I recall my shock, not having seen my father for a few months, when I spotted him waiting for me in a small crowd by the gate at Ft. Lauderdale airport.  It was nighttime.  He was there by himself, my mother was back at the apartment, reading a murder mystery or watching one on TV, perhaps assembling a puzzle on the dining room table.   A tall, heavy man throughout his life, my father appeared shrunken, weak, attenuated.  His skin, under the florescent lights, was a pale greyish color. Seeing me he lifted a hand and gave a tenuous half-smile. 

His hair was white, as it had been for a while, but his aura, something I’d never believed in, was undeniably sickened.   An air of death surrounded him, like an outline drawn around him in a unhealthy color.  His approaching death was palpable,  I could see it clearly there among the families happily greeting their members from up north.  It was as though our long, senseless war had taken its final toll, was draining his blood and the last of his life force. He was fading before my eyes.

My father was, it must be said, in a word he often used of others, a prick. He was also heartbroken and hopelessly frustrated by the time my sister and I were adolescents.   He had all the tools to be a great friend, and he’d had close friends throughout his life who roared at his dark quips,  pondered his insights, but as far as his children, he was all thumbs.   My sister and I couldn’t help but take it personally, the blame, the sudden, towering anger, the abuse.   Still, he saw himself as first and foremost intellectually honest and this led me to believe there was some case I could make to show him the folly of his ways.   My belief was naive.   No case would be heard until the very last night of his life, and it was a case he made against himself, me saying only what was necessary to console a person dying with painful regrets.

I will never forget the sight of him at Ft. Lauderdale airport that night, three years before his death from undiagnosed liver cancer, faded, weak looking, wearing his mortality heavily.   He was a dead man walking, in the evocative cliché, though the hematologist, endocrinologist and cardiologist he saw regularly had no clue about what might be ailing him.   The ER doctor knew at once, my sister read it in his face before the doctor could give her the bad news.  Our father was shrunken and jaundiced, suddenly unable to move, and the doctor palpated the inflated drum of the patient’s stomach.   He tapped it and shook his head almost imperceptibly.    We learned the word “ascites” — the fluid that builds up in the abdominal cavity, in this case due to liver failure. That fluid, the color of death itself, drained steadily into a large bag attached to his hospital bed.   Six days later I would be closing my father’s dead eyes.

I don’t recall the car ride back to Coconut Creek that night two or three years earlier, a drive of about 25 minutes from Ft. Lauderdale airport.   My father and I no doubt shot the shit somehow, both of us were fairly adept at making conversation, no matter how meaningless.  I suspect the unrelieved tension between my father and his only son was one reason my mother had decided not to accompany him to pick me up, to give us time alone to talk.   That and her basic laziness about things like changing back out of her housecoat once she’d put it on for the evening.  We drove north on I-95, or, more likely, the Florida Turnpike.

Such drives were exhausting for both of us.   My father needed to prevail, he would do whatever it took to remain indomitable.   Most of the time we both tiptoed around the explosives at our feet.   At this point in my life I was an adult, almost at the age when the mail from AARP begins to arrive, and it was clear my father would never listen to reason about certain subjects.  This knowledge made the air between us heavy.  Still, I had one last idea, would make one last try to get through to him.   I didn’t feel hopeful about it in the least, but something urged me on.

I’m thinking this visit must have been a few months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, since, in the days after that I finished a long letter to my parents attempting to put some things on the table between us.  The discussion of this letter, during that visit, would be my last attempt at reconciliation, my father made sure of that.   I’d been a lawyer for two years and was still scrambling for work, feeling very reluctant to practice the mostly futile art of making arguments for a living.   My ambivalence toward the law was hard to conceal when I spoke to potential employers.  I’d had an interview with a group of amoral lawyers from China scheduled for the bright blue early afternoon of 9/11/01, but their office, in tower two of the World Trade Center, was blown up a few hours before our meeting.  A few weeks later I took partner Chris, my contact in that firm, to lunch in Little Italy. He insisted on sitting at a table outside, in that persistent smell of burnt bodies and toxic chemicals, and I remember he ordered, and consumed, two full meals, though he was a thin man.

