The truth will not set you free, regardless of how inspiringly that phrase is emblazoned in the stone face of the hellish high school visible from the Harlem River Drive.  The truth is a slippery thing, and shape shifting, and notoriously amenable to conflicting interpretations.   Nonetheless, my father clung to the central role truthfulness plays in having integrity and hated liars wherever he encountered them.   One thing is equally true: a lie will not set you free either, even as it may get you off the immediate hook.  Put me on the side of honesty, please.  Tell me the truth and I won’t lie to you in return.

The truth may sometimes be hard to spot, but much of the time it is clear when a lie is a lie.  So somebody who resorts to saying things they know to be untrue, with some other consideration taking precedence over being honest about the thing they know to be true?   A moral weakling, a weasel, a contemptibly  unskilled spinner of truth, a person without integrity.  This was my father’s view.  Although my view is a bit softer, I have a hard time with people who resort to lying to protect themselves or their beliefs.  A lie is generally used to end the discussion, honesty invites conversation.

It is one thing to look at an ugly baby, at the mother’s expectant face, and gush “I love that hat!  What an adorable baby hat!”  That will get a smile from mom, as the baby regards you with a gas face, that disgusting expression an ugly baby will fix you with sometimes.  

It will be good enough, no lie, truly a cute hat, no feelings hurt, and, to me, it’s far better than saying “Oh, what a cute little baby!  Not ugly at all!!!  Oh, God, I could just die from the cuteness!  So cute!!!!”

OK, you will say, I am going way overboard to make my point. Fine.  It’s a subtle point, though, because, to paraphrase war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, there are the lies we know we are lying about, the lies we lie to ourselves are not actually lies, the lies we don’t know are lies and the lies that don’t realize they themselves are actually lies.   There are levels of this lying business.  Sometimes it’s a good thing to tell a little white lie, little black child.  It’s true.  To avoid hurting someone’s feelings, lie a little, it’s not a bad thing.  

“Do you like the succatash?” your hostess will ask expectantly, gesturing toward the foul smelling mass on your plate.

“My, what a beautiful plate and it goes so gorgeously with the place mat and the table cloth!” won’t help in this situation.  Only a real lie will.  

So you will say, seasoning your lie with a dash of truth “I don’t usually like succatash, but, as succatash goes, this is as good as any I’ve ever had.  Bravo, brava, bravissima!”  It’s a decent thing to do, to exert yourself a little bit to make someone serving you feel a little better about well-meaning, if shitty, service.

The lies I’m talking about are as troubling to me as they were to my father.  You ask a straight question, you get a crooked answer that has all kinds of internal contradictions and ramifications it is often better not to even think about.  “Were you there?” you ask.

“No, I wasn’t there, I didn’t get there until the following week,” comes the answer, the person looking down and to the right before speaking, to access the creative lying sector of the brain.  (I know this tell because of an internet comment I read the other day, under a video of George W. Bush giving an ambiguous answer about events on 9/11).  

“No, I wasn’t there until the following week,” will leave a deep chill in the room, if you had seen the person there the night in question.  An even deeper chill if you saw the person see you see them there, at the place they now say they weren’t even present.  You will move on, if you have decent people skills, filing away the important fact that the person you are talking to is capable of lying to your face.

After the liar left my father would turn to me and say “who you gonna believe, darling, me or your lying eyes?” and shake his head.

“Jokes that killed vaudeville,” I’d say and he’d shake his head some more.

My father instilled this quest for truth and honesty in his children.  It’s an admirable thing and something I’m grateful for, regardless of any problems it may also have caused me.  It is far easier, after all, to run along believing the common myths we all live according to,  myths that form our view of what is true, and right, and decent.  

Emotions, all successful politicians, advertisers and entrepreneurs know, are much stronger and more convincing than facts, no matter how indisputable those facts may seem to be, no matter how indisputable those facts may even actually be.   And when it comes to emotions, things not based on logical analysis, who’s to say what’s really true and what isn’t?  What’s true is what you feel, which is also true.

In the case of America in 2016, part of our truth is that a young man who makes a billion dollars now faces an even bigger challenge:  how is the young genius going to monetize that move to make some real money and stay at the top?   It seems a petty detail, and a perhaps grotesque example, but I can’t get it out of my head.  

Young David Karp was once an intern to a bright, likable millionaire I talked to once about my student-run animation program.  Karp built Tumblr, I think it was, and, on the day I was meeting with the art loving animation entrepreneur, had sent a car to pick up the man I was talking to.  The limo was to take his former mentor to the press conference, where Karp would sit next to his smiling friend and take questions about selling his baby for a billion dollars.   I recall googling Karp and reading how the business press was all wondering how Karp was going to keep his edge as a genius cutting-edge entrepreneur going forward.

Now, you can google Karp yourself (here you go, don’t exert yourself) and see that once again, I am distorting things for my own ends.   Karp’s net worth is only 200 million or so.  He didn’t actually make a billion as I claim.  Who’s the lying distorter of the truth now?

This is prickly terrain, I’m telling you.   I have taken on a mighty task: to tell the truth, in as sympathetic a way as I can, in giving you a portrait of the tragic, destructive, inspiring character that was my father.  Irv was like Zelig in many ways, you can look back at his life which spanned much of the twentieth century and reflected so many of its important struggles:  his youth of dire poverty, even by the standards of The Depression, the abuse he suffered at the hands of a probably psychotic mother, his army service in Germany after the Nazis were defeated, his college years and the powerful vision of Social Justice he carried forward for decades, his involvement in the Civil Rights struggle, integration, making peace between warring minorities, leading a youth movement devoted, in part, to justice in the Holy Land.    His keen, dark sense of humor (very, very hard to conjure, I can tell you for sure), his great intelligence and capacity for empathy.

And then we turn the page and he is metaphorically flogging both of his young children with a live, hissing cobra.  The daughter is terrified, phobic about even tiny, cute snakes, the son is filled with confused rage, what the fuck is my father whipping us with a live hissing cobra for, what the fuck?   I mean, seriously, what the fucking fuck? 

Now turn the page and we have him lovingly tending to one of the terriers, teaching his children to be compassionate, and merciful, and truthful.   Cracking them both up with a line so darkly personal they could not even explain the humor of it to anyone raised without the ear for it.  

I am taking my example from what Jane Leavy did so beautifully in her biography of the Mick, trying to give you both of these things at once. Why am I trying to do this?  God help me, I am trying to get to the truth.  I really am.

My father put a great premium on honesty and had a visceral hatred of liars.  I have inherited this to some extent, this quixotic quest for unflinching truthfulness and distaste for a lie.  Knowing that someone is lying inserts a bone crosswise in my throat sometimes.  

At the same time, I understand that people have many reasons for lying.  Sometimes they lie to protect somebody else, other times it is out of desperation to conceal their own shame.  There are many reasons, and styles, of lying.   My father, impressively honest as he also was, was a great stylist in this regard.

“Ah, there we go,” says the skeleton of my father, his smile bitter now, “there’s the Elie we all know and love!  ‘My father was a great stylist of lying, though he loved the truth.’  You want some truth? You are doing what you’ve always done, trying to cut out the middle man– going straight to the two or three people you’ve found who will tell you how interesting and important what you’re doing is, applaud your high-minded ‘work’– honest work which nobody will pay you for because you’re too good to let anyone put a price on it…”

Nice try, dad.  This is called the Voice of the Internalized Victimizer, as I learned from that maniac I went to law school with.   I leave it here as an example of your technique of reframing.  

