David Berman meant a lot to me. Means a lot to me. "Advice to the Graduate" hit me right around when I graduated college, and its advice hums in my veins at regular intervals: always use the old sense of the word; the things that you do will always make your mother cry; don't believe in people who say it's all been done, they have time to talk because their race is run. Not that long ago I got snagged on that last bit, convinced that my race was one that …
Lots of fancy-striking (letters from my father, part 5)
It's my dad's yahrtzeit today. I don't know if that means it started last night or it's starting now, at 8:30 p.m. as the late summer day starts to stretch out its last. The app I have on my phone that tells me when it's the third day of the Jewish month of Tamuz doesn't tell me if it's erev or not. And I didn't buy a candle, anyway. They're getting harder to come by, it seems, so I buy three at a time. But now that Harv is gone, too, I go through them …
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“Show me a man who smiles all the time and he should be in an asylum” (letters from my father, part 4)
This letter was a little hard for me to transcribe. It's from 2011, when my dad was 79, still living on his own in his condo. His health would start failing soon after, and by the time we went to South Florida a year later for his 80th birthday, I believe he had moved up to Jacksonville to live with my brother. A year after that he was diagnosed with the cancer that he would beat back twice before it killed him in 2015. That said, this letter is funny …