“You ask me if I have royal blood and I’ll give you a definitive answer,” said the skeleton.    

Do you have royal blood?  

“Possibly, but you’re definitely giving me a royal pain in the ass,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?   

“Why not personally examine my royal hemorrhoids for the magisterial answer to that one, poseur?” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?

“Possibly, but I could increase my odds by drinking all of yours,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?    

“Why, are you thirsty for a rich drink, unlanded vampire?”   

Do you have royal blood?   

“I don’t know, let’s compare it to your’s.  Come on, out with it, all of it, bloody bastard.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“Get on your knees when you ask me that, peasant, and call me ‘Sire’.” 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Not necessarily, though I do have hemophilia,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Beats me, but I do have a swollen royal blue asshole, I might be baboon royalty,” said the skeleton.

Do you have royal blood?  

“I don’t know, but it’s rushing to my head, and when it gets there, I’m going to order you and your family out of your home and have you hunted by hounds and nobles on horseback,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“I know you are, but what am I?  OK, that’s enough of that, Elie.  This was really stupid.  Not only a waste of time for everyone involved, burping out these semi-snappy MAD magazine-style rejoinders to a stupid question, but not even something I’d do when I was alive.

 “Wait, I know what you’re going to say– I have that power now absolutely–  ‘well, you’re not alive, and you’ve grown up since your death’– and that, I can tell you, 100%, is complete bullshit.  I haven’t changed a bit, except for that night when it began to dawn on me I’d be dead in a few hours and I thought it only fair to give you what I’d withheld from you for your entire life.  

“I’d been consistently unfair, taken advantage of your better nature to make everything your fault, make you shoulder the entire weight, and blame, for our long, relentless war.  It was only fair for me to say, before the little candle of my light winked out, that it hadn’t all been your fault.   I went a step further, since you were so mild about it by my death-bed, and took all the fault.”  

The leaves on the trees around the grave, once green, now orange, yellow, brown and red, trembled in the light breeze.  The wind made a quiet whistling sound, to accompany the rustling of the dry leaves.  There were no cars on the road.

“The Holy One, Blessed be He, threatened those who were hostile to Him with uncontrollable terror at the trembling of a leaf.   ‘The sound of a windblown leaf will make you run in terror, as if hunted by a hoard of your enemies, you will flee, heart pounding, though nobody pursues you,’ or some such poetic phrase, in your beloved Leviticus 26.   You know, as the days grow shorter and the temperature cools off, nights suddenly frigid, older, sick people tend to die and babies who are not fated to live long also begin to sicken and die.  

“The coming of winter is a living metaphor for death and humanoids recognized that thousands of years ago.  The holidays around the winter solstice all involve the lighting of candles, the miracle of the Hebrew zealots kosher oil burning for eight days, the Christmas lights, Diwali, a hundred primitive religions that time has forgotten, or whose practitioners have been wiped out by religions who had deadlier weapons.  

“Look, man, in fairness to yourself, you can’t just get up and come in here and expect much to happen every day.  Some days you are just going to be swinging an unstrung racquet at a nimble baboon’s unwashed ass. Today may be such a day.  No matter how you wiggle, and jiggle, and dance, the last three drops go down your pants.  Face it.  You can write all the lines you want for me, some days, this is all you’re going to get.  As for me, shit, I don’t mind in the least.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“OK, I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve never revealed to anyone.  I was a King.  This land is mine, God gave this land to me.  That is what made it so intolerable to me to be treated as an asshole, no different than the rest of you fucking peons.  

“Do you realize, when a little king is whipped in the face, the cataclysm that is rendered in the heavens and down here on the earth?  My divine right to rule, contested by an ignorant and vicious commoner, with a crude but effective whip in her hand, over and over with all her raging might, into my tiny face?  Do you understand what this does to the order of things?  How can you possibly understand that?”

Obviously I can, I have royal blood.

There is a website that periodically sends me an email asking, as a come on to try to get me to open their email, if I have royal blood.  I hit delete, but they are persistent.  When I say “they” I’m not talking about an individual, of course, it’s a robot of some kind, a snappy spambot, programmed on behalf of a company that you can pay to have trace your ancestry.  “Do you have royal blood?” the bot asks me, every week or two.  