It’s like the story CBS ran about former president George Dubya Bush avoiding military service in Viet Nam by participating, sort of, in that rich boy opt out his dad got him into, the Air National Guard he went AWOL from.   Defenders of Bush proved the documents CBS ran were fake, the so-called news a scandalously unsourced overreach by the desperate ‘liberal media’ to try to discredit a great American family– end of story.  Commies trying to bring down a true American patriot by claiming he was a rich boy draft dodger who also dodged a physical because of his regular cocaine use.  HOW DARE THEY!  They are the ones who should be publicly shamed, not a good Christian man like our excellent president.  

The truth or falsity of the story, never actually denied by Bush’s people, was beside the point, the point was: THEY LIED.  We proved the documents were fucking fake, suck it!

“Ridiculous comparison,” snorts the skeleton.

Sure thing, pops.  Yet, I am carrying on a grudge you began decades ago, have kept it going for more than ten years since your death.  The person, a reflexive liar, and I have not exchanged more than a dozen words in that time.  It is a matter of some delicacy, not to mention who he is, though it will also be clear.

“Well, he’s the perfect example of why somebody lies– to cover their shame, to justify themselves, to manipulate and mislead, to gain some imagined moral high ground,” says the skull that once housed my father’s impressive brain.

All true.  It hurts to think of the influence this liar has over people I love and care about, as it must have hurt the old man.  I could never be as categorical about writing off this liar, until after my father died, and I saw some examples of this fellow’s habitual dishonesty too hideous to ignore.  You will want details, I get it, and it’s a hard dance I’ll have to do to provide them, but I’ll try, in illuminating the difference between an outright liar and a brilliant and honest reframer like my father.

Take the example of my mother’s twelve aunts and uncles taken to a Ukrainian ravine by anti-Semites and shot in the back of the head.  My father didn’t dispute that this happened, and yes, that it had happened only thirteen years before I was born, and that they were a few dozen people out of millions killed in the world’s most efficient genocide up to that time.   Arguably an eight year-old learning about all this might be upset, OK, fine, fair enough.  That much was all beyond dispute.  But let me put it in a frame for you, my fretful son.

“We never knew these people.  None of them ever came to the United States.  They were abstractions.  You are getting upset about the deaths of people you never even heard the names of because you are one of these kids who wants to feel like a victim, you have a grandiose vision of yourself as some kind of participant in world history.  These people you are mourning were abstractions, do you get it?”

Holocaust denial without the denial, a denial too upsetting to marshal any arguments against.  Had I been able to take a step back from the unspeakable, even if well-meant, betrayal of his response I’d have had several excellent questions for him.

Grandma never knew her siblings?  Really, dad?   Pop didn’t know his siblings, his parents, his nieces and nephews?  Really?  Oh, when you put it that way, Dad, you’re right, none ever came to the United States, I am just a whining little bitch trying to make myself feel important.

My sister’s husband is a very opinionated man.  Well-read, with a good memory, he loved to argue with my father, about virtually anything.  He described my father as the most able fencer he’d ever met, by far the most skillful arguer he’d ever encountered.

“Your father could lay on the couch, watching the football game while reading the paper, and he’d,” and my brother-in-law made nonchalant fencing motions, the swordsman still reading his paper.  

“You know, you could attack him from any angle and he’d just,” and he pantomimed an easy parry, carried out with a yawn.

“I never saw anything like it,” he concluded, “he’s in a class by himself.”   For some difficult to grasp reason he continued to attack the old man, who always easily defeated his most spirited charges while lying comfortably on his back, on the couch, without bothering to sit up straight as he flashed his rapier.

“Nicely done,” says the skeleton.  “where you’re going in this piece reminds me of that great moment from a Boy Named Sue: ‘Now you just fought one hell of a fight, And I know you hate me and you’ve got the right to kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do..'”

Nah, man.  Skeletons should keep their rictuses closed when the living are trying to describe what they were like when they still carried the skin, muscles, organs and nerves around.

I will ponder this further, and try to describe this dynamic more fully, without, somehow, blowing everything up.

A few months back I learned about an on-line sort of Reader’s Digest for baby boomers.  A friend, who doesn’t need the money, makes some nice pocket change writing short, snappy pieces for it and suggested I do the same.   I sent in three pieces, all were accepted for payment and publication.   Then the third was unaccepted, leaving a lingering bad taste I can’t seem to rinse out.  

The lingering bad taste came on, with accompanying smell, when I learned, on following up, that, yes, he thought the piece was beautifully done, but… funnily enough, and he could have sworn he’d written to tell me, possibly a tad too personal for a website that sometimes features pieces about being raped as a girl and other traumatic subjects.  Mine was an amusing anecdote about something colorful my mother had said that summed up her personality and her view of religion.

On the same day he also rejected a fourth piece, about a Family Secret, a subject he’d suggested, for being “strangely unmoving”.  The Family Secret was the murder of my mother’s twelve aunts and uncles along with everyone else in her family who had remained in Europe.  I suppose it was strangely unmoving, in the sense that it was strange that he was unmoved, even stranger that he would tell me so.  You can be the judge of just how strangely unmoving it was, if you’d like. 

Actually, my father would have probably loved this in a way: another piquant example of the arbitrary assholishness of the world, another marginally competent fellow in charge of deciding who shall get $250 and “published” and who shall get a lame opinion about why he changed his mind.  But that’s not the reason I mention the editor (this whole digression will be my pleasure to delete without a trace in the rewrite).  

He sends an email from time to time with news of a new “franchise” he is considering, like Family Secrets.  “Better Late Than Never” was one: first doing something at an age much older than most people and the wonderful ironies and complications that it hopefully entailed.  If he ever comes up with the franchise “Times I Dealt Gracefully with Complete Assholes”, I have a perfect one for him that  I could whip up in a few minutes.  

Anyway, the “franchise” thing stuck in my mind when thinking about vantage points from which to show you my father’s unique personality:  “Things My Father Loved.”

“Elie, tell them about my brother’s funeral,” says the skeleton of my father with the grin that is now, in the manner of all skeletons, his only facial expression.  

“That will require a lot of background,” I tell him.  

“Hey,” he says, “I’ve got nothing but time.  And thanks to my industriousness and frugality, you don’t have to rush off to work today, for the time being, anyway, so you have time.  Give them some background.”

My father and his brother had a strained relationship, until the last day and a half of my father’s life, when two brothers were rarely closer.  My father was much larger than his little brother.  My sister and I noticed the way our uncle always cringed around his big brother.  It seemed my father had probably done many mean things to Uncle Paul all through childhood.  

The crowning achievement of this sibling cruelty was probably the act of sadism he cheerfully recounted more than once for his children decades later.  Here’s an account, snipped from an unsent family piece, that I wrote recently for (and never sent to) the jerk-off with the $250 a pop on-line magazine:

Our father shared very few stories from his difficult, impoverished childhood, but one we both remember is a time he recalled fondly.

“I stuffed my brother’s mouth with raw chopped meat one time,” he’d say with a smile and a little chuckle.  

