DAD

 While Grace Notes undergoes the editing and publishing process, I am pleased to release this excerpt, a special chapter that has been approved for posting! 

DAD

My father died two months after his 75^th birthday. Luckily, we got to spend his last birthday together and I took him to a movie. Although Dad was frail and not feeling well, he wanted to gratify me and go along. We saw A Soldier's Story, starring Mel Gibson, and from the corner of my eye, I observed my father fight back tears, which made my heart miss a beat. Undoubtedly, the tragic woes of war reminded him of his youth and his own army service, while the movie's theme of death reminded him that soon, he too, would be gone.

When I brought him home I gave him his last ever birthday gift: a handwritten book of gratitude, carefully culled, called 75 Ways I Love You.

A spiral bound journal, costing me virtually nothing, except the time it took to write it and the emotion poured onto every page, evidenced by a few tear-soaked stains.

I believe it was the best gift my father ever got from me. His face said so when he looked up at me after reading it, his hazel eyes brimming with tears and devotion.

When I began writing the birthday book I didn't know how I could possibly come up with 75 reasons for loving my father. Easily 10 or 20 reasons … maybe 50 … if I extended my imagination and my memories, but 75? That's astronomical.

So I made a list. Free-thinking scribbles about what Dad had done for me and any qualities or quirks that made him special. By the time I finished I had to edit out many entries to limit my grateful love letter to 75 facts. It turns out I could have written 1000 things about why I loved my father. And I knew he was going to die.

Dad's heart, though expansive, had expired. He was on borrowed time. We all knew it and Dad had known from the beginning of his dire heart diagnosis that he would die. He told me so. It made me angry. It pressed heavy on my own heart that his heart had defected.

Four and a half years before his funeral, Dad took me for a walk.

One day, out of the clear blue he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Why?” I asked, noting his unusual urgency.

“I want to talk to you. Let’s go,” he insisted.

That’s when he told me he was going to die.

“I got my wake-up call,” my father unceremoniously announced. “I’m not going to live much longer and there are things I want you to do....”

Not long before that, my father had gone to the hospital with an angry lump in one leg, cramps, and chest pains.

Diagnosis: heart disease.

Prognosis: not good.

We walked. We talked. I asked questions. Inside my head I remember thinking: How do you know for sure? Maybe they are wrong! Why are you telling ME?

Then my heart hurt. It beat harder and faster and angrier. Why are you laying this on me? The worst part about it for him was that he knew he was going to die. The worst part about it for me was that he told me about it. He made me face my own mortality and I didn't like that one bit. I'm not ready to forfeit my Daddy … I'm barely forty years old!

Anger and anxiety inside me muddled his message. I was mad at him and felt guilt about that right away.

Plus, there were the things he wanted from me. Things I didn't really want to do. Reconciliations with people I didn't really want to reconcile with.

My father was a peaceful and loving spirit. He wanted love and for everyone to get along. Within our family that was never going to happen. Too much hurt and too much wrong had come about. Now he's telling me his life is coming to an end and I'm the only person he is confiding in and he wants me to fix everything for him so he can die in peace.

No pressure, right? I felt furious at him. And then ashamed again for my feelings.

My father had not had an easy or happy life. Born to immigrants, he survived the Great Depression, WWII, struggles to earn a living and raise a family of four children, the early loss of his only sibling (my aunt Annette) to cancer, and the death of his parents. Dad also endured a 48 year marriage to my mother, a monumental achievement only surpassed by the fact that my father had no enemies. I've never known anyone else so beloved by absolutely everyone who ever knew him.

As we came around a corner and climbed the short hill towards his house, I boldly asked him how he managed to stay married.

“Why didn't you divorce?” I softly interjected into our intensely revealing and controversial conversation. If he could tell me he was going to die, I could ask the hard questions that had plagued me for most of my life. This may be my only chance to understand what I never understood. The now or never atmosphere surrounded us both while we walked and talked.

“I was in it for the long haul. What was I going to do?” Dad answered, with surprising forthrightness, as he turned his head to look at me with a perspicacious stare, which signaled a bold and honest confession that may have lingered underneath for decades. Realizing the weightiness of his admission, Dad intentionally lifted the weight of seriousness with wittiness – something I usually do too – and I realized then that I had adopted that trait of piercing sincerity with levity from him, especially in instances where I use humor to take the sting out of otherwise unbearable shame.

