Two and a half years ago I set out to write a memoir of my father’s life, a complicated life that had always been a troubling puzzle to me.   He was a man of high ideals, deeply held beliefs about justice, a great knowledge of history, sharp, funny, a lover of animals, underdogs and soul music, particularly Sam Cooke.   He was also, when the mood was upon him, a monster to his own family, conducting a relentless war over the dinner table every night.  A story that I thought might take a year or so to write has so far taken two and a half years.  The manuscript I have to wrestle with now is almost 1,200 pages, goddamn it.   I am continuing to wrestle with it, in my way.

It was tempting initially to structure the story of my father’s life with his dramatic deathbed regrets the last night of his life saved for the end, a kind of cosmic punchline at the end of a life insisting he’d had no choice but to strafe his children whenever he felt cornered.   He was literally cornered there at dinner, he sat in the worst possible seat at the kitchen table, landlocked between the wall, the counter with the toaster on it and the refrigerator, with my sister blocking his egress.  I had the best seat, right by the door, and often took advantage of it whenever I couldn’t stand the heat and had to get out of the kitchen.  

I came to realize, as I worked on the book, that setting the story up that way, with the big reveal at the end, was no favor to the reader or any kind of worthwhile dramatic revelation, really.   Not to say it wasn’t dramatic, or a revelation, but not one to save to the end of the story.  It’s not really a suspense story, or a mystery, though it’s also a suspense story and a mystery.

My father was a perplexing riddle, true, but perhaps every father’s life must be a riddle to his children.   When you think of telling the story of any life, boiling it down to a book, you are talking about a riddle.  Every human life is a riddle, human history is a riddle without an answer and much of what we experience here falls into that category.  I’ve had to keep this in mind as I work in a darkened room, trying to put together a puzzle that is missing many pieces, under the dimmest of lights.   The fragments, I think, are probably story enough.  Then again, I am not the judge of how much of a story I have managed to tell so far.

You can read all of it, in no particular order, here.

The other site I refer to at that link, while it does have some good photos and a selection of somewhat evocative early segments, hasn’t been updated for maybe a year and a half.   Feel free to check it out, but be forewarned.

“I don’t mean to push you, Elie, not at all… and it would be hard to do from this remote grave, even if I wanted to — but any thoughts on draft two of my book?” said the skeleton of my father from the lush green graveyard just north of Peekskill.  “I’d hate to see all this work you’ve put in become another albatross around your neck.  That albatross necklace must be getting pretty heavy by now.”

Heavy enough.  It keeps my neck strong, anyway.    

“To the cutting room floor with this bullshit.   Just a question, Elie.  1,200 pages is a lot to go through.  The other night you had the perfect ten second gem of a memory to include, but you didn’t write it down, and now….”  

Over the years I’ve largely lost that once ingrained good habit of jotting everything down, particularly things that came to me out of the blue, things that seem perfectly obvious when you think of them, then are prone to disappearing completely.  

“Well, those things happen as we crawl toward the grave, I suppose,” said the skeleton, motioning around him at the graves, his and everyone else’s.  

I have a sort of plan, and Sekhnet endorsed it the other day.  I need to buy several reams of paper.  We got a new printer that supposedly gets amazingly economic ink mileage.  I have to put the manuscript on an external hard drive, take it to the farm, print out the whole bloody thing.   Then work with pages themselves.  I’ve never seen the fucking thing on a page, only a screen, like the one I’m tapping on now.   It’s impossible to flip pages here, only scroll.   There is a metaphor there for our modern digital world, scroll only.  

“Yes, these algorithmically aided young geniuses, with the world’s assembled information a click away, never flip through books, through indexes, through a card catalogue.  They get exactly what they are looking for when they search, every time.  Specific information, delivered refreshingly free of context.   The human brain seems to be changing in accordance with this streamlined information/opinion delivery system.   I think it’s a good idea to have actual pages to read, mark up, re-order.   Get to it, man.”

I’ve got to find an external hard drive here formatted for the Mac, copy the current pages and selected pages.   Something has been bugging me the last week or two and I need to get it written out, out of mind on to page, put those black symbols onto this nice white screen.

“Use your symbols, Elie, and don’t let my story meet the fate of Whippie the Slave Dog, and your brilliantly simple animation non-profit” said the skeleton, with the proper note of poignance.    Whippie was an inspirational character and her story would have made a beautiful children’s book, in some alternative universe.

I must have been seven or eight, I think.  I recalled this the other night and wanted to write it down but forgot about it until driving down Fifth Avenue in a friend’s car a few days later.   Driving along the long stone wall along Central Park the forgotten incident flashed through my brain again.

I don’t remember much else about that day, except that, apparently, we had gone to the city by bus, from Queens.   Maybe we drove in my father’s car and the Long Island teenagers my father took to the Jewish Museum had come by bus.   I don’t recall if my sister and mother were there, but why wouldn’t they have been?   This was more than fifty years ago.  