We pictured the dreary house they grew up in, a vignette out of a nightmare, some dim kitchen or dining room, dust motes dancing in the eerie light, nobody home but the two of them.  For a family living in dire poverty, a mouthful of raw chopped meat was a big deal.

It seems to have been worth the ass-whipping he must have received from their mother, who bemoaned the “seenas cheenam” (senseless hatred) between her sons. She didn’t understand how there could be hatred between the large son she whipped in the face and the little, sickly one she doted on.

Both sons emerged from their difficult childhoods with raging tempers.  They had markedly different styles of hiding their ready rage.   My uncle’s camouflage completely fooled my sister and me for many years.  Our father’s workarounds to his temper tantrums didn’t fool us since his anger was so well-known to us.  We saw it up close virtually every night at the dinner table, saw it in its many colors, shades and gradations.  

My father, in polite company, typically masked his anger in a killer sense of humor, barbed asides, dark observations and pointed ironies deployed in sometimes dazzling fusillades.  

My uncle, who had a corny sense of humor and laughed easily, with a distinctive high pitched, scraping laugh, not unlike an inhaled cough, seemed like a mild- mannered man.  He was not, as my sister and I would learn later in life when he went absolutely apeshit during a Passover weekend we attempted to spend in his house.  

My mother always disliked my uncle, a vain, slight man she considered a tyrant and a condescending bully.  My sister and I got a long, bracing view of this side of him for the first time when we were both adults.  Deciding to leave early to avoid further exposure, we got in the car instead of staying for another hellish dinner.  

I took a small bag of garbage from the car and went to dump it in one of my uncle’s garbage cans before we left.  He clamped a hand on the lid.  

“Take it with you,” he said.  

I turned without a word and took the garbage bag back to the car.  My sister and I laughed about it as we hurried the hell away from there.

At some point my father spent a couple of days at his brother’s home outside of Washington, D.C.  

“How’s my uncle doing?” I asked him afterwards.  

“Let’s just say … he remains unchanged,” said my father, in as good an example of his style as I have ever scrawled on the side of a telephone doodle.

Among my father’s papers was a letter he’d written to The First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.  It was a beautifully composed request, written on behalf of himself and his brother, to continue paying the special out of town member rate.  

The Congregation sent them bills every year seeking the full dues that all members paid.   These dues paid for the Hebrew School, construction of the large new facility, upkeep of the new building, and the small original building, salaries for everyone employed there, possibly a gym and pool, as well as maintenance of the small cemetery.  My father and uncle had been out of Peekskill since graduating high school, and had continued paying dues for the fifty or more years since from wherever they were.  They paid the dues in order to keep their graves paid for.    My father had received, as had my uncle, as both apparently did every year, a bill for the entire several thousand dollar annual membership.

“I realize the financial hardship that giving discounted fees to many out of town members might impose on the Congregation,” wrote my father toward the end of his well-constructed plea for fairness.  

“In speaking recently to Lisa Gagliardi, I learned that my brother and I are the only two such members.  In light of this, I respectfully submit that the $300 out of town dues we have been paying for many years be accepted as payment in full for 1999.”

My uncle had a stack of such letters he’d written in a folder in his file cabinet when he died. The last were written after my father died, on behalf of him and my mother.  

Their first cousin Eli, a man of famous temper, had dealt with this issue of out of town dues more directly, and with greater success.  At 85, sick of getting these bills every year, he picked up the phone to yell at the rabbi.  When told the rabbi was busy and asked by the receptionist if someone else could help him, Eli exploded.

“Yeah, tell the rabbi he can bury a fucking dog in my hole, for all I care.  I paid dues for more than sixty years since I left Peekskill and haven’t set foot in the shul more than a handful of times in all those years.  I’ve paid my fucking dues, bub.  I’m done.  Tell him to do whatever the fuck he wants with my grave.”  He slammed the phone down.

Eli quickly got an apologetic call back from the rabbi’s personal assistant.  Of course they appreciated his long payment of dues for a facility he never used, of course he’d more than paid for his grave, many times over.  He was in fact their senior member, the man with the longest standing as a dues paying member.  They apologized to him and waived any further dues from him.  He skated for those last few years, until he was buried one sunny spring day in the grave he had paid for many times over.

My father and his brother were more civilized men, professionals.  Hence every year they made their neatly typed written requests, later granted, to pay $300 a year instead of the full active membership dues demanded.

I note here that Eli’s best friend from Peekskill was a man named Benny Peritzky.  Peritzky was the town’s kosher butcher.  According to Eli, Peritzky,  a heavy drinker and something of a hell-raiser when young, was very learned in Jewish law. He could have been a rabbi, Eli told me once, he had everything but “smeecha for rabbunis” — the certification that new professional rabbis receive from a board of professional rabbis.   Benny Peritzky’s grave is not far from Eli’s in the same cemetery where my uncle and father are buried.

My father’s death, though long in the making, came upon him suddenly– he got his sentence six days before it was carried out.  My uncle spent the last year and a half of his life in a wheelchair, after a stroke.  He was in and out of hospitals, with infections, and pneumonia, and all kinds of terrible complications from being an invalid over eighty.  My aunt, teetering on the edge of dementia, did her best to care for him, visiting him every day, eventually moving into an assisted living apartment with him.

“You do realize you could probably tighten up this story quite a bit,” observes the wry old skeleton wryly.  

But I also know my father would relish this small detail about his brother, which I am setting up, something that occurred a couple of years after my father’s death.

My uncle was always a fastidious and demanding man.  For years after he retired from the Civil Service he would put on a crisp shirt and one of his dozens of expensive ties every morning, and a suit, along with meticulously polished shoes he kept on shoe trees when not on his feet.  Although confined to a wheelchair and living in a hospital and then an assisted living facility, he still wanted to be dressed impeccably, even if it was in sweat pants and a t-shirt.  

The staff at the hospital were not as exacting when it came to the attire of patients confined to bed and wheelchair.   My aunt, more than passingly demented by then, did her best to keep his laundry clean, sorted and folded, toting it home several times a week and bringing it back in neat stacks.  

“I’m worried about your aunt,” my uncle told me when I visited him in the hospital.  “She really can’t live alone anymore, and I’m not able to take care of her or do much from here.  I have to figure out what to do, she’s really not capable of taking care of herself anymore.  I’m afraid something will happen to her, alone in that house.”  

I nodded, had seen troubling evidence of my aunt’s deterioration.  A moment later my aunt walked into the room and my uncle jumped straight on her back, wheelchair and all, about the laundry.  

I opened the drawer while he raged and saw perhaps a dozen neatly folded t-shirts in there.  He was attacking her about the latest batch that she hadn’t managed to do yet.  Their son, a long-suffering fellow of considerable wit, who was standing next to me at that moment, later proposed this epitaph for his father’s grave stone: “Where the fuck are my 10 t-shirts?” 

Soon enough my aunt and uncle moved together into an assisted living facility in Bethesda.   Not very long after that my uncle passed away during one last trip to the hospital.  I helped my cousin with details for the funeral.  

He called to tell me the rabbi had told him, during the call to arrange the funeral, that they could make no funeral arrangements until he agreed to pay his father’s delinquent dues for the current year to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.  I was more outraged by this than my cousin was, though the outrage of it was certainly not lost on him.