I wrote to my parents in a mood of agitated despair.   I’d borrowed a huge sum of money to pay for law school.   The sum I borrowed, doubled with interest over the life of the loan, was more than what I would ever earn as a lawyer.   Partly my own fault, because over the course of the misadventure that was my legal career, I’d mishandled, for purely personal reasons, the two cases that should have netted me large sums.  Banking those sums might have partly changed my view of the profession.   I was unable to divorce personal repugnance for a particular client from my need to make a living.  

The fees I should have earned on those two cases would have allowed me to pay off my student loans and choose a life more suitable to my personality. I didn’t have the stomach to persevere on either case, finding both clients despicable. I persisted unhappily in a distasteful career I’d undertaken mostly to try to please a father who nothing could have pleased.

My mother years later reported someone had called me “the dumbest lawyer in New York” though the remark was made after she’d done the exact opposite of what her son the lawyer had advised, and urged, her to do.   As far as doing whatever it took to make more than a subsistence living as an officer of the court with a license to print money, I was dumber than dumb. 

Ironically, the idealism that made it hard for me to argue on behalf of the guilty, the unlikeable or the powerful (not that the latter have any use for a late in life lawyer with a public education) came directly from my father.   He wanted something better for me than he had, he wanted me to be happy.  The miserable man once explicitly told me that, in a discussion of whether I should go to law school or continue trying to be an “artist”.   There are endless layers of irony in my father’s wish for my happiness, laid heavily one upon another, but that was his true wish, in his heart of hearts, his broken heart of broken hearts.  

There is birth, there is life, and there is death, that much we all find out.  As for happiness and misery, both of which appear in the course of every life, happiness turns out to be a delicate art that can’t be mastered without a loving community, a cheerful mentor or wise partners.   Contentment, joy, happiness were not things my father had any handle on, even though he could be hilarious.   It took detective work on my part, but in the end, toward the end of his life, I understood the reasons for my father’s essential misery.   Still, my father was actually, almost to the end, an idealist.

He once told me a story that made a deep impression on me.   A skinny stray dog was out looking for food when he was approached by a well-fed, well-groomed dog who asked him what was the matter.

The stray reported that he hadn’t eaten in several days and was feeling like shit. 

“I have humans who give me as much food as I want,” said the second dog, “I can get you a meal in five minutes, I live right around the corner.  Come on.”

As they trotted off the stray dog noticed some fur rubbed away around the neck of the other dog.  He slowed down to ask what was up with that skin disease.  

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said the dog, “that’s just from the collar that goes with the leash, it’s nothing.”

“The collar? the leash?” asked the stray, slowing down some more “what the hell is the collar and the leash?”  

The other dog explained that he had a leather restraint around his neck, connected to a leash that was chained to a stake on the front lawn for much of the day, to protect the home of his masters when they were at work.

“Your masters?” said the stray dog, stopping.   The other dog urged him on to dinner, but the stray turned around and trotted off to his life of precarious, difficult freedom.

So we drove north through the dark Florida night, my father at the wheel of his leased Cadillac, me tapping back whatever banter my death-haunted father offered. In a very short time the man would be buried in his grave, become a skeleton, and though there was no time to waste, we wasted it anyway.

1684 words

Good, specific feedback on our writing is very valuable to anyone working to be a better writer.   It’s easy to become too close to something that was satisfying to write, so close you are blind to its defects.  The great Philip Roth had a small group of smart, discerning readers he sent his first draft of every new book to.   These readers would carefully read his new work and send him their notes, notes he always took seriously when sitting down to write subsequent drafts.   I believe he went so far as calling this small group of readers essential to his work.    Most of us don’t have a circle of generous critics, we make do with a thumbs up for a post here, for all the good that does us.  The best feedback pushes us to be the best we are capable of being.