There is nobody to say this to directly, so I may as well send it out like a spambot, into the darkness of cyberspace.  A paragraph or two may come in handy for my proposed Book of Irv.

My family does not have royal blood.  If it did, the faces of those royals were many generations ago scraped from their tomb walls, their bones scattered to hungry scavengers.  In my memory, and the handed down and painstakingly unearthed short history of my family, I know only this much:

 My mother had twelve aunts and uncles and her grandfather on her  mother’s side wrote to her and sent her Russian coins when she was a girl.  Of these people none survived events in their Ukrainian town during the dark winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943.  Any of them, or their children, who made it through the starvation and disease was marched to a ravine on the northern end of town one warm summer night and in that ravine their misery was ended.

On my father’s side, a few hundred miles away, it happened a year or so earlier.  By July 4, 1942 it was all over for everyone but Aren and his little sister Chava, both of whom were in America, far from the killing.  The hamlet they came from in the marshes just south of Pinsk disappeared without a trace, along with all its inhabitants.  When I say “disappeared without a trace” I mean that nobody who has researched it has found any trace of where the little settlement was on a map.  As for its former inhabitants, don’t ask.

So, royal blood?  Most likely I don’t need a thorough check of my ancestry, which, except for two framed photos, can go back no more than two generations in any case, to answer that one.  Royal blood? No, thank you.    

There is a large framed photo here of Azrael Gleiberman, Aren and Chava’s father, and one of his wife Leah, but those haunted-looking, life-sized portraits are all that remain of them.  Azrael is referred to as Reb Azrael on his daughter Chava’s gravestone in Peekskill, suggesting he was a learned man, or at least a very religious one.  Only Aren and Chava, among Azrael’s children, ever got a grave stone.   Royal blood?  Let me see.  It looks somewhat unlikely, romantic as the idea undoubtedly is.  

It might be nice, in a fairy tale sort of way, to believe that the rage of Chava, the frequent unreasonableness of Yetta, the fearfulness of Sam, Eliyahu’s devil-may-care attitude, were all caused by the high octane spirits of royal blood.  You know, the reason Yetta drank so much vodka sometimes, and acted so headstrong and impetuous– she was a former royal living in exile in a worker’s apartment in the Bronx.  Unbearable!   Sam, once a prince who dressed in the Russian fashion, shaken to his core by the surprise assassination of his father the King and fled from the lands he once ruled.   Chava, the youngest member of another royal family, forced by cruel circumstances into marriage in an alien land with a man whose wits and constitution had been damaged beyond repair by generations of royal inbreeding.

Why else, really, would these people have acted so crazy?  It has to be royal blood really, no?  

I think of the history of the world, how it continues to be written in blood, so little of it royal blood.  Which is a shame, really, since no less an expert than Thomas Jefferson believed that the Tree of Liberty needed to be watered periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  And who more fit to be a tyrant, and to provide sustenance to that noble tree, than a ruler pulsing with royal blood?  

The Divine Right of Kings, Manifest Destiny, Indian Removal, Separate But Equal, Racial Purity.   Do I have royal blood?   If we have ever spoken, you already know the answer to that one, comrade.

My father, a brilliant and prickly character, prone to anger and armed with a great sense of humor, died on April 29, 2005.  He was supremely defended while alive and tended to dictate the scope of any conversation he participated in.  

Since his death he has become much more interactive, far less given to the brow-beating he often resorted to.  I have enjoyed months of honest, back and forth conversation with him since January of 2016 when I began writing the first draft of The Book of Irv, the story of my father’s life and times.  

When he first popped out of his grave on the outskirts of Peekskill to contest something I’d just written, I thought little of it; it appeared to be something easily enough fixed in the rewrite.  It seemed kind of a stagey conceit, having the protagonist pop out of his grave to contest his biographer’s assertion, try to correct the record.  I thought it was a bit idiotic, frankly.  But the skeleton was soon back, intent on participating fully in the telling of his history.  

It was oddly organic, the way our conversation began.  He seemed to insist on it.  Being by nature a collaborative improviser, I went with it.   I soon found myself looking forward to our almost daily chats.  

“Don’t you wish we could have had a few of these when I was alive?” said the skeleton of my father, smiling that odd, sardonic smile they all have.  

