Even my body, my poor klutzy body, the body that hid from gym class, the body that ducks baseballs, the body that is wobbly and injured and aging, the body that loves coffee and cheesecake and a grilled sausage on a bun – While my brain lunges and snaps for elusive rationale, My body, my …
Category: Aging & Dying
Unveiling
Back from my dad’s “unveiling” in Toronto – that’s a Jewish thing, a year after someone’s death, the unveiling of their gravestone. Family stuff, you know – surreal and wacky and painful and aggravating as shit — are everyone’s relatives as fucked up and crazy as mine?! (rhetorical question). Family stuff. Death is all around …
Kaddish for my dad
My dad was a mischievious sprite. He lived for the little thrills. He loved orange popsicles and sliding on ice patches. He would fly his kite to the end of a very long string and then tie the string to the arm of the adirondack chair and just sit back and gaze into the near-empty …
Get rid of that shit
I just spent the day on a team mercy mission, mucking out a four-bedroom bungalow full of some poor guy’s shit. Good god…thirty years of clothes and products and papers and porn mags and obsolete electronic equipment, plates, pots crockpots and twist ties and on and on and on…three of everything. Apparently the house was …
The white-belt-and-shoes gene
My dad carried the white-belt-and-shoes gene: the stamp of the salesman. He passed it on to my brother and me. He started out in the ’60s selling encyclopedias — for real! He was good at it so they sent him to Australia to open a sales office in Sydney. He took my mother and two …