“I told him I would put it on the credit card before the funeral,” my cousin told me with impressive maturity.  “He also asked me if they could bury my father with a pallet of worn out prayer books.  Apparently Jewish prayer books need a proper Jewish burial after they die.  He told me it’s considered a great honor to be buried with worn out prayer books.  I told him it was fine, that my father would love it.”  

The funeral was one of the saddest I’ve ever attended.   It would have made my father weep, to be there.   The surrounding ironies would have given him a grim, satisfying, delight and that’s the reason I present them here: to illuminate my father by something he loved, something twisted in a way he would really appreciate.  

The extreme cold at the cemetery, where the grave had been dug, the pallet of old books, the fresh snow, the seven mourners around the grave, including the rabbi– all very depressing.  My cousin escorted his mother, by then quite dotty and shaky on her legs, up the long slippery hill to the grave.  

The service was not long, the remarks by my cousin were short, my own were much shorter.  My uncle, I said, had been my inspiration for being an uncle to my niece and nephew.  I didn’t add that I hadn’t seen or talked to either of them for an unconscionably long time.

As the books and my uncle were buried, and my aunt gripped my cousin’s arm for the slippery descent to the car, I took the rabbi aside.  I told him how wrong and hurtful he’d been to bring up the one late dues payment by my newly deceased stroke-victim uncle.  I mentioned the brutality of the insensitive timing, putting this matter to a son who’d just lost his father, a man, by the way, who’d dutifully paid his out of town dues every year for more than sixty years.  

The rabbi began to explain that it was the policy of the Congregation, that they told him to do it, that he was only following orders.  I shook my head and watched as it quickly dawned on him how lame the excuse sounded, and how similar to Eichmann’s.  He appeared to be truly aghast and apologized to me.  I told him it was my cousin he owed the apology to, and he hurried over to talk to my cousin.  His body language was very humble.  My cousin later said it had been a very sincere apology. 

Here’s the punchline for my father.  He would have loved it and I hope it was worth the old skeleton’s time waiting for it.  

As my cousin was driving his mother back down to Bethesda he got a call on his cell phone, somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike.  Benny Peritzky’s son, a senior member of the board of First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill, a man he’d never met, calling to tell him how sorry he was to hear about his father’s death.  He remembered Paul, he said.  He was also calling to tell my cousin he was sorry about the rabbi’s unfortunately timed mention of the unpaid dues and to give, as a token of the Congregation’s apology, a $25 discount on the final year’s dues.  They would refund it on the credit card charge, he said.

“Wow, $25,” I said, “that’s generous.  Almost ten percent.”  My cousin and I snorted about the whole hideous business.   The darkness of the whole thing would have tickled the old man, who would have savored every grotesque detail, even as he no doubt would savor them now, if he could, grinning in his chilly grave at the very top of that same hill where his brother is buried. 

I learned at a young age that animals have souls, the same as us, and suffer from the same things that hurt us.   Apparently not everybody is taught these simple things about animals, sad to say.

I learned these things from my father, and also from my mother who knew them too.   If you don’t like being cold, make sure the dog isn’t suffering from the cold.  Being hungry hurts, remember to feed the dog before you yourself eat. These things were taught to my sister and me in the home where we grew up.  Dogs lived with us from the time I was a young baby.  The first was a brilliant black and white spaniel mutt named Patches who my parents adopted before I came along.  

Patches had lived quite nicely on the street before she let my parents take her in.  She displayed this talent for hobo living throughout her life, raiding the nearby bar’s garbage container for chicken and other delicacies during her daily forages. She was almost never on a leash, and walked the neighborhood as she pleased when the weather was nice.   She ran, even before I was old enough to, with the neighborhood kids to greet the Good Humor truck.  The Good Humor man would open a cup of vanilla for her and wait for my mother to come out with the dime to pay for it.

“Patches and Pop would take off as soon as you toddled into the room,” my father would laugh every time he related it.  Pop was my grandfather, the only one of the two I knew, my mother’s father.  “Patches and Pop would be on the other side of the room, watching you.   You used to pull Patches’s ears and try to ride her, so she kept her distance from you.  And Pop had big ears and that temptingly pendulous nose too, so he had reason to be worried about you.   He used to sit with Patches on the far side of the room and the two of them would watch you like a pair of vultures.”

I remember the last night of Patches’ life, my father up with her all night.  Lights on, noises in the bathroom, water running, the muffled sound of my mother crying.  The day Patches died (at the vet’s) was the saddest of my young life. 

We went to the Westminster Dog Show soon after Patches died to find our favorite breed.  We chose the West Highland White Terrier and arranged, with breeders Frank Brumby and his wife, (Brumby had a great Scottish accent) to purchase a young Westie puppy bitch (as it said on her papers, to our great delight) we named Winifred, or Winnie.  She was adorable, if a little hopped up when we first got her to her new home.

“They respond to body warmth,” my father told me, as the puppy squirmed on the side of the upholstered chair I was sitting in.  Positioning the little dog along my leg, which was warm, seemed to calm her down.  My arm over her flank and my hand on her back warmed her a bit more.  In a moment she was snoring, dreaming those puppy dreams a warm puppy can dream when it is pressed up against a heat-giving friend.

Winnie was probably my father’s favorite dog.  She was a sweetheart, very patient, and with a good sense of humor.  There’s a shot of her wearing my father’s big horn-rimmed glasses.  She’s looking at the camera, deadpan.  She died young, after posing for the immortal shot sleeping on my napping father’s chest, his arm draped over her on the couch.  She was followed by Dodi, Dodi’s daughter Sassy, Ginger, and, after my father’s death, and tragically, an ill-fated dead-ringer for dead poodle Ginger my mother named Lovey.  The story of those dogs is another story for another time.

I just note here how deeply this love of animals was instilled in us.  The animals themselves, by their behavior, by the directness of their affection, taught us to love them.  This is how we learn to love whatever we do love, I suppose.  It is unusual, I would think, not to learn to love somebody who shows you nothing but love.

Until I was in my twenties I never saw the charm of babies below a certain age. They were kind of disgusting, it seemed to me, and it struck me as a little sickening the way everyone cooed over these little puking vegetables.  Then, in a flash,  I learned to love babies from a baby, a one year-old master teacher named Ana Jaya Saroj.  I remember the feeling of exactly how it hit.  It was at my parents’ dining room table, she reached out from her mother’s lap.  I took her somewhat reluctantly in my arms, her face turned up to me, smiling, arms extended for a hug.   It was as though she extended her arms directly into my chest, where they grew like a living plant to attach to my metaphorical heart.  Her hug was like vines that grew straight into my heart.  She was the gateway baby that gave me the insight to love other babies.

Likewise, it was a cat who taught me the love of cats.  We were all dog people in the house where I come from, I never had any connection with or sympathy for cats.   Cats, to me, seemed like arrogant, self-serving bastards.  My girlfriend at the time had saved a tiny kitten from boys who’d cornered her under a car and were trying to drive her out with a stick.  She was excited about it over the phone, cooing about this adorable pet I didn’t want, already in my home.  Little did I know, by the time I arranged to have her adopted the following day, that it was already over, I was already working for a cat.  

I packed her inside my jacket on a chilly night and set off on my bicycle to an apartment where I’d drop her off for adoption.  On the noisy bridge that connects 207th Street to Fordham Road she became alarmed, climbed upwards one step, put her paws around my neck, let out a soft plaintive cry, and bit me tenderly on the Adam’s Apple.   I rode back home with her still in my jacket, after the cats at the apartment I was dropping her reacted to her presence with hissing feline rage.  