Obviously.  And cruel as it would have been to say while you were alive, it was almost inevitable we wouldn’t have a much better relationship until after you died.  I want to underscore who you were, who you are now, as your own skeleton, and who you’re not.  

“Well, clearly, I was always the proponent of people not having the ability to change their inner wiring to any significant extent,” said the skeleton.  

Which was convenient, I realize now, because that belief kept you from taking responsibility for your sometimes brutal actions, things that were hard-wired in and not amenable to your will to control, according to your rigid belief that people can’t fundamentally change.  

“So you dragged me out here to fight?” said the skeleton.  

Nah.  I dragged you out here to show that, while you have evolved to an impressive extent since your deathbed regrets and the absolution I tried to give you as you were dying, you remain, in many ways, and as you always insisted, unchanged.   You get defensive, you attack when feeling cornered, you prickle, and startle, express your fear as bravado, and so forth.  

“So you dragged me out here to mock me?” said the skeleton of my father.  

Well, only to the extent that it’s funny to hear from such an opinionated skeleton.  Most people, when they die, are simply dead, I suspect.   In fact, you yourself would be completely dead now, but for my exertions here as I creep inexorably toward my own extinction.  

“Well, it’s nice of you to indulge me this way, then,” said the skeleton.    

It’s nice to talk with you in light of your improved insight.  The regrets you had while you were dying gave you a perspective you hadn’t consciously acquired in eighty years.  

“Better late than never,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   The insightful Jeanne Safer wrote about the new ongoing dialogue that is possible once a parent, no matter how problematic, dies.   I never thought I’d find myself in a silent room tapping out actual conversations with the skeleton of my father.  

“Well, shit happens, Elie.  It seems to me you’ve gotten a lot more out of this process than you ever did out of sitting week after week with that earnest little unsupervised idiot in the Brief Psychotherapy Program who started off trying to teach you what she’d learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy before secretly switching to a ‘relational’ approach a few weeks in,” said the skeleton.  

She wasn’t an idiot, she was just an unsupervised grad student.  Yeah, look, this process is certainly the best use of my time right now.  Unless I could get an appointment with someone like Jeanne Safer, who I believe is writing full-time and no longer seeing patients, it’s pretty pointless to look for the help of people who just want to be normal and successful.  

“Two things nobody could accuse you of being, Elie,” said the skeleton.    

Hardy-har-har.  You know, you haven’t lost that deft touch you always had, even when foam was forming on the corners of your mouth.  

“Foam never fucking formed on the corners of my mouth,” said the skeleton indignantly, unconsciously wiping at his molars.  “You’re thinking of Eli.  Now there was a guy who could turn purple at will with spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth.”

Eli is another can of worms.  

“Not anymore, he’s been dead ten years longer than me.  The worms have moved on.   He really deserves his own book, you know,” said the skeleton.  

He certainly does.  Now, to sum up:  

The skeleton is a combination of my father in life, a man who remained stubbornly unchanged, and the man who underwent a certain transformation in the last hours of his life, as he was seized by countless regrets.  

“I literally could not make an accurate tally of my regrets,” said the skeleton, dry eyed.

I know, and I take a deep lesson from that.

(Please note that Sekhnet called the previous draft of this “nauseating” and urged me to do it, if I must, with a lot less sickening language and a lot more artfulness.  I’ve removed a couple of stray “f-words” and re-titled the fucking piece)

There was a television show my father used to like.  It aired toward the end of his life, I don’t remember the name of it, but it ran in an age when television writers were allowed to be more true-to-life, on a network that didn’t bleep words like “fuck” and “asshole” and “poop”.  

He loved the snappy dialogue and verbal violence of the show.  It was set in a brutal western town during the days after the Gold Rush, during the genocide of the Native Americans, the mass slaughter of the American Bison, the building of the transcontinental railroad that greased the wheels for the new Barons of the Gilded Age.

In this town, which may have been called Deadwood, brutal characters vied with anyone who wanted a piece of what they had fought to grab.  There was an evil-looking, dead-eyed character, perhaps the mayor of the town, with a head of thick, greasy black hair and a mouth like a maldita inodoro, as the Latinos say.  He’d sit at the bar and snarl at the people around him, all, apparently, fucking shit-assed cocksuckers of one kind or another.  

