Dad
When I was an elementary schooler my father would read me such bedtime stories as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” – stories well above my recommended reading level, in vocabulary and in their general vibes. He passed on to me an early love of literature and also a fascination with the darker elements of human nature.
He also taught me to love the theater. We’d go to plays frequently, at home in Berkeley and on- and off-Broadway when we took family trips to New York. He preferred serious straight plays to musicals – a preference that could cause some tension when trying to decide on a play between him and my sister – though I recall he acceded to see Spring Awakening and perhaps even enjoyed it. When I was in high school he encouraged my burgeoning interest in playwriting, revealing that he himself had also written some plays in his youth.
Eventually, in adulthood, he taught me to love high-quality alcohol, though I never developed the palate he had for fine wines, despite numerous tasting trips through Napa Valley and along the Sonoma Coast. Instead I went down the road of whiskeys, gins, and cocktails. When I visited home, we’d often go out in the evening to a wine bar, taste a number of different wines while schmoozing with the bartenders and other patrons, and then return home where, to finish off the evening, he’d ask me to mix him a nightcap of my choosing. I might go for a classic favorite, like a boulevardier, but more often I’d mix something improvisationally from his prodigious, but eclectic, collection of liquors and mixers.
Another thing he passed on to my sister and me was a strong moral and political compass with the ability to hold nuance and complexity. I remember one occasion, when I was ten or so, he cautioned me against bringing my fancy digital camera to a summer camp. When I tried to understand why I couldn’t bring it there, but I could bring it elsewhere, I said, “You’re worried that it might get stolen there because people are poor?” I asked the question out of innocence, trying to genuinely logic out his reasons, not accuse him, but I could see he had taken it personally and it had triggered a referendum in his mind. After a long pause, considering, he said to me: “Rich people can be thieves too, sometimes more than poor people, but usually in different ways.”
In the days following 9/11, when much of the country was swept up into a traumatized nationalistic fervor and our politicians were already angling for a retributive war, he was educating me with a skeptical perspective, though I was only in middle school. He expressed concern about using the phrase, Never Forget. “That’s what they said about Pearl Harbor,” he said to me, meaning that Never Forget had been a contributing factor to the internment of Japanese-Americans and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The politics of the decades that followed 9/11 proved him prescient.
And as a writer himself and a journalism teacher, he taught me to value the importance of journalism, a thread that has trailed my entire life so far, from my service to my own high school’s newspaper, to my current work at a nonprofit that protects journalists and whistleblowers.
But he didn’t just shape my – and my sister’s – interests, he was also good at responding to them. When I got into photography, he would daydream about us making a coffee table book together, scenes of people hanging out in Golden Gate Park. When I had a brief but intense interest in graphic novel writing in college, he went out and bought graphic novels that fell at the intersection of our interests. Browsing his shelf this morning, I found an interesting one – an illustrated history of Students for a Democratic Society, written by Harvey Pekar. He was engaged and interested in every job I had and my office’s fundraising team would regularly let me know they’d received a donation from my dad or exchanged emails on their latest campaign or event.
My whole life my dad talked to me about his dreams: The house he and my mother bought when my sister and I were 3 and 5 was a fixer-upper. He daydreamed constantly about fixing up. He planned and replanned a renovation that never came: knock out a wall here, put in a door there, add a washbasin here, replace that floor. He did recently replace the light fixtures after long and careful deliberation as to the perfect fixtures for his 1915 craftsman home and many many visits to the local lighting store on Solano Ave. He fantasized about renting an apartment in NYC so he could live a true bicoastal life, alternating seasons on both coasts. All my life he had dreams of projects, books he’d write, photographs he’d take, the trip we’d take to the old family shtetl of Lapirovschina in Russia. On my less charitable days, I thought of him as a Willy Loman-esque character – Death of a Salesman, of course, being one of many plays that he introduced me to – full of dreams that he never accomplished.
That perception was my fault, not his. My dad wasn’t Willy Loman and he didn’t lack accomplishments. When he was diagnosed with his most recent cancer, a sarcoma induced by 53 grays of radiation he had been dosed with decades prior during his first bout with cancer, he said to me, “Well, it gave me 43 years.” On Facebook, to his friends, he wrote,
I remain grateful for the 43 years I have enjoyed and all of the things that filled them. These include having and raising two children, traveling and enjoying the company of friends, and doing what I consider to be meaningful work.
Indeed, he lived a full life in just the decades between cancer diagnoses, to say nothing of his adventures in the decades before. He had and raised two children. He taught generations of high school students, touching hundreds of lives. When they heard about his diagnosis, many wrote to me or him to express their lifelong gratitude. One wrote:
I’m the youngest of three and you taught all of us. […] We’ve taken wildly different paths in life, and when I sat down to write this letter, I had a revelation: whenever my family is together and the topic of high school teachers comes up, one teacher always finds his way into the conversation – you. […] Looking back, I think it’s because the way you ran your classroom felt different. You spoke to students like we mattered – like we were already adults, not just kids killing time until graduation. There was no yelling or threats in your classroom. You pushed us to think, and often to get out of our comfort zones, but in a way that still felt safe.
He also maintained close family ties, not only staying close with his sister, mother, and two cousins, but also establishing new family connections online with distant branches of the family tree he discovered in Russia. He wrote essays, some of which were published in local papers and some that were published only on Facebook, but read and engaged with by his devoted community there.
One realization I came to, which is more important even than any accomplishments, was that my dad liked his life the way it was. In his last year of life, the family offered to help him finally get that apartment on the East Coast, whether New York or Boston. He considered it briefly, but ultimately refused. He enjoyed his home in Berkeley, fixer-upper though his house was. He liked going to Peet’s for coffee in the mornings, sitting on his porch, chatting with the neighbors, substitute teaching at Kennedy High School long after retirement. He liked tending his menagerie of plants, some of them improbably poisonous. He liked going to political club meetings, going out to dinner, tasting wines, walking in local parks, sitting in on classes at Cal, seeing plays at the Berkeley Rep, and so on. He didn’t want anything different. He liked his daydreams, but he loved the life he was living.
I love you, dad. I’ll miss you forever.