“Why do you think I stayed away on the road every week and traveled for a living?” Dad said, adding his signature chortling chuckle as his eyes glowed with glee that he had finally admitted his vocational vacancy from all of our lives as the way that he had coped with an emotionally oppressive situation.

Dad loved my mother from the first moment he spotted her standing on some steps. She wore a hat. Without even meeting her yet, he picked her out from afar, singling her out of a bevy of other bride hopefuls and knew she'd be his wife.

Like a lot of people, his gut knew before his head had a chance to harness any rational thinking, but unlike most of us, my father paid attention to his intuition. Typically ignored, inner “knowings”, integral and intense signals, are elementary parts of our human electrical system. We are, after all, made of working parts. Parts that regenerate through restoration. We are machines. Warm, human, machines. We communicate with signals. That requires electricity.

I'm convinced the ability to recognize and pay attention to those subtle signals, once essential to the survival of our species and now suppressed for most people, is an inheritable attribute.

My father was a literary, musical, mystical man. Fortunately, I am the same way.

In fact, he spent the last few years of his life writing a novel. Left unfinished, it remains a task for me, to somehow step into his scenes and usher his story to a publisher.

As we finished our walk, I found no way to bring frivolity to the facts of what my father had told me.

He would die. He wanted me to know. And he wanted me to keep this secret to myself.

After we got home, I sneaked upstairs to the attic bathroom in my parents' house. Knocked for a loop with the news, I needed a bath. As if soaking could remove the stain of permanent pain.

Theirs was an old house and this bathroom stored the treasure of an antique Victorian style claw-foot bathtub. Huge, embracing, shaped correctly, more curvaceous and human-like than the modern clunky, rectangular and shortened tubs. It had sinuous exquisite little faucets externally attached, and once filled, one could slide fully below the water. A real bath.

I could easily drown if so inclined. I thought about that … which meant inclination.

My mother forbade bathing in this bathtub, because the pipes were nearly a hundred years old and in her paranoia she decided they would crack if water ran through them. I decided pipes are meant for water to course through them and in my typically recalcitrant irreverence for her dictatorial ridiculousness, I settled in for a soak.

The pipes didn't crack. Or I didn't notice, too occupied with my own sudden splitting inside. I thought again about slipping beneath the water, about escaping the inescapable. My father was going to die. He just told me so. That meant my life as I knew it was already over.

Why did he tell me what he told me? How could he do that?

I felt at fault for feeling he was selfish. I felt guilt for feeling everything I kept feeling, but resented the pressure of carrying such a heavy burden alone. Was he sure? How could he know when he would die? Was he simply trying to manipulate me to do things I didn't want to do? No … my father didn't operate that way.

But now every day going forward I would worry if that would be the day I would lose my father.

I wept. Salty snotty rivulets streaming, glad for the water I saturated in to absorb my outpouring of grief. It's not any day when someone says to me “I'm going to die” and leaves me in charge.

How long would it take? One year? Two? Three? How long would I be consumed, just waiting for my father to die? The thought of waiting for anyone to die is plain wrong. I didn't want him to die, yet what if he lived eight or nine or ten more years? That would kill me! To carry this secret around without any certainty. How? When? Where?

I looked around my childhood bathroom. Pink. It had been painted pink. Sparse, small, as old bathrooms are, it had only the essentials: a porcelain sink, small medicine cabinet, toilet, and this giant tub, plus one small window which let in light and chilled air. I smiled when I saw two small golden angel decals, pictures of angels playing musical instruments that had been pasted onto the toilet tank, forgotten fragments from my tumultuous teen years.

I settled on five years. An arbitrary and fair number for my father's foreseen prophesy. Instantly, I felt at fault for setting a parameter, but if he didn't die then the burden of waiting would consume me, wondering when? Next week? Two more years? Was he wrong?

Death is not the most beautiful part of life. Death is brutal, but more so to those left behind. And exponentially more severe to those waiting to be left behind.

I was mad at my Dad. Mad that he had told me and left me to sort out the confusion. My anger layered on top of my guilt. The warm water did nothing to soothe my anxiety. I knew. I couldn't not know what I now knew. My father would die. It was a secret. I could seethe, but I better believe him and prepare for the worst without knowing when. I fluctuated between fury and sorrow. Sorrow trumped my wrath, squeezing inside me. That's anxiety. I recognized its vice-like grip around my gut. I wanted to scream, to yell at God, but unable to cry out, not daring to risk getting caught in the sacred bathtub filled with forbidden water and tracks of my salted tears. Scared, I stifled any sounds along with my unsettled secret and sunk low to the water surface.