Jimi Hendrix, a lovely soul and musical genius, recorded the live album Band of Gypsies at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve, 1970.    Jimi played his ass off during the first set as the audience went wild.  He played with his teeth, behind his back, between his legs, flipped on to his back like a super-agile break dancer, never missing a note as he played his wild, electric blues with infinite nonchalance. He came off the stage beaming and asked  Bill Graham what he thought of the show.  

Graham said “well… it was very good, it’s too bad none of those acrobatics and tricks you did will be on the album…”   Jimi, Graham reported, glared daggers at him and went back to his dressing room.   He came out for the second set and played the entire set standing stock still.   Barely moved a muscle, other than his fingers, as he played his new soulful set.   That second dhow contains much of the amazing live improvization that would wind up comprising the album.  

 When he was done Jimi glowered at Graham at the side of the stage.  Graham was clearly blown away.  Jimi mouthed something to the effect of  “go fuck yourself!” and proceeded to scream and go completely insane during the encore, doing all his Chitlin Circuit tricks before humping his guitar, which sent the late show crowd into a frenzy.   That superb live album reflects the power of excellent, fearless feedback.   I’ve never heard a live recording of any guitarist as consistently brilliant as Jimi’s playing, goaded by Bill Graham’s hard, undeniable truth, on Band of Gypsies.

I recently exerted myself to write a 3,000 word abstract of a long manuscript about my father’s life and times, much of it in the form of a conversation my father would have loved to have had, but was unable to, about the nature and substance of history, what happens to idealism during savagely hard times, the curse of unexamined anger,  the great blessing of forgiveness, the overarching tragedy of deathbed regrets, which cast such terrible shadows over a life.    

The 3,000 word piece was intended as bait, an advertisement to catch the interest of an ambitious literary agent.  It originally began with an expository paragraph, describing my father, his eyes the color of a slightly sickened green-grey sea on a cloudy day, and so forth.  Not the way I usually write, not particularly well-written, but I was off and flying and in a hurry to write the other parts and I never really looked back.  

In two or three rewrites of the whole piece I tried to rescue that first unaccountably sluggish first paragraph, which seemed to drag the whole thing backwards. I never succeeded in making it flow, dance, sing, intrigue, engage, beguile, seduce, all the rest of the things a good opening paragraph should do.

I got an email from a writer friend who tentatively suggested, for the reasons mentioned above, that I might want to cut back that first graf, or lose it entirely, even.   I blocked out the whole paragraph and hit “delete”.  

The piece immediately read better, no longer dragged backwards by that false-note opening.   Addition by subtraction, a marvelous thing.  Tip of the cap to him, over there in our new enemy, Europe.

Sent the piece to another old friend, this guy also an excellent writer.  He makes fine distinctions and argues for a living, and understandably decided it wasn’t worth the job of thinking it all through and writing it all out, and being overdue for a check-in,  he  invited me to call him for his feedback.   We spoke for a long time, about many things.  In the course of a long chat he gave me a couple of excellent insights about the piece.  

He prefaced his comments by asking for my elevator pitch, a short statement of the exact nature of the product I’m proposing to sell.   It’s a hard one, because the project is quite complicated, even as I always strive for clarity.   I made a few halting attempts, probably none as concise as what I wrote above, to wit (and which I will edit now):

The book you’re holding is the story of my complicated father’s life and times, spanning much of the tumultuous twenty-first century.    The story is largely told by the skeleton of my dead father during, a chat he would have loved to have had while alive, but was unable to.   We wrangle over the nature and substance of history, what happens to idealism during savage times, the curse of unexamined anger, the great blessing of forgiveness, the overarching tragedy of deathbed regrets, which cast a terrible shadow over a life, even as the unburdening of those regrets is also a great blessing. [1]   

His first insightful, specific comment (and I cannot over-emphasize the usefulness of the specific) was that the skeleton of my father, a man he interacted with quite a few times during the early years of our friendship, (years before my father died and grew into the philosophical skeleton we know today), sounded nothing like my father.  

