Eulogy

DAD, August 28, 1925 – December 9, 2002

Dad was unique.

Every person is unique of course. But Dad was a little uniquer than most.

Dad was a nonconformist - an independent thinker. He had this HUGE gusto for life. And boy oh boy did he know how to have fun!

Dad loved music. My childhood memories are filled with song.

I remember Melany sliding around up on Dad’s shoulders, and Mom and me following around behind them, all of us marching round and round the pink bedroom in our pajamas. Mom playing trumpet with her hand - like this - singing “We Belong To The Mu-tu-a-a-a-a-l Admiration Society, My Baby And Me…..”

We’d go on camping trips, always singing in the car - rounds, harmonies, folksongs. Dad, Melany, and I could do a mean "Hoist Up The Sloop John B" in three-part harmony.

We had a pink rambler station wagon. She had a name: “Rose.” Dad would throw some army blankets - our only camping equipment - in the back of Rose, and take us driving out into the country. Once we sneaked Rose into someone’s private woods with what must have been a very extraordinarily cheap piece of steak Dad had bought; we dug a hole in the dirt, lit a teensy weensy fire with some sticks, and then sat there for hours into the night staring at our wee little fire and our raw steak, going weak with hunger, and singing and singing. Dad told us this particular type of steak is called "Bubblegum Steak" because you have to gnaw on a piece for hours to get it soft enough to swallow it.

Everyone in this room knows that Dad loved to dance! And he was a good lead! He would get all dolled up in his elegant suits - which cost a full $1.50 - which Mom would have found for him at the thrift store – because Dad and Mom love a great bargain – and he would look like a turn-of-the-century dapper dandy dancing chap. And his big straw hats! Dad loved hats.

And Dad loved words. Stories, wit, quotations, jokes - especially Jewish jokes. And poetry. He loved poetry. This poem will always remind me of Dad:

THERE'S a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again
In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

Dad loved a story, and could make one up without any effort. Dad and I went to see a lot of movies together, and he loved the movies that told a great story. I love character, but Dad has always loved a good plot. Once we were sitting in the theater waiting for the lights to go down, and I asked him HOW he managed to just come up with these wonderful stories of his that he'd make up, and he said, "Well I just open my mouth and start talking and a story comes out. " He himself had no idea where it would go or what would happen next, and he wanted to keep telling so he could find out.

Dad didn't get the Sunday paper. He thought it was inferior. And it was too thick, anyway. But every Sunday morning he would call me so I could read him the Style Invitational - my favorite part of the Washington Post – a weekly humor contest. And WOW would we get laugh on Sunday mornings! Dad's favorite contest was the one where you had to come up with the WORST metaphor in order to win.

His favorite worst metaphors were:

"Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze."

"The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't."

"John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met."

And this was his favorite ... I don't know why it got to him, maybe because it was like physics, but this one cracked him up:

"His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free."

Dad loved to talk. About politics, the world, art, movies, books, people, food, music, and microscopic bdelloid rotifers that you can boil for an hour or freeze to within 1 degree of absolute zero - and they do not die!! They dehydrate themselves!! and turn into tiny specks!! and blow about the globe as dust so easily that they blow back and forth between Africa and America!! And - there are no male bdelloid rotifers! Every single member of five hundred species of bdelloid in the world is female!! Bdelloid rotifers reproduce without sex! For 80 million years bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing without sex!! Dad would talk about the wonders of nature, the wonders of life.

Dad cared deeply about the Jewish people. I am so glad that Dad came to visit us in Israel and lived in the house next door on our moshav, and that he was able to get a taste of Israel in it's heyday. Dad was worried we might lose Israel. I am too. It took 18 centuries from the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE all the way to 1948 for there to be a political Jewish entity again, and it’s existence seems so tenuous now. I am so glad for Dad that he had a chance to see an Israel during his lifetime.

Dad and I would wonder together what it is about Jewish theory (and sorry Dad wherever you are out there, but Jewish "theory" is Jewish religion, hate to say it) but what exactly is so compelling about the culture that allows it to survive devastation of entire civilizations of Jews disappearing forever into history - and yet the theory still persists and revives itself again and again? We will have to wonder about this ourselves now, without Dad's thoughtful insight and help.

Dad was an atheist. And he was a deeply spiritual man. He was both those things.

I remember the first time I came home from school and asked him if there was a God. WOW! Did he explode. "Is there a WHALE in that lightbulb?? How do you KNOW???"

But I kept asking him and asking him, again and again, over the years. And I asked him again last year. I said, “Dad, I wonder about the idea of God,” and he said "I know you do dear." And he finally gave me the answer I'd been waiting to hear all my life.

He said, “I tell people I'm an atheist, because people need to hear simple black and white answers to complex questions. And as a physicist I would say that everything I can measure and understand about the universe tells me that for all practical purposes there simply is no evidence of any supernatural force or intelligence. But the truth is that I do not KNOW what I do NOT know. I only know what I CAN know. So how can I know if there is not something BEYOND what I can conceive of or understand? How do I know God is NOT out there, and has created this universe for me to study and examine, and is toying with me? So the truth is that I don't know if there is a God or not. I will say I'm an atheist, because the God that most people believe in seems like nonsense to me. But the truth, Liza, is that I am not an atheist. I don't really know if there is a God, or not, and what God might possibly be.”

Dad loved his family, but he loved Mom most of all. He told me that in all the world, there was no person with whom he shared so precisely the same viewpoint on people, and on life, as he did with Mom.

Dad's cancer progressed rapidly, sapping his strength, but never his spirit. Dad had five miserable surgeries, suffered through six different chemo regimens, and was in and out of the hospital, often heavily medicated for pain. I decided - on that first shocking day when Dad called with the terrible news of his diagnosis – that whatever struggles or horrors lay ahead - I would not let him face it alone.

What I didn't realize is the incredible richness I would get from these two years of such intense closeness with my father. I feel so lucky to have had this close, close time with him. I feel lucky to have had fifty years of closeness with Dad. So very much love between us.

Dad, this is for you:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. --Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, --let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Dad told Mom that he wanted his death to be a class act. Dad, wherever you are, it was a class act. You were a class act Dad. Thank you for your life Dad! You were - and are - an inspiration.