After visiting the museum we were waiting on Fifth Avenue for the rented school bus to take us back to Long Island.  This was decades before everybody had a phone in their pocket.   My father, the director of the Nassau-Suffolk region of Young Judaea, a national Zionist youth movement (my father was fond, in those days, of imitating Arab leaders who referred to citizens of the Jewish State as “Is-rah-ale-eee Aggressors”) had a group of restless kids from the rural counties east of Queens lined up on Fifth Avenue.   At some point he sent me up Fifth Avenue to see if the bus was coming.   I walked off northwards on a mission.

About a block or so into my quest I was approached by three or four black kids about my age, maybe a year or two older.   They moved in a group toward the wall and, being a suburban kid with no instincts about these kind of things, I veered in the wrong direction.  I quickly found myself trapped between the kids and the wall.  They demanded my money.  I didn’t have any money, outside of a few coins that were in my pocket, mostly pennies.  They took the change.  It was less than a quarter’s worth.  It may have been 8 or 9 cents, which, in those days, could buy you a candy bar and a few chunks of Bazooka gum.   

They demanded to look through my pockets.   I was wearing some kind of jacket and produced what was in the pockets.   Outside of some tissues, which I always carry, there’s wasn’t much.  There was some kind of small, flat box that slid open.  Inside the box was a tiny pad and the ends of a few pencils, small enough to fit into the box.  Even at that age I felt desperate if I didn’t have something to draw with on my person.   The would-be muggers examined the box in disgust, pencils stubs falling to the cobblestones by the bench along the long stone wall.  I recall one of them bent to pick up a pencil and hand it back to me.   After the robbery they headed south, toward my father and the teenagers waiting for their ride.  

From a short distance away I watched my father intercept them.   “Get up on the goddamned bench!” he commanded, and they obediently hopped up on to the bench along the park wall.   When I got closer he called out to me, as though I was a stranger, “hey, kid, did these boys take anything from you?”   I shook my head, then noted the few trifles (they’d left me my box with the drawing stuff in it).  My assailants coughed up some muddy coins, which my father handed to me when I reached him.

I remember him chuckling afterwards.  “They probably thought I was an undercover cop,” he said.   It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was an adult man, over six feet tall, and they were a small band of children, prowling the wealthy strip by the park, looking for some coins to buy candy.   I certainly don’t condone what the tiny predators were out there doing, but, I have to say, they were pretty decent about the whole thing, as far as that went.  As far as I can recall, it was the only time I saw my father act the tough guy in public.   It was more usual to see him acting this way, against the wall, back to the shelf with the toaster on it, firing live ammunition at me and my sister over the dinner table.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father from his quiet grave on the outskirts of Peekskill.  “And I know you’re taking a break from the long research and first drafting of my life story and all that.   Something just occurred to me.  In every case in our family, where rage lasted thirty, forty years, as long as it took, neither party would acknowledge the feelings of the other party.   It was like a mirror offense, if you want to think of it like that, each one denying the other one the right to their genuine feelings of being unfairly attacked. 

“Think about it, Elie, Eli didn’t speak to his sister for what, forty something years?  I think of other grudges in the family.   It always boils down, it seems to me, to a refusal to grant somebody else the right to their feelings.  I was as guilty of it as anybody.  More guilty than many, actually.  When you take the trouble to make yourself vulnerable and express how you’re feeling, expose your weakness, your fear, there is nothing more damaging, more infuriating than being told you’re crazy, off-base, an asshole.   I had that down to an art form, of course, because I could always redirect any discussion to whatever direction I felt it had to go.  I was an expert in that sort of conversational jujitsu.

“It seems like a small thing, not to tell a crying kid to grow the fuck up, not to say to a moody teenager that she’s a victim of hormones coursing through her, making her irrational, not to deny somebody’s right to a feeling, to just offer a soothing word.   What is hard about offering a soothing word?  Or just being respectfully quiet as the person expresses how they’re feeling?   Maybe we’re all ego-driven beasts designed to feel our own pain much more than anyone else’s.  I don’t know.   It is not always our reflex to soothe, even our loved ones, sad to say, especially our loved ones.  We may rush to offer a solution, but that is a much different thing than acknowledging the other person’s true real-time suffering.   Should be easy, like not killing, or not stealing, but there is nothing easy about sitting with another person’s uncomfortable feelings.   If it was easy, not as many people would be killing each other, killing themselves.

“So I guess that tit-for-tat insensitivity leads to the classic vicious cycle:  you were brusque with me when I was in pain, so, what goes around comes around.    ‘Now you want to cry to me, you insensitive motherfucker?  Who gives a shit about your tears?  What about my fucking tears?’  

“That is always the question: ‘what about my fucking tears?’   Like that great formulation by Mel Brooks: tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.  