He reminded me that my father always had an edge, menace in one form or another always at the ready.   In marked contrast, and out of character, his skeleton in this sample is a reasonable, wise and anodyne fellow, truly, nothing like Irv Widaen at his dreaded best.

I realized almost at once that my friend was right and then immediately understood why what I’d written for the skeleton had fallen flat: the skeleton I’d imagined for the 3,000 word piece was the skeleton of my father at the very end of our long journey together in the writing of his book.   In that satisfied skeleton there is no trace of the brooding, superior, caustic, irascible eternally stewing deployer of barbed humor and spewer of threatening ad hominem throwaways.

So there is that error of voice and tone to be fixed, the skeleton needs to be much more contentious, much more like the elegantly brutal bastard my father was in life.  

And then there is the matter of the remarkable deathbed scene, that last conversation between my father and me on the very last night of his life.  My friend pointed out how rare a scene like this scene is, and how dramatic.  After a lifetime of blaming his children and being an adamant, prosecutorial adversary, my father, as he was dying, told me that I’d been right all along and that he, to his irremediable regret, had been the immature, pugnacious, flailing asshole the whole time.  

“I never said  ‘immature, pugnacious, flailing asshole’, you pugnacious, flailing asshole,” said the skeleton of my father, with the best approximation of a scowl a skeleton can muster.  He still looked manically cheerful, as skeletons always do, but his tone was unmistakably sour.  “And who, by the way, even talks like that, you writerly fuck, you?”

Fine, but the deathbed scene certainly needs to be mentioned in the opening section, it’s the dramatic centerpiece of the whole exercise.   It does the intended job, once sketched out, of interesting the reader in knowing the rest of the story.  

Leaving out the revelation about the face-whipping in this 3,000 word sampler may also be a very intelligent note.   That stunning, sickening detail really is a kind of spoiler that shouldn’t be set out so quickly, as the anodyne skeleton suggested in his reasonable, sugary remarks.

I thanked my friend for these helpful notes.   Important to know that these kinds of fundamental deficiencies are hiding in an otherwise pretty good first draft of a piece.  I thanked him and told him to go fuck himself for giving me so much more work to do on something I’d considered pretty much done.   He didn’t even bother, in the manner of the harmless version of the skeleton of my father, to say “don’t mention it.”  It went without saying, clearly.

[1] Fuck those chatty, rambling 99 words.  I need to do it in about thirty-five, I figure, but next time.  Good night.

My father read two or three newspapers every day, starting with the New York Times.   The bending of the moral arc of history concerned him greatly and he could speak spontaneously and intelligently on many philosophical subjects without the need for notes.   He came across as something of a hipster, an ironic idealist with a dark, wicked sense of humor.   He loved soul music, particularly Sam Cooke.   For a few years, in the middle of his long career, he wound up speaking like the angry black cats on the street.  “As they say in the street,” he would say, then hit us with the latest street vernacular. “Dassum shit,” he would snap when confronted with something that struck him as bullshit.  He appreciated the subtleties of the word motherfucker.

Professionally, he hung out with the violent leaders of rival ethnic high school gangs, bullshitted frankly with them and won them over to his way of thinking.   In those days he wore mutton-chop sideburns and grew his dark hair down to his collar.   As part of a Mod Squad style team (Black guy, Jew, WASP folk singer, Italian guy, Puerto Rican woman) my father led the rap sessions, I am sure, with quick, barbed humor and irreverent, pointed honesty.   His deep identification with these discontented underdogs must have come across, along with his sincere hatred of brutal, random hierarchy and its inhuman unfairness.   He invited these young enemies to laugh, identify, curse, imagine, talk about injustice and find common ground. They all left as friends, or at least with mutual respect, at the end of these weekends, time after time.   There was a certain amount of charisma and a lot of deft, real-time improvisation involved in this alchemy.