My father loved this guy, not only for his brutality, but for the over-the-top way he used his quick tongue as a filthy, razor-edged bullwhip.   I don’t think I ever saw more than a moment of the show, which I think only ran one season, but my father would tell me about it, chuckling.  He clearly loved the way these characters cussed at each other.  

My mother complained that she couldn’t stand the cursing.  “He loves it, every other word is ‘fuck’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker,’ I can’t watch it,” said my mother in disgust, going into the other room to read as the characters cursed on the screen and my father smiled from ear to ear.  

I grew up in a household where curses were common, so my mother wasn’t squeamish about words, she just found the language in the show offensively excessive.  

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of cursing in the house, but it was within reason.  For example, I can say with perfect confidence that my little sister and I were never at any time referred to as ‘cocksucker’ or ‘motherfucker’ or anything inappropriate like that.   Rather, curses were sprinkled like salt on a wound, to make it sting and sink in, although not so much to cure anything, except in the sense that a dead animal’s flesh is “cured” for eating.  

If, for example, I was called a snarling rattlesnake if I said something mean to my sister, it was much better to swap in “fucking” for “snarling” and make me a “fucking rattlesnake.”  You see how that works?

It worked the same way for the vicious pricks in this fictitious town.  My father read to me from an interview with the creator of the show.  The guy said he had researched it and the over-the-top language was historically accurate.  It was a way of expressing violence, aggression and domination without resorting to guns.  It was a kind of safety valve, if you like, allowing angry men to blow off steam and express honest hatred of each other without coming to blows and killing each other, as was the code for most physical altercations on the frontier.  

A “filthy cocksucking varmint” could either retort in kind, and spit a plume of filthy tobacco juice after saying it, or reach for his gun.  If he went for the gun, people would die.  If he retorted that his interlocutor was a “slimy, ass-dicking, motherfucking polecat,” well… stand-off, you see.  They’d glare at each other, throw back their shots of cheap frontier whiskey and go on with their business.   My father liked that.  

Would I have preferred if my father had taken a swing at me, literally gone for his gun, pistol-whipped me every time he used a curse word to whip me with?  I’d have to take being called a fucking cobra, if those two things were the only choices.  

I hope this explains why a “senseless war” is often referred to in these pages as a “senseless fucking war” and being weary is sometimes “fucking weary” and like that.  It adds a flavor to the ms. that makes it more true-to-life than omitting a spice that is, admittedly, not to every taste, but which was ubiquitous in my father’s home cooking.  It’s just how the fucking guy was, liberal with the fucking f-word.  

The f-ing “n-word”, in any form, was not in his vocabulary, I must point out again.  That said, if he needed to say the word at all, as in quoting a racist legislator or Supreme Court justice, he would say “nigger” and not swap in the hideous, hypocritical fucking “n-word”.  

He may have often had a mouth like a maldita toilet bowl, but there was nothing immoral about it.

“You know, when you collect these last few posts and add them to the ms. you’ll have close to 700 pages of this ambitious Book of Irv,” said the skeleton of my father.  “Then, I understand, you’ll begin assembling them, organizing it by subject matter into chapters, cutting, pasting, weeding out the redundant passages that you’ve written multiple passes of, like yesterday’s, combining the best of them and so on.  How will you know when you’re done?”

A fair question.   I have to grant you part of what you always said about me:  “you’re not afraid of hard work, you can lay down right next to it and drop into a sound sleep.”  What you described above is hard work, Brownie.  

“Heck of a job, Brownie,” said the skeleton cheerfully.  

How will I know when I’m done?  That’s a $64,000 question.  I guess I’ll come to the part of the process where I’ve always hit the wall– getting the help of amiable and essential insiders I should have been lining up for my entire lifetime.  

Had I been the kind of person you always hated, the guy who figures out what he needs, works a room, drops business cards like Johnny Appleseed, glad-hands, winks, cultivates political alliances, makes sincere-looking expressions as potentially valuable strangers complain, I’d have a useful connection or two.  If I’d been that guy, I’d have people I could tap to read the first draft, and other people to introduce me to agents, and publishers, I’d have a connection.  One good connection is worth ten small strokes of luck.

“Yeah, well, sorry about that.  I always did hate those careerist types and I guess I imparted that strong distaste to you,” said the skeleton.    “I should have urged you to go to Harvard instead of City College, I suppose.”

