It took twenty-five years after her death for me to be able to write about Liz Brucker, my best friend. I have not written anything as intimate in the last eighteen months. It is very difficult for me to write about the people I love. Exceptional writing about a person conjures up more than a tale or an image but a panoply of emotions. I think of what John Berger observed about Modigliani, that the artist’s dark outlines of the women he painted were his way of showing the opposite, the infinite way that love blurs and expands their corporeal boundaries, “both the flesh and the soul.”
How can I write about my own father? How does anyone write about a beloved parent? At least I do not feel compelled to write a chronicle of his life and accomplishments. Rabbi Bruce Elder did this skillfully and beautifully in a eulogy at last year’s funeral which incorporated his own and family members’ facts and vignettes.
I challenged myself to try. Several months ago, the facilitator of the grief group in which I participated asked each of us to make a short presentation about our loved one.
I surrounded myself with all my dad’s cards, letters, emails, photos and published opera blogs, looking for a golden nugget – something in which my father revealed his true self. That true self is only partially revealed in his emphatic opinions about politics and religion, his detailed descriptions of baseball games and opera plots, and family histories. If I know one thing about my father, it’s the thing I know about myself: he hides behind the pronouncements.
My friend Peter Schultz unwittingly gave me a path forward. I had written to him in February about my fresh grief over the death of my friend Janet Smith. She was a lot like Liz, my age, the daughter of working class parents, and also a victim of an aggressive form of cancer. But in contrast to Liz, she had a chance to have a full career (what a difference 26 years makes) and to plant her flag as a professor, community and labor activist. In writing to Peter, I couldn’t help comparing myself to Janet and wondering about my own legacy. Peter replied that I needn’t worry on that score, and went on to point out that it’s not the big accomplishments that are necessarily the most meaningful.
It’s the small acts of selflessness and kindness that are remembered and cherished the most. You may have forgotten the act because it was a small thing, but the person who was the beneficiary of the kindness remembers it forever. It goes back to your idea of community. The feeling of connection and support is built from these small insignificant acts. I remember the first piece of pizza I ever bought in my life. I was a kid and the cost was 15 cents. I slid a nickel and a dime over the counter and the guy behind the counter slid the nickel back to me. He said “a small price for a small kid.” I’ve never forgotten that act of kindness and I still love to eat pizza!
I felt my heart in my throat: “It’s the small acts of selflessness and kindness that are remembered and cherished the most.”
And so I took a fresh look at all the cards, letters, emails, photos and opera blogs by my dad that initially overwhelmed me and mined them for one small act.
I came to see that this was how my father himself conveyed his true feelings about others. Indeed, Schechter family stories became legends by their constant retelling, much in the way rutted prairie paths resulted from years of covered wagons traveling the same west-bound routes.
His way of remembering other family members was to tell an anecdote about them, something that encapsulated who they were.
About his own mother, this email on what would have been her birthday on August 6, 2005, is as complete and compact as a teardrop. It says something about my father too.
“Fillim”
Dear Loved Ones,
This morning I awoke from a dream with the word “fillim” in my head.
That was the word my Mom would use in lieu of “film.”
August 5th was the day we would celebrate her birthday. What lingers in my mind is her delight in her memories of her grandfather, Moses Eisenberg, a man so well loved and respected that two of his great grandchildren were named after him. Even Pop, who held Mom’s family in no great esteem, thought highly of Rabbi Eisenberg. (There is a Rembrandt-like photo of Moses Eisenberg wearing a pillbox-like yarmulke and looking upon the world with soulful eyes – a picture that is uncannily emulated in Malvin Schechter’s Bar Mitzvah photo. Pop took both pictures and lovingly sepia-toned printed them.)
The day Mom and I ventured out to Baron Hirsch Cemetery (on Staten Island) to find Grandpa Moses’ grave is one I shall never forget.
The Cemetery had been vandalized; headstones knocked down and broken. Amid the heavily weeded area (where only Hebrew was etched in the stones), I found, under foliage and weeds, Moses Eisenberg’s stone. Suddenly my mother, who rarely beamed with happiness, was elated.