He was born and raised in “grinding poverty”, a phrase he always spoke through gritted teeth, face like Clint Eastwood’s.   “Grinding poverty” stood in for his unspeakably brutal childhood circumstances in Peekskill, New York during the Great Depression.  My father had the good fortune after High School to be drafted into the Army Air Corps as America entered World War Two and live through a unique time in American history when hard work and determination, and a little help from the G.I. Bill, which put him through college and graduate school, could actually lift a person from humiliating intergenerational poverty to a comfortable middle class American life.   Not to say my father ever felt comfortable, not for a minute.   He paid a high price, working two jobs, to give his children an infinitely better life in a nice little house on a tree-lined street in Queens.  Naturally, his children, not knowing any different, never sufficiently appreciated the things they took for granted, the lawn, the great, small public school, the backyard with the cherry tree that gave big, black cherries. 

My father had all the appearances of a cool guy, but the pose concealed a dark, corrosive edge that was always at the ready.   He had a deep reservoir of rage that was kept under tight control most of the time.  His anger poured out almost every evening over dinner, in violent torrents over his two children, my younger sister and me.   Even as we expected it every evening, as our overwhelmed mother recited all her complaints about us for her tired husband to address before he drove out to his night job, the ferocity of his anger still surprised us, somehow.   It was a little bit insane.  

Like anyone who rages and snarls, he justified his brutality as necessary to deal with his responsibilities, in our case to educate the two viciously ungrateful little pricks he was raising.   He never hit us with physical blows but pounded us regularly with ferocious words intended to cow us and destroy unified resistance. The terrible mystery was how he could be such a tyrant while also imbuing us with important life lessons about decency, humility and kindness to animals.

The brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was a regular feature of our childhood.   It was as horrific as any war scene you can imagine.   The strafing from planes, ominously rattling machine gun nests, the rolling clouds of poison gas, the stinking trenches, rusted barbed wire, the groans of dying horses were as common to us as the steak, salad and Rice-a-roni we found on our plates in front of us virtually every night.   Eating steak was a sign of prosperity for a man who had been hungry during his entire childhood, my mother broiled steaks from Frank and Lenny’s almost every night.  The steaks were barbecued during the spring and summer months, my father or I usually turning them on the grill.  Ironically, and somewhat characteristically, my animal loving father joined PETA later in life and cut out a lot of his former meat diet.  

I was an adult, well into in my late-thirties, before I had the beginning of any insight into this confounding split in my father’s psyche.  On the one hand he was a funny, smart, sympathetic, hip guy who was very easy to talk to, when he wanted to be.  On the other hand, he was a supremely defensive man who more often used his great intelligence to keep others constantly off balance, a man who seemingly could not help trying to dominate and verbally abusing his children.  

My father had all the attributes to be a sensitive, lovable, very funny friend, yet he somehow chose to be an implacable adversary to his children most of the time.  

I’m realizing only now, as I write these words, since I am not a father, what most fathers would probably have realized a long time ago:  what a tormented father my father must have been all those years.  

I spent many years, before and since his death in 2005, trying to assemble a picture of my father as a whole person whose life made some kind of holistic sense.  I could never do it.  That’s the reason I eventually started writing this, an attempt to put together the puzzle of my father.  I work at the puzzle in a darkened room, most of the pieces missing, moving things around on a slanted, slippery table.  His unhappiness, right alongside his great capacity for laughter, was something I never had any insight into, not even a clue.   Puzzling over it as a kid must have been at the roots of my lifelong compulsion to research and write.  