Piss down the drain.   And the rest of that is down the road anyway.  I need to do all those things to get the ms. into readable shape before I can do any of that searching for how to get it into print, get paid something.    While I’m doing that I will produce discrete chapters, like the one on religion I’m planning to do this week and send to your nephew.  I will hopefully be able to get some short pieces published while I’m working on the next draft of the book.  When I have a couple published I should have a much easier time getting readers for the ms., an agent, etc.  That’s my plan, anyway.  

As for the short answer to your question, I’ll know we’re done here when someone I respect reads the manuscript and tells me she shed a few tears, had a couple of laughs and it made her think about her own life, imagine the ordeals her father must have endured.  I suppose that and a $64,000 check, payment in full for the proverbial question.  

“Well, strength to your arm, then, and best of luck,” said the skeleton.  

Gracias, papa.

The art of persuasion is, mainly, the art of properly framing the issue.  The frame you set the story in makes the story look the way it does.   

“Bingo,” said the skeleton of my father.  

“And by the way, my apologies for giving you the silent treatment the other day when you were up at our grave.   As much as I enjoy these chats, you know, I couldn’t resist giving you the bony cold shoulder on that wet, frigid day as your cousin planted his mother’s ashes in the grave my brother paid so many thousands of dollars for over the course of more than fifty years.

“I know you weren’t really expecting a cheerful greeting, Elie, but still, I wish I could have given you a sign, like knocking the rocks off the top of my gravestone when you put an arm around it for that photo Sekhnet told you not to smile for.  It’s all poignant shit, but beside the point, and ready to be snipped away and left on the cutting room floor.  At any rate, I didn’t mean to cut you off, geh ‘head.”  

The person who frames the conversation generally controls the conversation.  You had a particular genius for framing and constantly reframing conversations, on the fly, to suit the brow-beating you were intent on delivering.  

“Nice of you to say so,” said the skeleton, “if only I could have used my powers for good instead of evil…  

“Look, I had to do that to you and your sister, you understand.  You posed a constant, existential threat to me, the threat of revealing that I was actually a monster, even with my excellent and laudable intentions, a destroyer who deeply knew the value of nurturing and just couldn’t fucking do it.  So it was essential for me to always frame what we were talking about so I had the advantage, the moral high-ground from which to strafe you guys.  I’m not proud of that, Elie, but it’s an important facet of my personality and tactics you do well to point out.”  

Heh, yes, I know that.  After all, I am framing your story now, even as we speak.   Think about it, if only you knew at thirty-five what you first figured out as you were dying, what you know so well now that you’ve had almost twelve years in your grave to meditate on.  

“As if a pile of dry bones can fucking meditate…” said the skeleton wistfully.

Yes, of course, I suppose this whole conversation is an exercise in poetic license.  But, now, an example of the framing I was talking about.   It took me forty years, and law school, I suppose, to acquire the skill to consistently fight past your framing, but in the end, framing is a fairly crude, almost mechanical technique, even if you were infernally fast on your feet in shifting the frame whenever necessary.  That adroitness, dad, was a gift.  

“Well, in the end, you were able to beat me at my own game,” said the skeleton.  

But it took more than forty years of senseless fucking war.  Once I “won”, I gained nothing but the certainty of how tragic your desperation to win had always been.  

“Well, as Reagan said to Carter over and over, ‘there you go, again…’.  I know the example you’re going to bring up.”  

It’s a beauty, in its crudeness and simplicity.  Yom Kippur, around twenty-five years ago now.  Met you at Hillcrest after services, at the end of the fast.  The hypocrisy of the whole ritual of fake atonement chafed me like a wet, crusty diaper every step we took toward the house.  

“A truly disgusting image,” said the skeleton.  

For a truly disgusting thing.  Here is the holiest day of a religion whose moral teachings you tried to instill in my sister and me, The Day of Atonement, and there is no hint of remorse for anything you’ve ever done, not a thought of atonement.  You just fasted, and stood, and sat, and stood, and read responsively in a well-dressed crowd of the very people of whom Jesus reputedly said “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”  

These good people were a cross-section of climbing middle class types, living a few blocks from people who’d managed to acquire some measure of real wealth, pretending, once a year, to be pious, God-fearing Jews.  They took a day off from their carping, grasping secular lives to mortify themselves, whether they needed it or not, not before those they had wounded but in front of a judgmental God who, if He even heard their prayers, is senile at best.  