A very doglike little animal, and beautiful, she would remain my tenderest companion until she died.  I have a fondness for most cats now, because Oinsketta taught me how lovable a cat can be and I see a little of her spirit in every cat I meet.

Phrases from childhood attest to the lifelong sensitivity to animals and susceptibility to their love. To this day, when my sister or I drive ditheringly around a parking lot, seemingly looking for a particular spot, we mumble “looking for some shade for the dog,” which our father said whenever the dog was in the car.   It was wrong, and sometimes deadly, to leave a dog locked in a car that would be baking in the hot sun.  He uttered the phrase so reflexively that my sister and I turned it into a joke, though it was, in fact, a humane and sound practice when parking a car on a hot day and having the dog wait in the car.

Likewise the Old Testament’s commandment (it may be in some related book, I don’t have the source handy) to feed an animal before yourself.  This is easy enough to do, get up from the table where you’re about to tuck into your own dinner, get the animal’s food, put it in a bowl, get some fresh water for the creature, give it a pat on the head and return to dinner.  The animals the Bible had in mind were donkeys, horses, camels, cows, chickens, sheep.  How much more did this simple decency extend to smaller animals who hop up next to you when they’re ready for a nap?

“Food is love,” my father once said when feeding overweight Sassy from his plate.  And while food is not, strictly speaking, love, good food is better than many things.  And preparing food for someone with care is an act of love.  And we all get it.  What really showed the love was the way my father gave Sassy her shot of insulin every night, after the heavy, paranoid, long-lived Cairn terrier developed diabetes in those last few years.

I listened to the recording of my father’s last words the other night.  He insisted, on his deathbed, that he had been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.  I probed, since, on its face, it was an idiotic statement.  I asked how it was possible he could have been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill.

“By far!’ he snorted, ending that line of conversation while launching an inquiry that continues almost eleven years later.  

A few minutes later he was grappling with my question about what he’d like to say to my sister, anything that might help her make sense of things after his rapidly approaching death.  There are long moments of silence on this section of the recording.   I somehow knew to leave the silence alone, let it ripen into whatever he was going to say.  

He chose sibling rivalry.  Yes, that was it.  The competition with her genius brother had been the main thing that had robbed her of all self-confidence, of the ability to believe a compliment later in life.  In his telling my sister always had to work like a dog in school, in life, to do what I could do easily.  I pointed out that she’d always been much more successful in life than I have.  He shrugged this off.   This hopeless competition, from her point of view, he said, made her feel she could never be good enough.  

I probed, looking for any bit of sympathy or apology he might have for his daughter.  The old man stuck to this simple, if also idiotic, theory.

“She feels she could never live up to the high standards I set for you guys,” he said at one point, his voice weak and strained, impatient Death breathing directly in his face.

“Well, don’t you think your standards may have been a little hard for anyone to live up to?” I asked quietly.

“That’s putting it mildly!” he said, with as much harumph! as a dying man, who is having trouble speaking at all, can put into it.

On the last night of his life my father expressed regret about having fallen into the trap of seeing the world as black and white.  

“I think now how much richer my life would have been, and everybody’s around me, if I hadn’t seen the world as black and white,” he managed to say during that last conversation.  Black and white thinking is one of the easiest traps for people to fall into, especially people who strive to be moral.  

I once bought two subscriptions to Mother Jones magazine, one for me, one for my father.  Mother Jones was a now largely forgotten warrior for social justice.  The magazine is (or was, not sure if it still exists– but these days we can just ax google, here you go) dedicated to her spirit of principled resistance to the tyranny that most see as just the way things are.   Things we can’t do anything about.  

Things like little girls and boys in far off lands who unfortunately are ripped apart by the guided robot missiles we send in trying to blow up people who hate us.  We are very rich, you know, those of us who actually order the drone strikes, and these poor people, who are primitive and hateful, hate us for our freedom.  You know, good vs. evil, white vs. black, the kind of thing we just have to put out of mind, because thinking about it for more than the second it takes to say “yeah, OK” will only cause anguish we can do nothing about.  

Anyway, I knew my father would find the editorial take of Mother Jones to his liking.  He hated the reactionary turn our nation had taken, away from protecting the least among us, away from any social contract, international law, Justice, further and further from a commitment to human dignity.  He did like the magazine, we talked about the first issue, which we both perused with interest when it arrived.  

Toward the end of the year I asked him if he wanted me to renew his subscription.   He seemed momentarily sheepish.  Then he admitted he hadn’t been able to get himself to read it after that first issue.  I’d had exactly the same experience.  I renewed neither subscription, though both of us were pretty well-aligned with the views expressed in the periodical.  

Don’t know that this Mother Jones business is a good example of black and white, maybe it’s more the difficulty of dealing with nuance.  Or maybe the articles were just somewhat boring, or overly academic, or preaching to the choir too much, or shrill, or something.  Glancing at the on-line version now, which seems pretty good (though, to be honest, I had trouble getting through the whole linked article about Ted Cruz’s father), I really don’t recall why it was we both didn’t read it.  

I found myself thinking about this Black and White business the other day when Antonin Scalia finally shuffled off this mortal coil after decades of shaping American law to his often hateful views.  

Did Mr. Scalia, who was famous for highly intellectual, nuanced analyses of the law, and framing his views with a claimed fidelity to the Constitution he revered as a dead and immutable relic of inspired framers, see the world in black and white?  I think so. You could always tell where he was heading, which side he’d come down on.  I rarely agreed with him.  My father felt the same way.  Yet, here’s the kicker: everybody seems to agree, leaving aside his repugnant views on many subjects and the damage he did in many areas, he was a funny, engaging, brilliant, playful, likable guy.  

I have tried to say nothing bad about the man since he died, though while he lived I considered him a pretty evil bastard.  I recall in law school reading some of his incendiary prose and recoiling at what a vicious prick the guy was.  I was first struck by his casual monstrousness reading an influential case about how strictly racial quotas must be reviewed by courts.  His provocative reference to white plaintiffs, who in different Supreme Court cases had claimed that the preference given to Blacks under Affirmative Action had unjustly victimized them, momentarily sickened me in my chair when I read it.  

Scalia underscored his intolerance for any government scheme that did not place color-blind merit first with flames.  “When we depart from this American principle we play with fire, and much more than an occasional DeFunis, Johnson or Croson burns,” he wrote.  I read this as a sickening, sly and hateful reference to Blacks set on fire by the Ku Klux Klan over the decades when such things were winked at by the Law.  The harm to Blacks burned to death by racists pretty the much indistinguishable, in this playing with fire, from the harm to white college students and contractors disadvantaged by programs that gave preferential treatment to small numbers of Blacks in an attempt to remedy centuries of racism at law.  I remember thinking what a dangerous bastard a guy like Scalia is, with a lifetime appointment to an all-powerful court from which there is no appeal.

And yet, he was Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s best friend.  Early on in law school I’d heard a gifted comedian on the radio, addressing an appreciative group of young fascists at some law school, and had been so impressed by his wit, his quickness, his command of the facts and the law, how persuasively he quipped, that I stayed tuned to hear who this comic genius was.  I recall feeling confused to hear this great and convincing comedian and social critic was Justice Antonin Scalia.  I remember thinking: what the fuck?  It seemed inconceivable to me that this man, whose writings struck operatic chords of racism, homophobia and other shades of complete and crusty asshole moral tone-deafness, could come off as such a cool and charismatic guy.