Partly in search of insights into my perplexing father, I used to visit my father’s beloved first cousin Eli in his retirement cottage in Mt. Kisco, New York.  I’d drive up there every other week for a while, about an hour north of my apartment, and sit with the supremely opinionated Eli in his tidy living room, shooting the shit.   Then we’d go out for a meal somewhere.  We’d often wind up talking until well after midnight and by the time I left I had to drive the twisting, black Sawmill River Parkway steering with both hands on the wheel.    

Eli was an old man, well into his eighties, alienated from his own three kids, in a forty year blood feud to the death with his half-sister, on an every other year basis with his half-brother, he didn’t get that many visitors.   I was a fledgling writer and he was a great storyteller and it was usually a pleasure sitting around bullshitting with him about the past.  

It added to our bond that I was also the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite cousin, Irv.   Irv was the firstborn son of Eli’s favorite aunt, Chava who was the youngest sibling of Eli’s firstborn father Aren.  My father’s Uncle Aren had deserted from the Czar’s army, hopped a westbound train as the other draftees were shipped east to fight the Japanese.  Aren’s run to America, and bringing his little sister here a decade later, a generation before their hamlet was wiped off the face of the earth along with everyone they’d ever known there, is the only reason any of us were ever born.  Eli was Uncle Aren’s firstborn son, born in New York City, 1908.  

My father’s first cousin Eli was seventeen years older than my father, he had watched my father for his entire life.  The tough, American born Eli was the closest thing to a father figure my father had growing up, though his own father, a silent man from Poland overwhelmed by this world, was around until my father was in his mid-twenties.

Eli was a colorful character, no other way to put it.   A short, powerfully built, frog-bellied man of infinite charm, with a sandpaper voice, equally comfortable charming a pretty waitress with his smile or punching someone in the face with either hard hand.   I have often said of Eli that if he loved you he was the funniest, most generous, warmest and most entertaining person you could ever spend a few hours with.  If he didn’t like you, he was Hitler.  

I sometimes brought friends with me to visit with him.  I’d know in two minutes if the visit would be a fleeting ten hours of cheer, great stories and laughter or 150 endless minutes of grim, pointless discussion and occasional glaring.  Eli either loved you or hated you, there was not much in between, though he was capable of pretending, mostly, for a couple of hours.   He had his own demons, surely, but was devoted to my father, my mother, my sister and me — there was never the slightest doubt of that.  

He had a fierce temper, the “Gleiberman temper” as he called it, and would turn, in one second, from an infinitely charming raconteur into a purple faced, savage panther, white foam on his sputtering lips.  Even at eighty-five he was formidable when he was angry, and my father seemed to be somewhat scared of Eli until the end.  My mother was the only person I knew of who was allowed to constantly fight with Eli.  It was great sport between them, to rage at each other wildly and end up laughing, hugging and kissing when it was time to take their leave of each other.  

Once, describing a car trip back from Florida with Eli, my father told me happily “your mother and Eli fought all the way from Boynton Beach to the end of the New Jersey Turnpike.”  I pictured my mother, turned around in the front passenger seat, slashing at Eli with a broad sword as Eli swung his at her from the back seat.  Tireless combatants locked in mortal combat, swords clanging, for more than a thousand miles, then getting out of the car, hugging and kissing with genuine, unquestionable love, laughing and saying they’ll see each other soon.

I had something of this kind of relationship with Eli, every visit he’d turn purple with rage at least once, but we always parted as friends.

It was in this spirit of friendship, and seeing me so frequently perplexed by my father’s unfathomable anger and sudden alarming rigidity, his grim determination to win an argument at any cost, that Eli finally told me something that immediately changed the way I thought and felt about my father.   The more I thought about it, the more it explained.

“You remember seeing those old electrical cords they used to make before the insulation was made out of plastic?   They were thick and heavy, not very flexible, wrapped in layers of rough cloth for insulation.  The ones you saw as a kid were frayed, like burlap — you remember those cords on the old toasters?”

I did.

“Well your grandmother, my beloved Tante Chava, had one of those cords for her steam iron that she kept in a drawer near where she sat at the head of the kitchen table.”