I used to think God went mad with grief over centuries of heart-break, watching what humans did to each other, to the world He created.  If He had been all-knowing and all-powerful and full of mercy at one time, He’d been broken by the viciousness of the worst of his Creation.   I’m no longer committed to that youthful metaphor.  God is the fantasy crutch religious fanatics use to beat nonbelievers to death with.  “God is a concept, by which we measure our pain”– John Lennon.

“Yeah, we get it, on with it, MacDuff,” said the skeleton.

On Yom Kippur we’re expected to make amends, go to people we’ve hurt and tell them we’re aware that we hurt them, and that we regret it, and to ask their forgiveness and promise to do a better job being decent in the coming years.   Instead, for the vast majority of modern Jews, Yom Kippur is a long, somber synagogue service and quick stepping it home after a day of fasting and praying, bad-breathed and longing for a drink of juice, some food, caffeine.  

So we are walking along Union Turnpike, God has already sealed each of our fates for the coming year, and snarling silently between us, as always, this senseless enmity.  

“Seenas Cheenam, my mother, may she rest in peace, always called it when my brother and I went at each other.  ‘Groundless Hatred’ I suppose is the translation from the original Hebrew, which she pronounced in Yiddish.  She was a deeply religious woman with no clue, and I, in turn, in spite of my great understanding, and every reason to know better, had no fucking clue,” said the skeleton.  

So we walk along Union Turnpike in the gathering darkness, get to 190th, cross over, and finally I can hold it in no longer.  I say to you “I am willing to listen to your fatherly advice, but if you can’t filter out the hostility, I am not willing to continue this charade.  You use s0-called fatherly advice as a delivery system for your rage and I’m not having that any more.”  

You say you have no idea what I’m talking about.  I quote your recent statement, when grudgingly agreeing to cut me a check for a final course towards my teaching certificate, after my unemployment ran out, toward the end of my savings.  

“Well, I’ll give you the $169, not that I feel obliged to, and I don’t like the way you asked me, but you have to admit it’s pretty pathetic for a thirty-six year-old man to have to beg his father to pay for his course.   You’re unemployed for a very good reason, you have no respect for authority and you feel you’re too good to work.  You’ve always had that, you know, a genius shouldn’t have to work.  I know your friends are kiss-asses you’ve surrounded yourself with to tell you what you want to hear, that you are special, and sensitive, and talented and so forth.  But I’m your father, and I’m always going to tell you the truth– the reason you can’t hold a job is the same reason you’ve never had a girlfriend for very long and don’t have one now — you’re lazy and selfish and you think the world owes you a living.”  

My father’s face shows no sign of yielding.  I’ve quoted him accurately, everything he said is true, what is the fucking problem? We are in the house now, my mother greets us and asks if we’re hungry.  The food smells great, we are hungry.  

My father says “I really have no idea what you want from me.”  We sit across from each other in the living room as my mother goes back into the kitchen.  

“I want you to think before you give me your advice.  I want you to consider what will help me and what is just venting anger at me.  I want you to make an effort to filter out the anger and tell me the thing you believe I need to know.  I’m willing to listen, I’m not willing to be abused.”  

“Well, this is pretty abstract, I mean, I really have no idea what the hell you’re talking about…” he says, eyes shifting as they always did at such times.  

“OK, let me try to make it more concrete.  When you paid for that course at Lehman last month you attached the condition that I accept your opinion of me: pathetic, surrounded by spineless, ass-kissing friends who flatter me, unable to keep a job, or a girlfriend, for the very real reason that I am some kind of lazy, self-centered asshole.”

As far as my father can see, I’d stated basic, indisputable facts pretty succinctly.  He waits, dukes up, wary, ready to counter my next move.  

“So, let us assume, for the sake of this discussion, that all of that is true.  I won’t dispute any of it.  But what proportion of my total being is encompassed in that unflattering description?  Maybe 25%? I mean, aren’t we leaving out things like my basically generous disposition, sense of humor, self-deprecation, general acceptance of people, willingness to listen, my intelligence, integrity, kindness to animals, a lot of other things? You’re reducing me to the sum of my faults and expecting me to accept that picture as the totality of who I am.  I’m not having that anymore.”  