But there we are, with one of our hardest projects as human beings– seeing the often confusing nuance of the world.   We want things to make sense, and they don’t.  Does it make sense that a funny, intelligent, sensitive, curious, engaging person is also vicious, enraged, intolerant, inflexible?   Strictly speaking, no.  You’d think that if someone can laugh appreciatively at the jokes the condemned comedian makes he would spare the guy’s life if he had the power to.  

“You’re very fucking funny, cabron, and I hope you’ll behave more shrewdly in the future, man, because you crack us all up.  OK, untie him now,” you would have the guy say.  And many in the audience who’d come for a good burning at the stake would be pissed off, come all this way for a good show and so forth, God damn it, nothing good ever happens to me… Others, of course, would feel their hearts swell to see this brilliant comedian spared the dictator’s wrath, a little sniff of real justice in an unjust world.

I think again about that wonderful biography of Mickey Mantle by Jane Leavy.  Every page presents all the evidence you need to love and admire the Mick or to want to kick him in the stomach.  It has been called the mark of the highest intellect– the ability to hold more than one truth in mind at the same time.  That is the thing I am striving for as I write these recollections, try to paint the living, three dimensional portrait of my brilliant, loving, hateful father.

Erik Erikson’s theory of ego development takes the maturing person through several stages of growth. This growth results in a productive, generally satisfying adulthood, or frustrating years of stagnation.  His schema provides a useful frame, although, of course, lives rarely fall neatly into categories.  According to Erikson, the satisfaction or frustration as an adult depended on whether any stage of ego growth is not completed.   Things that lead to stagnation are unresolved trust issues, shame, guilt, isolation, a sense of inferiority and things like that.  Each stage has a virtue attached:  hope, will, purpose, competency, fidelity, love, care, wisdom. His final stage of development puts the choice for the last years of life starkly:  ego integrity or despair.  You can get the refresher overview here, as I just did.   I don’t know if Erikson’s theory makes any more sense than any other, but it does shed a certain light on my father’s final years and on my determination not to repeat his sad trajectory.  

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

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

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

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

“But I have to say, in terms of teaching the children math, and reading, or anything, really, besides how to treat each other– which I’ll grant you is also very important– she seems to be a moron.”  And she described with illustrations the parochial stupidity of this very kind woman.  “Plus,” said my mother, laying down the trump card in this mixed metaphor of an anecdote, “she’s a born again Christian.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My parents never reported any overt attempts to convert them.  They spent many a pleasant time with them.  I never met them, or was particularly interested in meeting them, but I regret that now.  They would play a disturbing role in my father’s final hours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proof of the depth of their dedicated Christian charity would be seen soon enough. Not once did they visit or contact my mother, the grieving widow.  My father, with his large, funny persona, had apparently been the drawing card to this loving relationship.  It would not be the only time my mother would be abandoned by those dear friends who had been so close with the couple.  My father, for his part, would not be in the least bit surprised by this betrayal.

As I learned from watching my father in action for decades– it was not the thing itself that would get under his skin and send him into a long-lasting rage, it was the maddening principle of the thing being done to him.  The indignity of being held powerless, no matter the indisputable rightness of his position, the arbitrary stupidity of the other position.  

This was no doubt instilled during his powerless childhood when, between a father who could not earn a living and a mother who couldn’t control her rage, though she may have cloaked it in some religious guise, he was subjected to whatever happened to him with no regard for what was right, or just, or decent, or what his perfectly justifiable feelings about the matter might be.

It is this being made invisible that is the truest, most violent curse of poverty. You are not even a person, sir.   The tastes I’ve had of this invisibility are hideous.  I had them in court many times, while standing in the shoes of the poor and powerless threatened with eviction.  I get tastes of it to this day, trying to live on a low fixed income and forced to engage in futile arguments with under-paid idiots under no obligation to do anything but tell you they are powerless too, sir, and similarly screwed, and who, in the end, read you their masters’ regulations and tell you to have a nice day.  

This was a large part of my father’s fury to become middle class, to become wealthy enough, he thought, to become exempt from this invisibility constantly poured over the poor like tankers of cold piss.   The kind of wealth that makes one exempt from these indignities is a rare kind indeed, it takes tens of millions nowadays to even get into the room where you can be considered for a life of dignity.  Though even minimal wealth will insulate one from the worst of this galling invisibility.

Easier, by far, is to acquire the well-adjusted mindset one prays for in the Serenity Prayer, to know the difference between the things I can tackle and the things that will only drive me insane by grinding my soul into dehydrated urine.

I am reminded of this by the spiral of rage I fell into yesterday trying to verify my “priority” confirmation to have an agency’s mistake corrected so I can resume the health coverage I have paid for every month for ten years.  That I will run out of hypertension medication before coverage begins again, and have no coverage in the event of a stroke or accident, everyone agrees, is a shame, and that’s why we gave you priority in the backdating of your claim, sir.  However, you have to understand, sir, that priority means many different things.

 And we are not responsible for what the other office does, we don’t do anything in-house, and are not obligated to provide you with any information whatsoever except to verify that your claim is still labeled “priority” and still being expedited.  It took only 12 days to be electronically transmitted from this office to the one who decides, and it’s still marked priority, sir.  Can you imagine how long a non-priority case that doesn’t involve running out of hypertension medication might take?  How many people are being fucked far worse than you, sir, not eligible for any health care ever?

I get this propensity to be enraged by this kind of bland, business as usual fuck-yourself-in-the-face, sir, directly from my father.   He instilled it by doing the same to me, and to my sister.  

“He would be just as upset if he lost the 35 cents change he got when he bought the paper as he would if one of us was hit by a car.  Everything was of equal weight to him as tragedy,” my sister reminded me.  And it was true.  If you asked him, once he’d calmed down again, it wasn’t the 35 cents he’d misplaced, obviously, it was the loss of control it symbolized, the fact that his system for keeping track of things had broken down.  That he was powerless.

Which is what rage is all about.  A person who does not feel violated, and powerless, is not likely to lash out with anger.   I’d intended to go into the hideous subject here of the politically required “n-word”, a word more offensive in many ways than the hateful old word it replaces: nigger.  To say “nigger” these days is to violate a new and deeply held taboo.  To continue treating people like niggers, well, sir, you can’t use that word, no matter how descriptive, apt, perfectly fitting, the conversation is over, once you put hate speech into it, I’m going to report you for acting like a damned n-word.  

But here is the most basic thing about being treated like a nigger, you just have to take it– or, if not, don’t get all moralistic about it when we put you in a fucking choke hold. 

Substitute any other word here, if you prefer, though nigger sums it up best.  You can say kyke, spic, greaseball, habib, sand nigger, wog, chink, gook– but let’s keep it simple.  Nigger is the gold standard, the centuries-old American word of choice used to describe someone with the power to do nothing but accept the, admittedly very bad, situation.  Nigger was the word, and inferior condition, used to justify American Slavery, Jim Crow, every atrocity.  Slaughters of blacks by whites that the ruling racists re-branded as “riots” happened periodically and were quickly forgotten, the didn’t happen to people anyone had to care about, they happened to faceless niggers.