I pictured the kitchen grinding poverty would have provided a little family in Peekskill, New York in the 1920s.   It was like a scene out of a gothic horror movie, a shaft of light coming into the dim, barren room from a high, narrow window, dust motes dancing listlessly, menacingly.  

“When your father was little, she used to reach into that drawer every time she got mad, and she had the Gleiberman temper, you know, and she’d grab that heavy cord and whip your father across the face with it.”

Across the face?  What?  I’d never met my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, but… what the fuck?

“Yeah, she’d give him a couple of shots in the kisser with that heavy cord and he’d stand there cowering and crying.   I saw it many times.   After a while, all she had to do was rattle the drawer and your father would stand like this,” and Eli stood and did a remarkably moving imitation of a little kid staring down at the ground, cowering in terror.

“How old was he when she started whipping him in the face?” I asked.

“From the time he could stand,” Eli told me with infinite sorrow.

The skeleton of my father sat up abruptly in his grave at the top of the hill in the small First Hebrew Congregation cemetery just north of Peekskill.  

“Jesus, Elie, you spend forty years trying to dig up enough clues to solve an insoluble existential puzzle and you put that giant piece on the table just like that?   On page two?   You don’t think that’s kind of a spoiler?”

I never planned on my father’s skeleton being my partner in trying to tell the story of his life and times, but he made a pretty good case.   As I said, he was a very smart guy and, in spite of a lifelong twitch to defend himself at all costs, could always see the other side of whatever he was arguing against.  

“I love it when you talk to the reader like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton, turning his head in a crackling circle to loosen his crepitating neck.  

I can feel this little intro slipping out of my hands, dad.

“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his boney hand.

High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air.   The skeleton looked up and nodded.

To those who loved my father, and there were many of us, including some very bright people who frequently roared at his tossed off lines, waiting with expectant smiles for the next bit of hilarity, it will cause great distress to read about his monstrous side.  

“After all, Elie, who among us has not employed relentless brutality to irreparably damage the children we raise?   Come on, Elie, be fair about that.”

I’m picturing the dinner table when Arlene and Russ Savakus were over.  Arlene with her keen appreciation, her super-sharp mind, Russ, her more low-key hipster husband, a moderately famous bass player, both of them howling.  Their explosions of laughter were a kind of music I can still hear.  My father was at his best with an audience like Arlene and Russ.

“We’re always at our best with people we love, who love us back,” said the skeleton.

Yes.  Love is all we’ve got here, really.  If you don’t have love in your life, nothing else really matters, except a ruthless lust for power I suppose.

“As your friend Napoleon, who reputedly regarded men as base coin, wrote in his diary  ‘As for me, I know very well I have no real friends, and you don’t suppose I care– as long as I remain what I am I will always have ‘friends’ enough.’  As you have noted before, Elie, who is the ‘you’ he is addressing this thought about not needing intimates to?”

Arlene and Russ.   I remember lying in my bed, as a kid, long after dinner, with the smoke from Arlene’s endless cigarettes wafting up to my room, along with their cackles and excited remarks.   It is hard to imagine, seeing you at your best, that you could have also…

“Well, there’s your mystery of life right there, Elie, and nothing very sweet about it, I’m afraid.”    

The potential in all of us, to be at our best, instead of pressed under the pressures we are constantly forced to fight being crushed by.  Mind boggling, how hard it is to put that best side always forward.    

“Well, some people are better at it than others.  Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror.  Look at this menace you have in the White House now.  Unloved bully, raised by a demanding, overbearing. loveless father and whatever the hell his gold-digging mother was, look at the cruel monstrosity that produces.   I like to feel, although, admittedly, I verbally whipped you and your sister in the face every night over dinner, that I never humiliated either of you, that I always, somehow, let you know how much I loved you both.”  

Aye, that you did, pater, though it took me almost sixty years to see it all clearly.

