating and catching up, my niece and nephew, then thirteen and nine, had nobody to talk to.    Finding a basketball, with the help of the janitor, we challenged them to a game.  Being two spunky kids they happily accepted our challenge and the four of us stepped around the wall.  

As the mourners continued to eat their turkey, roast beef, pastrami and corned beef, while my sister was being consoled, and the rabbi came by, and whatever else was going on, the four basketball players ran up and down the court in our funeral clothes.  It was a raucous game, with my friend’s antics quickly turning it into a hilarious circus.  It lightened my heart to see the children who had just stood somberly beside their grandfather’s grave laughing, particularly my nephew, who, to this day is not easy to crack up.  In spite of our clowning, we kicked their asses, I’m glad to say.  

And that’s why, a few years later, I felt so fortunate and so honored to be carrying his father’s coffin.