“You know, I really don’t get what you expect me to do about any of that,” says my father, with every appearance of deep conviction.  

“Let me try this again.  I am willing to listen to your wisdom about life, but only if you’re not using the conversation to force the poison pill on me that condemns me as a failed human being.  I am more than the sum of my weaknesses, everybody is.  I agreed for the sake of argument that I’m all those negative things you laid out– but there is an argument to made for each one being less than 100% true.  For example, I am one of the vast majority of teachers, something like 80%, that the system loses to attrition in the first few years.  Most teachers quit the fucking system if they find any remotely better way to make a living.  It’s not necessarily a referendum on my character that I am not currently teaching in New York City Public Schools.”  

“Yeah,” says my father, jumping on this chance to reframe what we’re talking about, “but not every teacher gets fired from every single school he ever worked at.  You’ve been, literally fired from every job you ever had, inside and outside of teaching, do you realize that?  What does that say about you?”  

“It says that I’m less able than most people to accept being treated like an asshole by a boss who, everybody else knows, has the prerogative to fire you if you get the last word,” I say.  

“Oh, so now it’s a virtue that you can’t take a normal amount of shit like everyone else who has to eat a certain amount of shit to make a living,” says my father.  

“No,” I say, “I agree it’s a disability.  I don’t say it’s a virtue, it’s something I need to work on.  But we are getting far from what I need you to understand.”  

“You’re not explaining it very well, you know, you just want the right to be outraged and attack me for my so-called abuse when all I’ve ever wanted is what’s best for you,” says my father, playing another favorite card from the bottom of his deck.  

“Well, then let me explain it again.  I’m willing to hear your advice, and appreciate any insight you have to offer, but I’m not willing to be reduced to the sum of my faults.  If you can’t manage to separate those two things, I’m not continuing this false and destructive relationship with you.  We’re done, if you can’t manage to lose the constant hostility you disguise as fatherly advice,” I say.  

At this point he’s had enough.  “Well, what we should really be talking about is your titanic fucking anger.  You get into a self-righteous rage and just fucking explode, that’s what we should be talking about, your fucking need to be right and rage whenever you feel like it.”  

“Do I appear to be enraged right now?” I ask with exaggerated quietness.  He clamps his jaw.  

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks.  

“Would you say you’re a man of more than average intelligence?” I say.  

“I suppose so, what does that have to do with anything?” he says.

“Well, I’ve had to explain the same relatively straightforward thing to you now several different ways and you still act like you don’t understand,” I say.    

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks, clearly not thinking things through.  

“Well, don’t you think it might be frustrating to have to explain the same relatively simple idea now three or four different ways, and have a father of above-average intelligence keep acting like he has no idea what you’re talking about?”  I say.  

“What’s your point?” he says pointedly.  

“Do I look enraged?  Am I raising my voice or acting angry?  So my temper, however fucking terrible it might sometimes be, is not the issue here.   The issue is that another Yom Kippur has now passed with the same result– zilch.  I’m not even asking for an apology from you.   I’m telling you what I’m prepared to accept from you going forward and what I’m not prepared to accept.”

He makes a grudging acknowledgement that he gets what I’m saying, says he’ll try to do better, we go in and break the fast.

He’s as good as his word, for the next ten years or so he manages to filter out most of that rage.  When I point out in his Florida den years later that even he’s changed, by way of showing the possibility that humans can actually change, he laughs with Dick Cheney-like mirth.  

“No, I didn’t,” he said, “I pretended to change, just like you asked, on a purely superficial level.”  

“Well, that made a big positive difference in our relationship,” I pointed out.  

“Not really,” he said, “because below the surface act, which you demanded I perform, I never felt any differently about you.  If I ever told you how I really feel it would do such irreparable harm that we could never have any kind of relationship.”  

After a moment I told him he’d won, that we’d do it his way, never talk about anything deeper than a baseball game, health or politics. Paid a hell of a price to win, I think.  

“Yop,” said the skeleton, “and I kept thinking about my willingness to pay that insane price as I was dying, hoping you’d be as gentle as you wound up being to a father who’d treated you like that.”  

All we can do is hope for the best, dad.