“The tragedy of life, Elie,” said the skeleton.   One of the vultures suddenly veered toward earth, the other one turned to follow.  

Also the triumph of life, dad.  We couldn’t have this kind of conversation when you were alive, but now we are.  

“I’ll take it,” said the skeleton, looking off toward the rapidly descending scavengers.

The skeleton of my father sat up abruptly in his grave at the top of the hill in the small First Hebrew Congregation cemetery just north of Peekskill.  

“Jesus, Elie, you spend forty years trying to dig up enough clues to solve an insoluble existential puzzle and you put that giant piece on the table just like that?   On page two?   You don’t think that’s kind of a spoiler?”

I never planned on my father’s skeleton being my partner in trying to tell the story of his life and times, but he made a pretty good case.   As I said, he was a very smart guy and, in spite of a lifelong twitch to defend himself at all costs, could always see the other side of what he was arguing against.  

“I love it when you talk to the reader like I’m not sitting right here,” said the skeleton, turning his head in a crackling circle to loosen his crepitating neck.  

I can feel this little intro slipping out of my hands, dad.

“Don’t mention it,” said the skeleton, with a nonchalant little flip of his hand.

High over the well-situated grave (there is a huge tree providing blessed shade) two Westchester turkey vultures made lazy circles in the air.   The skeleton looked up and nodded.

To those who loved my father, and there were many of us, including some very bright people who frequently roared at his tossed off lines, waiting with expectant smiles for the next bit of hilarity, it will cause great distress to read about his monstrous side.  

“After all, Elie, who among us has not employed relentless brutality to irreparably damage the children we raise?   Come on, Elie, be fair about that.”

I’m picturing the dinner table when Arlene and Russ Savakus were over.  Arlene with her keen appreciation, her super-sharp mind, Russ, her more low-key hipster husband, a moderately famous bass player, both of them howling.  Their explosions of laughter were a kind of music I can still hear.  My father was at his best with an audience like Arlene and Russ.

“We’re always at our best with people we love, who love us back,” said the skeleton.

Yes.  Love is all we’ve got here, really.  If you don’t have love in your life, nothing else really matters, except a ruthless lust for power I suppose.

“As your friend Napoleon, who reputedly regarded men as base coin, wrote (something to this effect) in his diary ‘As for me, I know very well I have no real friends, and you don’t suppose I care– as long as I remain what I am I will always have ‘friends’ enough.’  As you have noted before, Elie, who is the ‘you’ he is addressing this thought about not needing intimates to?”

Arlene and Russ.   I remember lying in my bed, as a kid, long after dinner, with the smoke from Arlene’s endless cigarettes wafting up to my room, along with their cackles and excited remarks.   It is hard to imagine, seeing you at your best, that you could have also…

“Well, there’s your mystery of life right there, Elie, and nothing very sweet about it, I’m afraid.”    

The potential in all of us, to be at our best, instead of pressed under the pressures we are constantly forced to fight being crushed by.  Mind boggling, how hard it is to put that best side always forward.    

“Well, some people are better at it than others.  Some people, some of our most successful people, are all show, a thin candy shell over an inner life of squirming, festering horror.  Look at this menace you have in the White House now.  Unloved bully, raised by a demanding, overbearing. loveless father and whatever the hell his gold-digging mother was, look at the cruel monster that produces.   I like to feel, although, admittedly, I verbally whipped you and your sister in the face every night over dinner, that I never humiliated either of you, that I always, somehow, let you know how much I loved you both.”  

Aye, that you did, pater, though it took me almost sixty years to see it all clearly.

“The tragedy of life, Elie,” said the skeleton.   One of the vultures suddenly veered toward earth, the other one turned to follow.  

Also the triumph of life, dad.  We couldn’t have this kind of conversation when you were alive, but now we are.  

“I’ll take it,” said the skeleton, looking off toward the rapidly descending scavengers.