We went to the office to notify the operator of the Cemetery. Mom wanted the stone repaired and set in place and agreed to have perpetual care provided for the grave.
Afterwards we went to a Howard Johnson’s diner to wash our hands, have coffee and talk. Suddenly Mom was remembering being embraced by her grandfather whom she greatly loved.
Mom did not, I fear, have such a happy life. To hear childhood memories of happier times was a revelation.
Today, I regret I had no camera that day nor “fillim” to record the events.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
Love,
David
A man who was now a grandfather reflected on the love his mother had for her own grandfather.
My father used to tell me never to expect anything back from the person for whom you did a good deed. Gratitude is always returned in karmic fashion from others, even if it takes years. But his mother’s beaming was his thank-you gift that very day.
He riffed off this story, after I responded to him, by fanning out all the generations of our family in the present moment, as if they were his always evenly spaced hand of rummy cards. In comments on how “easy it is to forget that our parents once were children,” he conjured, among others, my mother, my daughter Julia (his Jay-fish), his father, my maternal grandmother – a whole collection of relations in one swoop.
Imagine your mother, a 3-year-old, standing on a broad dining table, singing to the enraptured farmhands in Normandie.
She had a good deal of Julia’s charm and always was in the center of the Famille Blottière’s celebrations: weddings, confirmations.
Ah, but the Jay-fish doesn’t merely attract attention; she demands it. As when she pushes the newspaper behind which her Daddy’s face is buried. Or when she pounds me in the chest: “Wake up, Grandpa!”
Do you remember how much your grandparents loved you? “Gailène” is how Mamie referred to you. My mother was always eager to see you. Pop treated you and your brother as though you were twins.
It is the small acts of kindness that one remembers most and the beneficiaries remember them forever.
I take my cue from my father. I tell a small story.
In the midst of the clutter of all forms of correspondence and publications, I pull out an email he wrote in 2003 about how Julia inadvertently led him to the TV show, Family Matters, featuring “a lovable nerd, Steve Urkel” and his family in Chicago: “The show features a wonderful Grandma and a hapless, overweight father.” Emphasis on the wonderful Grandma. It always amused my dad when my children would talk about visiting “Grandma’s house.” He’d laugh and say he was just a tenant there. “I think Family Matters conveys a gentle message: people have to be themselves and not imitate others simply to gain popularity.”
He wrote me again about the show a month later and there I found that golden nugget of revealed feeling:
I can only assume that the attachment contained his transcribed lyrics to the song, but I’ve long since shed that email address and probably never did download the file.
But nearly two decades later, I seek out the opening credits to Family Matters. “Kind of gets me” is an understatement. Listening and reading and remembering, I am moved too.
As Days Go By (Lyrics)
It’s a rare condition this day and age
to read any good news on the newspaper page
Love and tradition of the grand design
some people say it’s even harder to find
Well then there must be some magic clue inside these gentle walls
Cause all I see is a tower of dreams
real love burstin’ out of every seam
As days go by
we’re gonna fill our house with happiness.
The moon may cry
we’re gonna smother the blues with tenderness.
When days go by
there’s room for you
room for me
for gentle hearts an opportunity
As days go by
it’s the bigger love of the family
Whether the walls are “tearful” as he heard it sung, or “gentle” as it is written, what matters is the love within. That is what my father said all along, all my life. I brushed it off as sentimentality; I armored myself against his repetition of an embarrassing baby story.
Now I understand and feel the magic inside my father’s gentle walls.
There is another tune used as a theme to a TV series that my father described as “irresistible.” It is Edvard Grieg’s “The Last Spring.” Is it any wonder that the show should have also been about a tight-knit ethnic family, in this case, I Remember Mama. I find “The Last Spring” that much more poignant when I read that Grieg recast his original lyric into an “elegiac melody” for strings without words as he sensed his life come to a close.
For years, I thought that if there were a memorial for my father, I would play The Last Spring during a silent mediation.
When I called my father, he always picked up the phone asking, “What can I do for you?” In his last years, when there was little he actually could “do,” I would stifle tears.
But he himself taught me that it’s not what you do that gives you meaning but who you are. The small act is cherished. But the person behind it, even more.