My father finally retired. He and my mother moved to Atlanta, built a new house, settled into senior years as grandparents to my nieces and nephews. Dad spent his time writing his book, but wouldn't share what he was writing, which made it more difficult for me to fulfill his vision and finish his story.

I called him every day, an adopted habit, one that attempted to assuage the worry and the waiting. As if I could make up for all the days and years of our sparse communication.

Also, I traveled a lot. Ski trips, vacations, beach getaways, aboard cruise ships as an enrichment speaker, and often out of the country. I fretted that I would be away when Dad died, preemptive remorse for being gone at the wrong time. (Naturally, the day Dad died I was far, far away, as I feared I would be when the time came.)

Months morphed into years. The light in my lamp of pretend joy-filled life dimmed. Impending death, the certainty of loss followed me as a dark cloud, blocking my perspective and shadowing my private pain.

After nearly four years, I remembered my predetermination and became more preoccupied. Then Dad suffered a small heart attack. With his usual acumen of acceptance, he called it his “happy heart attack.”

Frantic, I went to sit by him at his hospital bed and I quietly searched his face with a silent plea that he should reassure me we still had time together.

“I'm ready to go,” he whispered. “I've lived a long time, I've had a good life, and that's it....”

But that's not it! I protested internally. What did I expect? Not that.

As I sat by his bed, holding his hand and looking out the window into the night, I knew that this was the beginning of the end. I didn't say anything. I looked at all the buildings around, so many little lights … the hospital helicopters repeatedly taking off and landing, so many little lights … everything twinkling and blinking and brightly oblivious to insignificant little me watching in the window while my father lay dying and I clinched hard against crying.

My happy halted in that singular moment of recognition.

Dad apologized for not feeling like talking. Nor did I feel like talking, but I didn't say so. I nodded, held his hand and we stayed side by side in silence.

Was it then that the idea blossomed for a book of gratitude?

Surely I wanted to write something to him and for him, to tell him he had done his duty as a dad. He had been the best example of fatherhood: a diligent provider, a loving and caring man, a soft influence and staunch supporter of so many of my secret wishes shared only between us.

He stuck up for me during decades of squabbles with my mother. He slipped me money, usually in one hundred dollar increments, making certain I stayed solvent, especially during times of anguished struggling. He played Anagrams and other games with me, took me to amusement parks and rode the rides with me! At ten years old, my first sojourn into the sea was holding his hand, but after getting a mouthful of ocean, I ran out crying because the saltiness shocked an unwary sheltered me.

“You never told me the ocean is salty!” I hollered with hostility at my father.

“You never asked,” Dad said, in his matter-of-fact didactic delivery.

You never asked. Dad said that a million times – about loads of things. It always made me laugh. How was I supposed to ask about anything I didn't know to ask about?

He cracked me up.

Cracked me up … another one of my father's corny and familiar expressions.

Dad loved to dance. Suave and smooth, he glided girls across ballrooms everywhere as a young man seeking a bride. Until my mother swept him off his feet, standing on some steps, wearing a hat. Go figure. No fancy footwork after all as a prerequisite to prenuptial.

Dad played violin. I loved when he accompanied me at the piano, standing behind me with his fiddle as we shared our love of music. He stopped doing that by the time I was a teenager.

Dad wrote beautiful poetry. Every card I ever got from him had a handwritten poem. He called me his “Princess.”

Dad taught me the meaning of loyalty: that I should never forget anyone that I ever loved. I have always held on so tightly … grasping, gasping at the losses, the loves....

My father's life was ending. He needed nothing. I sought to at least give him the satisfaction of knowing his life meant something.

I love you because you loved me.

Thank you for loving me – always.

I love the way you laugh.

I love that you played the violin.

I love you for writing a poem on every card you ever gave me.

My father died two months after his 75^th birthday, which was four and a half years after our fateful walk, well within my arbitrary assignment of allowable time.

As I had feared, I was far away when he died, 750 miles from Atlanta, walking around a park in Pittsburgh, thinking about him and imagining I heard him talking to me.

