Part Four of the Randomness Trilogy

 father's Day

If I was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade "Drama Queen" Float, my late Dad could have best been described as the casual bystander wearing a carefully deadpan expression...and holding a pin. And that sound? That's the helium, leaking out of my pretensions.

I remember being a teenager, on the phone, within earshot of Dad. I declaimed sonorously to a friend that "The heart has five chambers. Just like a revolver, babe."


There was a pause. Dad, in his wingback Dad Chair, waited for me to hang up. Without putting down the copy of the "Nation" he was holding up in front of him, said, "Four."


I was puzzled. "Four WHAT, Pops?" I asked.


"Four chambers. The heart has four chambers. You might want to switch to a Remington."
*********************


Once? There was a generation that came and went, as generations by definition have to. My Dad's generation was a very specific one: New York Jews born to immigrants in the 20's and 30's. You can see and hear the wisdom, ruefulness and brilliant humor of that moment in great Woody Allen pieces; in the Talmudically wise humor of Mel Brooks and the corruscating, impatient brilliance of Mailer. Like Woody Allen, he grew up reading and emulating the Algonquin Round table wit of Robert benchley and Dorothy Parker, the lapidary comic genius of SJ perelman, and the chaotic, "smarter outsider" humor of the Marx brothers. Like Mailer, he also loved Rafael Sabatini's "Captain Blood" and other improbably romantic sea shanty tall tales. (He also had similar bright blue eyes and fabulous curly hair.) Like Mel Brooks, he simply had no room for pomposity...his own or anyone else's. And like Brooks, whose now-obscure-but-completely-indispensable comedy recordings of "The 2000 Year Old Man" were hysterically funny and also profound (in retrospect), Dad taught in jokes..taught in his practice as a doctor; in his visiting professorships at Columbia and Harvard; and taught his kids, who amused and bemused him in turns.



Dad had an incurable case of realism. Thank God. He grew up in the Depression. his father, David, owned a hardware store on the Upper East Side, where david worked 6 days a week for 40 years.(The store is still there, intact, and looks like a hardware museum, right down to the barrels of nails on the floor); David started a fund for his son's medical school education the day his son (that is, my Dad..can we just agree to call him "marvin" from here?) was born, and that was pretty much that. Like many first-born sons of jewish immigrants at that time, Marvin was treated as a sort of visiting young god, and I'm going to say that I don't think that that was a bad thing, entirely...it gave him the confidence his astonishing intelligence needed for ballast.
I can't imagine starting college at 14, as he did; I can't imagine finishing medical school at 21, as he did; and i certainly can't imagine what it must have been like to be a Very New York Very Jewish kid, at the University of Virgina fifty years ago, as he was...it must have been like going to school on the moon.Dad used to say that the first time his very Jewish father visited him at UVA, his Dad was completely nonplussed by 16 year old Marvin calling him "sah" ["sir", in a completely phony Virginia accent.] Dad grew out of that phase. But he never grew out of being aware of and amused by, pretensions: his own and other folks'.