“It’s quite a world, Elie, quite a twisted work of fiction, and facts worse than the most twisted fiction.   As Eli told you ‘this world couldn’t be more cockeyed and fucked up if I’d made it myself!’  But you already know that.  All I wanted to add today is that the right to have your feelings simply acknowledged appears to be one of the most abused rights out there.  This inability to comfort others when they are upset… hoo boy, big source of conflict, of rage.   It’s not any great wisdom I’m laying on you, it’s pretty basic stuff, but I just thought this was a helpful way to phrase it.  Someone whose feelings are routinely dismissed often goes on to shut down emotionally when faced with other people’s troubles.

“When I felt bad as a young kid, I got whipped in the face.  Not really the response you hope for from your mother, of course, but there you are.  So much easier to picture the damage when you think of it as a refusal to grant someone the right to feel the way they feel.   You can’t argue with a feeling, if you’re a kind person, anyway.   The first line of help is let the other person express how they feel, take it in, acknowledge it.    You will be lucky to find one person in your life who has this essential skill, who makes a habit of listening.  

“Usually, of course, it’s ‘well, I think you should try to think of it, not as being whipped in the face, but as your mother having intimacy issues that have nothing to do with you, baby.   You shouldn’t feel bad that you’re whipped because you’re hungry, you see, because your mother has terrible problems of her own.  Maybe if you focused on her pain when you’re feeling like a victim, you’d realize that she has it much worst than you do, and you’d stop feeling so sorry for yourself.   Phew! your diaper stinks, kid.  You really should think about using the toilet, like everybody else.  Why do you want to go around smelling like shit?’

“Do you get the point I’m making here, Elie?” said the skeleton.

I did, but I said nothing, my mind and thoughts being far away at the moment.

“Asshole…” said the skeleton, reclining back into the soft earth.

My father had a playful side to him that popped into view once in a while.   Before he was married he used to wrestle with his little cousin Azi, a man who looks uncannily like him.   Azi was Uncle Aren’s grandson.   Azi told us recently that when my father got engaged, and brought his finance over to Azi’s house,  Irv took young Azi aside and explained that they wouldn’t be able to wrestle so much anymore as Irv now had a new wrestling partner.

My father rarely passed up a chance to hoist a small dog by the armpits and slowly rock the dog back and forth as the stiff armed dog gave him an uncomfortable look. I can perfectly see the look on my grandparents’ Chihuahua Bunny’s face as the little dog endured this odd swinging exercise.  Bunny’s arms and legs would be stiff, face staring unblinkingly at the man smiling and swinging him back and forth on the fulcrum of the little dog’s armpits.   There was nothing sadistic in this playful routine with the dogs or with the young Azi, for that matter.   My father had a good sense of humor and a playful streak that sometimes got the best of him.

“Lydia T. Shize-kup!”  he would suddenly say out of nowhere.   Her last name meant ‘shit head.’   He would say no more about Lydia, just her name, and it always suggested to me a hidden world of the man’s playful imagination.   “Jonathan Trrrrrrah-ahhhhsk!” he would say out of nowhere, rolling the “r” and giving a broad Germanic stretch to the “a” — another whole story never told.  Sometimes he’d ask, overly cheerful and to nobody in particular “have you relatives in Chermany?”   I was in a vast cemetery the day before my sixtieth birthday, strolling with friends in a historical graveyard in Brooklyn.  One of the graves was of someone named Trask.  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I heard my father’s exaggerated pronunciation and photographed the headstone for my sister.    “Seedy Moronni” was another one.   Each of these characters the star of some story that would never be written, or even sketched out.

The names of these characters bursting forth suggested to me recesses of my father’s imagination that were largely hidden from even him.   It reminds me of the way he’d sing, tunefully and with style, a tiny snippet of some song he loved.  “I-iiiiii wish you…. bluebirds….” he would croon to my mother in a Sam Cooke cadence as she served dinner.  Just those few notes, never anything more.  The songs he loved were pretty much worth loving.  Some of them I didn’t hear full versions of until years later and they turned out to be songs I learned and played.   “I’ve got a house, a showplace, but I can’t get no place, with you…” snapped off at the end of the phrase.    I Can’t Get Started is the name of that one, Ira Gershwin lyrics to a tune by Vernon Duke.  One of the few reactions to my guitar playing I ever recall from my father was his enthusiastic smile and calling out the name of the tune when I played the first few notes of  Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me.

I am writing these thoughts on a day when my eyes are tired, my hands and feet are tired, my legs and back are stiff.   Along with thoughts of my father’s mostly unexercised imagination are thoughts of my own taxed imagination.  I am at a loss to imagine how to proceed, on days like this.  My mind suddenly fixes on my medical predicament, which is unfolding in slow motion.   More tests the end of this month might or might not show my kidney function still unimpaired in spite of the persistence of all the side effects that alerted me to my mysterious, idiopathic kidney disease in the first place.  $88,000 worth of immunosuppressive liquid buys you a 30% chance of remission.  The upcoming blood and urine tests will show, perhaps, whether I have been lucky with regard to my kidneys.   On days like this, there is not enough coffee in my mug to fully wake me up.

“Lydia Sheiss-kopf!!!” shrieks the skeleton of my father, out of nowhere and with unaccountable mirth.