Yahrzeit

So yesterday, July 14th was my friend Mike's 50th birthday, Bastille Day, and the 39th anniversary of my father's death.

I celebrated the first event the evening before, with some drinks at Trulucks, and Mike and I talked about the summer 25 years before when we went to Tampa to do battle with the Florida Bar Exam. We won. I don't really give Le Rat's Ass about the French (though I do dig Paris and want to return), and the third event was most poignant to me.

I visited ancient Mom. I asked her if she knew what the day meant. She looked at me blankly, and said "Is it your birthday already?" No, I told her, it was the anniversary of Dad's death. "Oh," she said, "I only remember happy dates, like our wedding aniversary." I guess that's a major reason she's lived past 91.

On the way back to the Turnpike, I passed the former Oriole Shopping Plaza where he died in my arms, in a barber's chair. I wonder whatever became of that poor young haircutter. She was about my age, and sort of punk looking (it was 1982). I wondered if she quit the business after the customer died while she was cutting his hair and chatting happily. Maybe she let the pink in her own hair grow out, and attended medical school.

Time truly does soften all blows. For the first year after Dad died, I sort of slept walked through my life. I later learned this was a psychological phenom called dissociative behavior. I remember the strange sense I had that I was sort of watching my life happen from an outside vantage point.

I still think of my father daily. I wonder what his take would be on the world "a black president? Really?" On his children, on his grandkids, on his wife.

I headed back home, as Wifey was spending the night at her friend's on Miami Beach, helping her recover from a secret surgery (facelift). I let the dogs out. My father loved dogs. He used to spend hours on a weekend getting our mutt Missy to howl along to his singing --it delighted him.

And then I went to the water. My Dad was cremated, and his ashes spread in the ocean off Pompano Beach. He wanted this done for two reasons. First, he ABHORED the funeral industry --he felt they preyed upon the vulnerable, and second, he wanted to be remembered whenever any of us was at the beach, instead of having to make a sad trip to a cemetary.

I drove to Matheson Hammock. As if it was scripted, there was an enormous, gorgeous, almost surreal full moon to the East. The lights of Downtown were coming up to the North. It was calm.

I told my father how much I still missed him. I told him about his grandkids. 3 were born while he was alive, the last three came along later (including my Ds).

I apologized for failing to light candles in synagogue, as I did for several years when I became friends with a rabbi. I told him I was his son, and he always taught me that organized religion was a load of horse shit, and I'm quickly coming around to the same conclusion, but if I was wrong, and he was spending eternity getting poked in the tuches by a devil with a pitchfork, well, my eternal fate would be the same...

I told him about the love I found in my life, and how joyful it was.

Isaac Singer wrote that as he grew older, he believed more in ghosts. I'm getting that more and more. When I fetch the newspaper in the pre dawn gloaming, sometimes I think I see things.

I drove home to my house, wondering. Did my father's premature death force me to become a man faster than I otherwise would have? Clearly. I didn't see it as much of a choice, as my mother, Edith Bunker as we called her, never paid a bill in her life, or balanced a check book.

Still, I miss him dearly, and every day. Unlike my mother, I remember even the unpleasant days. Sometimes I remember them more clearly than the happy ones.