Like the massacre of defiant Blacks Easter Sunday, 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, the one that resulted in the acquittal of all the killers involved.  Like the destruction by fire of the middle class black city of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, the Black Wall Street, and the detention of all black survivors in prison camps afterwards, a century of legally winked at lynching, states’ rights as code for we decide what’s best for our niggers, thank you, welfare reform to wean n-word parasites off the tax tit, defending cops who once in a while kill unarmed Blacks against the misleading and hateful accusations of fucking n-word animals.

Why did my father have such a strong identification with persecuted Blacks?  He grew up as a nigger, the poorest, dumbest, most powerless kid in a town run by Ku Klux Klan sympathizers.  He imparted the feelings of this identification with the poor and the crushing powerlessness of poverty most effectively to my sister and me.

It is the principle that is so hard to digest, maybe impossible.  Ask for the director’s name, the director of a public agency, someone who as a member of the public you should have access to, especially when there is no other meaningful avenue of appeal.  You will be told that you can hire a lawyer and subpoena that person’s name, they are under no obligation to provide the public servant’s name to you, a mere disgruntled member of the public.  

This unreasonable denial of a reasonable request will sting briefly, but the longer lasting stink is being reminded of the larger principles, like corporate laws that insulate wrong-doing corporations from liability or the lack of promised transparency by our Hope and Change “most transparent administration in history” president.  

After all, it is nobody’s business how many people are accidentally, or inadvertently, or collaterally killed in your name.  Drones are better than boots on the ground, everyone agrees, and much less expensive.  The less the public needs to know about civilian casualties the better.   Secret trade deals are better, politically, than ones that will get Americans all pissed off, like NAFTA.  That’s the principle when a public servant tells you that you have no right, as a mere member of the public, to any information you can use to try to get redress for things that, with all respect, sir, you have no way to get redressed.  Have a nice day.

“This piece is true enough, as far as it goes.  But you should go back and delete that nigger paragraph.  Too incendiary.  I was never squeamish about language, you know, but I’d urge you to be careful when using a word like nigger.  It’s just pouring gasoline on a fire to use that word, no matter how perfectly it sums up what you’re talking about,”  the skeleton of my father continues smiling, the only expression he’s got these days, taking a beat to let the point sink in.  “You know what I’m saying?  Not for nothing…”

My father’s first concern when I came to talk with him that last night of his life was to make sure I was recording our talk.  He wanted to leave me a primary source to ponder, to work from.  The recordings show we began talking, or at least recording, at 1:33 a.m..  The last short recording is time stamped 3:18 a.m.   This shows we talked for around two hours, him with great effort in a voice that was incredibly weak and strained.  A lot was said, obviously.  

The nurse was smiling at me from ear to ear as I passed her in the hall when I left.  This suggested to me that she and my father had talked about his anxiety over how he was going to talk to me.  They both, likely, were surprised to find me so mild, so ready to help make his passing as easy as I could for him.  She clearly wanted to hug me as I passed her on the way back to the parking lot.  Perhaps she did.

Here’s the thing about having the primary source right in front of you– you can see how your imagination will often recall something quite different from what the record shows.  That last night of my father’s life I operated somewhat foolishly as to the primary source we were creating.   Each time my father asked for water, which he needed every few minutes, I shut off the recorder.  In the emotions of the conversation I did not always remember to turn it back on when we started talking again.  Thus I have a recording of about 35 minutes, instead of the full conversation.  What is recorded on that record, as my father must have known, is about all I can remember with absolute certainty.

I offer you one example that jumped out at me when I listened to our chat last night.   In the previous post I have my father saying, and I’m pretty sure he said it:  “Those stories Eli told you, he pretty much hit the nail on the head.  Only he spared you the worst of it, how awful it really was.  My life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”

I distinctly remember those lines, particularly “my life was pretty much over by the time I was two”.  The recording has my father saying:  “You know, you caught bits and pieces of it when you talked to Eli about me. He hammered it on the nose.”

The record does not have him say anything like “my life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”   He may well have said it, and it made the impression it made, or I may be remembering some synthesized version of the statement, created from the full context of what he was talking about.  Though I’m also sure he said it.

Maybe it was the first thing he said when I walked in, as I remember it, and we talked for ten minutes or more before I put the recorder on.  Perhaps his reference to Eli hammering it on the nose was just a restatement of what he’d said moments before, when he also told me that his life was pretty much over by the time he was two.

“Or, perhaps, it was what you wanted to hear me say,” says the always complicated skeleton that used to help my father get around when he was alive. “You always had a vivid imagination.  Do you remember that sadistic crew that lived up in the attic over your bedroom when you were a kid?   They had this kind of guillotine contraption you described to us, that you could hear them wheeling over your bed.  Your dilemma each night, trying to sleep below it, was which way to position your body when the blade fell to avoid the worst.  Do you remember all this?”

Obviously I do, since I am the only one actually in this silent conversation, old man, but continue.

“Your dilemma was, they knew the orientation of your bed and were determined to surprise you one night by dropping the blade.  So sometimes, when you heard them wheeling it, you’d reverse yourself so that your pillow was at the bottom of the bed and your feet were at the top, where your head had just been.  Then you braced yourself to have your feet cut off at the ankles, instead of your head, if the worst happened.  Young paranoid’s triage, we might say.”

Sometimes, when you are trying to make sense of things that make little sense, it is good to just let the other person run with it, particularly in the absence of primary sources to the contrary.

“I appreciate your attempt to fairly tell the story of my life, my values, to write the manifesto I might have written about my beliefs, what I learned about life and the world.  I really do.  It is not easy for an almost eleven year-old skeleton to express this, but here I am, telling you plainly. “

“I think it’s also admirable, if typically quixotic, that you’re writing this story in hopes of giving the full context for why you believe in your student-run program as much as you do.  Giving all the backstory of a difficult father, scarred by poverty and abuse, who nonetheless imparted these humanistic values, I applaud the whole thing.  May you publish the Book of Irv, may you get some publicity and attention, may somebody fund your program, may the kids do great things.”

“But I think it is also only fair to give the reader a bit more context than just your point of view.  I expressed sorrow for the first and last time, pretty much, and asked for your forgiveness, for sure for the first and last time, as I was checking out.  Prior to that time, as you’ll recall, I yielded nothing, nada, gave you not a single point.  I told you, at the end, that I knew now that you’d been right all along, reaching out to your father, and that I’d been wrong, unable to reach back.  You won’t find that in the record, stated as succinctly as that, but we both recall I made a point of making that clear.  Anyway, the thing the reader should know, is that I was your implacable enemy for most of the time we knew each other.  They should read the book knowing that.”

“And now, on the threshold of old age, you’re trying once again to do what you might have done at 24, or 35, or 40– write a coherent explanation of difficult things that might get you paid.  Make the story interesting enough, write it with enough conviction and engagingly enough,  you might sell a book.  Some publisher will hopefully give you money to sit at your keyboard and write the full manuscript, if they think they can sell your book.  That would be great, not working for free.”

“And, for the record, I thought Me Ne Frego should have been published, but you gave up after that little idiot at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux opined, from the short sample you’d sent her, and the synopsis, that unfortunately the protagonist had not seemed to have undergone the kind of dramatic transformation that is necessary for any compelling narrative.  Her name was Strauss, the author of that thoughtful rejection letter, was it not?  And she had a degree in literature from a top Ivy League School.  Who should know such things, if not her?”

