Elliptical time, in a certain place, sent currents of
Connection but I’ve forgotten where. Maybe that is
Why my body, like a metal detector over a weak charge
Can be heard crying, “Here, here,” and “There, there.”
Elliptical time, in a certain place, fits perfectly
Into a space I’ve forgotten where. Like a button
From an old familiar wool coat, a memory detector
Tucked away, maybe in an old cigar box, remembered.
–August 1994
===
I’m always remembering you, Pop, always talking to you. Neither dead nor alive you’re reified, from the Latin res, made more real than that old codger abstraction dead. Tonight, on your 41st yahrzeit (I always think of Tom Seaver when I think of 41 but you surely would be quick to remind me that Eddie Mathews wore 41 for the Milwaukee Braves and you had the ticket stub from the 1957 World Series to prove it! And I’d remind you that the ticket stub was actually Mom’s, which she saved and gave to me but that’s another story…)
And when we can talk, we’re laughing, mostly, and these are among the many objects of your hilarious sarcasm, scorn and dismay: the “jamoke” who signaled left but exited right on the “expressway;” how you thought “Traveler’s Choice” coffee was better than Sanka even after we told you it was actually called “Taster’s Choice;” how, after a round of golf, you recounted holding your putter in your hand on the back nine like “a gorilla” and blew par yet again; how you said to the blabbermouth sitting behind us in the movie theater who was droning on about the import of the movie’s place in film history, “if I wanted a commentary I would have asked for one so SHUT UP!”
Even your more sublime forms of advice for living in a complicated world were shaded with biting irony: “It’s important to have a realistic understanding that there are a lot of shitty people in the world, son, but you don’t want to think about it too much – otherwise you’ll become a sick, morose character.”
This is what you said to me when I came to you a year after not making varsity basketball. I had become a reader and was wrestling with Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Hesse, Vonnegut, Salinger, Roth. I was “thinking deep thoughts” and increasingly convinced that the “fate of the earth” (Jonathan Schell) was to be realized in a nuclear holocaust. You stared me down when I told you I didn’t want to register for the draft as a qualifying condition for student loans and told me that it was my obligation to serve my country, period: “And if that asshole Reagan starts a war, we need guys like you in the Army to keep people sane.”
In cooler moments it was you who told me that Elvis Costello reminded you of Cole Porter; that you don’t have to listen too hard to notice a difference between Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and that both were jazz vocal perfection; and that when all else fails, laugh.
For refined Jewish humor there was Groucho mocking jingoistic militarism in Duck Soup and Mel Brooks taking the piss out of racism with Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles. You showed me how Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder all had their own subtle ways of drawing forth into conversational light the subject of an interview; and you could elucidate painterly layers of interpretation in shows like Carol Burnett, All in the Family and MASH. Deeper truths were there to see if you were smart enough to notice and I eventually came to understand that in the still unpublished pedagogic parental manual that bears your name, your motto was, “Be Clever.”
To say that you didn’t “suffer fools gladly” is a wild swing and a miss. You were a man of extremes which in the end was your undoing. It’s a damn pity, Pop, that you could never really see that you were best when you could slow down enough to allow yourself to appreciate with laughter and a roll of the eyes man’s foolishness. But at your worst, when the world was just too much for you, all you could do was “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
It’s why you destroyed your marriage; lost your job; and in a too fleeting incandescent moment, lost your life.
But like a child excavator who stumbles across the detrital remains of the meteor shower of your life, Pop, I have tried to live toward the light with darkness riding shotgun. Call it hope with a very strong double shot of cynicism. I am a man of faith, of prayer, of learning and (never enough) good deeds. And when darkness overwhelms me, as it does for so many of us, so much these days, there you are, in the light, very much alive, calling out to me as you did from the stands at my baseball or basketball games – “Drive, son, drive!”
It’s how I hear you remind me to live.
===
Light the candle, son.
And not just one.
Strike the match!
Light them all!
It is cold out here, and very dark.
Light for me. For your mother. For my mother, my father.
They were just as much yours as mine.
Remember the kugel hot from the oven
The sour one, from Minsk
Not the German one, with cinnamon and raisins.
Who eats that?
Remember sneaking Grandpa’s diabetic candy
From the porcelain dish
Near the ashtray with smoldering Pall Malls
While you watched us play bridge on snow Saturday nights
As the fire burned.
Grandma’s yahrzeit is always before yours, Pop.
And at Passover Yizkor this year, Grandma’s candle won the race.
Yours always burns fast, finishing first.
You are maddeningly consistent, Pop.
I think I should cook more for my children.
I need to do a better job taking care of those I love.
It’s cold out here.
So light another candle, Andrew.
Warm your father, like a son.
–October 2019
This is profoundly beautiful, in so many light and dark ways. Thank you, Andy.
This is deeply beautiful and resonant and makes me think hard about my own challenging, brilliant father and how I handle his yahrtzeit