“OK, then, here’s my point.  You expect the reader to come with you, to be moved by what moved you.  The reader should also consider this: everybody tells their version of events.  Meaning this– people lie, consciously or not.  You know I always hated your brother-in-law because of his eccentric relationship to the truth.  The point is, how does the reader know what is real and what is bullshit?”

“Do you really expect, for example, anyone to believe that nice little fairy tale about walking on a hill with Arlene as she pulled a chain and gave you that illuminating insight about your life?   It’s a neat story, I’ll give you that, and I love the way you slip in that ‘Mozart IQ’, that was cutely done, but the fact is, we never had a friend named Arlene.  And, even if we had, the story she told you was not true.  It was your fault.  All of it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s nap time here at the First Hebrew Congregation Bone Yard.”

And I am left awake, wondering about the man who insisted to his eight year-old, when the kid was done vomiting after seeing the footage the Nazis shot of their Final Solution (talk about primary sources, Jesus), that the slaughter of his mother’s dozen aunts and uncles was merely an abstraction.  “Nobody ever knew those people, you’re just being dramatic to think they had anything to do with you.”  

“Fine, I was wrong to say that.  Have me admit that now, from my grave.  Now, please, Elie, leave me to my nap.”

When my father was hospitalized, suddenly, for what would turn out to be the last few days of his life, I made a quick plane reservation and headed, by public transportation, to La Guardia airport.  At 42nd Street, where I switched trains, a man was singing on the train platform.  He was an older man, down on his luck by the looks of it, and he sang uncannily like Sam Cooke.  

He was singing one of my father and my favorite songs, You Send Me.  I began recording it.  As he hit that long “whoa-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh” between verses the E train roared in, drowning him out.  I stepped on and headed to Queens for the bus to La Guardia.  Very cinematic, I thought at the time.  I had a ten second snippet ending with the train’s roar recorded on my digital recorder.  I’d intended to play the wonderful imitation for my father, but there was no point.  There wasn’t enough of the man’s beautiful singing on it.  The abrupt end was the very image of death.

Throughout our life, despite having much in common, my father was a determined adversary.  This started long before I could speak, when, according to him, I stared at him “accusingly, with those big black eyes”, from my crib next to his side of the bed.  Accusingly, because, apparently I could already see the future, knew, somehow, the long fight that was in store for us.  Because of my accusatory stare they had to move the crib, and eventually move to a house where I could have my own room.  His response to any suggestion that my conversations with Eli were giving me insight into this adversarial relationship was typical.    

“Sure,” he said, angrily dismissing the idea, “listen to fucking Eli.  Eli’s full of shit. He’s a great source of history.  Did he tell you how many times he was almost a millionaire, how every business he walked away from was somebody else’s fault?  Everyone he ever knew fucked him, as the always honest Eli will tell you.  Ask his kids about him, they’ll tell you what a great father he was to them.  Eli’s version of history is complete bullshit.  Go ahead, keep listening to Eli, you’re really getting some fucking wisdom there.”

The old man wasn’t giving me much credit, of course.  I listened to Eli and I argued with Eli and through this process came away with what I considered close to the truth of whatever matter we were discussing. Eli had no ax to grind against my father.  He was very proud of my father.  He told me so every time we talked about him.  

“Yeah, but Eli, you have to admit, both my father and my uncle are somewhat insane,” I would say.  

“OK, somewhat insane, that’s OK, fair enough.  But if you had seen where they came from, the horrible situation they came up in, and compared that to where they wound up, both well-educated, respected professionals with nice families, living in beautiful homes, you would see what I’m talking about.  You could never have imagined either of those dirty little urchins coming out of that place they grew up amounting to what they both amounted to.   You have to see the whole picture.  Somewhat insane, OK, but I’m very proud of both of them, your father especially.”

There was no question that Eli had no ax to grind in this particular case, though he had many axes he was constantly grinding.  He told me whatever he did about my father’s life to help me understand a very complicated and troubling puzzle.  And, in a sense, a very simple one.  Add up the facts.  

In a time when everybody was poor, your father’s family was more poor than anyone else’s.  As well-spoken and quick witted as your father is now, when he arrived in kindergarten he was treated as a big retard by the other kids because he spoke not a word of English.  When your father was first able to stand his mother began whipping him in the face every day.  Do the math.  Somewhat insane?  Well, I’d say that’s pretty goddamned good.

I got it, too.   It was only by having these pieces to give context to the aggravating whole that I was able to make any sense of it.   This information allowed me to realize the guy couldn’t help being paranoid, and guarded, and macho, and unsympathetic, and bullying, and maudlin.  In time I was able to realize he couldn’t help being that way and it helped me get past some of the hurt and anger.  The damage was done, and was in some ways unforgivable, but at least it was understandable.  What I learned from Eli was a huge help to me.

My uncle, who always cowered around his much bigger older brother, was the person my father kept asking about from his deathbed.  “Is my brother on his way?” he wanted to know.  I had a call, he was at the airport, I drove down and picked my uncle up.  He stopped the doctor in the hall, asked if a liver transplant was possible for his 80 year-old brother in the last days of liver cancer, wasn’t there a possibility to get him a liver in time to save him?  I gently pulled him away from the doctor.  He and my father clung to each other, the sight of it was very poignant to my sister and me.  After my father died my uncle sat by the body, until the members of the chevrai cadesha arrived to take the body and prepare it for the funeral.  My brother-in-law sat and waited with my uncle and dead father, a not un-moving detail.  

We sat with my dying father throughout the day and at some point in the evening, my uncle said we should let my father rest and we all left for the night.  I’d bought my father a small digital recorder and, before I left, I showed him how to operate it.  “If you think of anything you want to say to anyone, you can record it on here,” I told him and he nodded and told the nurse to put it in the drawer next to his bed.    

Then, trying to sleep back at my parents’ apartment, I realized it was absurd.  My father was clearly dying and I was trying to get a good night’s sleep.  My uncle, for all his intelligence, was a fucking rigid idiot who tried to make rules for everyone around him.  I got dressed and left without waking him up.  On the drive to the hospital I came as close as I would come to shedding tears.  I got choked up, thinking about the many wasted years when my father and I could have been friends, helped each other, instead of being enemies, harming each other.  

It was probably one a.m. when I reached the hospital.   I made my way through the quiet halls and was greeted warmly by the night nurse, an angel who had quickly bonded with my father.  She was a black woman, slightly resembling a couple my father had been close friends with at one point during his life, and they seemed to get each other immediately.   She was very protective of him and was clearly glad I had arrived.  I went in and left the door open.  

My father was awake, as though he’d been waiting for me.  “Did you bring the recorder?” was the first thing he said.  A lifelong fascination with history caused him to date things and to be aware of the historical significance of primary sources.  We were about to create a primary source.  

“I left it with,” and I said the name of that angelic nurse, a name I’ve forgotten now, sad to say.  

“Oh, she put it in the drawer,” he said gesturing feebly in the jerky, ghostly way he gestured those last few days of his life.  I got the recorder, switched it on and laid it on his chest.

“Those stories Eli told you,” he began, “he pretty much hit the nail on the head.  Only he spared you the worst of it, how awful it really was.  My life was pretty much over by the time I was two.”

(arbitrary end of part one)