I clearly heard his voice in my head, but then argued with myself about the silliness of such a thing. Unfortunately, instead of listening intently I dismissed my wacky thoughts as creative thinking and debated with myself that it was only me talking to myself in my mind. How abject, because I know better. My whole life has been a series of unexplainable spiritual and surreal intercessions. Knowings I will never understand, yet are undeniably real. Dad kept talking to me, and I kept talking to myself, two streams of struggling sounds inside my consciousness – meaning I missed a message. When I found out later on that that's when my father died, I too late understood how important a moment I had missed. A chance. A choice. To listen and believe or to talk over a numinous communication.

The idea of my father whispering to me in the wind was too weird, too overwhelming. So I discounted rather than discerned his message. I talked over him as I had done in real life.

It's a sharp reminder of all the interruptions I initiated that curtailed curiosity or essential lessons throughout my life. Talking, even to myself, instead of listening.

I missed my father's goodbye.

I love how hard you persevered despite obstacles and downturns.

I love you for being calm in a family full of commotion.

I love you for your ambitions.

I love your faith in God.

That late spring day, ethereally beautiful, beckoned me beyond my irrational thinking into a peaceful walk on a grassy hillside of Schenley Park. The wide oval was unusually empty. A late Friday afternoon and I was the only one there. My car parked at the top of the hill looked out of place all by itself. The grass, so green, glistened with dew and lay thick like a velvet-textured carpet. Dandelions dotted the rolling landscape while white cotton-ball clouds clung to the sky and dipped down to the ground in downy thickness separated by pretty patches of the brightest bluest sky imaginable. I promise you, Heaven and Earth were kissing is what I saw.

I walked and thought about Dad. Where was he now? What was he doing? I closed my eyes and could feel him walking too – at that very same moment.

No! I countered, to myself … Dad walks in the mornings.

Still, I sensed his presence, heard his words, and argued again with myself at my daydreaming – my mind's meandering – dismissing meaningless airy-fairy reverie as wanton wishing.

Somewhere during those few exquisite moments my father faded away, falling with his final breath into that vast Heaven. (I didn't know it then, but later learned Dad died during my deep deliberations about him.)

I love you for instilling in me a devotion to nature, all living things, and an open warm way with all animals.

I love you for the sacrifices you made so your family had plenty.

I love your soft-spoken yet powerful demeanor.

That everyone who ever knew you adored and admired you.

Eventually, hunger stole me away to a favorite restaurant for soft-shell crabs and a luscious late lunch. While waiting for my food, I dialed Dad's phone number on my mobile phone, but hung up after one ring. Talking in a restaurant is rude and what if there were trouble with Dad? What if an ambulance had been summoned? I don't know why I thought those thoughts, but I did and that precise precognitive prediction does not make it any easier to accept what happened.

Days later I learned that Dad was walking while I thought those thoughts at the park. He walked a short block to his house, before falling down dead in his bedroom.

Who can ever explain such things?

I love that you always stuck up for me and defended me in many battles.

I love you for playing games with me – and teaching me to lose.

I love you for teaching me about business.

I loved looking at you in a suit everyday.

I love you for relinquishing our only bathroom to me, often with a face full of shaving cream.

I love you for enduring my pounding piano playing every morning at 6 a.m.

The day Dad died, he felt unusually good, and hungry for dessert. He asked my mother to take him for a banana split. Happy for his hunger, she eagerly obliged and he enjoyed his just desserts just before he left us all.

As she drove him home, that's when he asked her to pull over and let him walk a bit. (At that same time, I was walking in a park hundreds of miles away and thinking I could feel him walking too … I knew ... )

At the end of his long life, the last thing my dad did on the day he died was have dessert. What a way to go.

I had to write about it because it was a good way to go. Dying after dessert. It is a good way, supposing there is such a thing as a good way. And my father deserved a good way.

It is a beautiful way to go, really. How many people get to die after dessert? His heart stopped beating, his clock simply quit. He died as he lived ... quietly – no fuss – falling forward into Heaven. 

Except for the fact that this happened to my father, I think it is a glorious ending.

And he knew I had loved him. His last gift from me was gratitude.

I love you for insisting people recognize and care for the mentally retarded.

I love your love of music and reading.

I love that you wrote a book … expressing your secret love of flying.

I love you for all the $100 bills slipped into my purse or needy hand.

I love that you wrecked your Lincoln Town Car to save a gnat on your windshield. A gnat!

As my father read the birthday notebook, which was fundamentally a long and tender gratitude letter, I watched his eyes well with emotion and waterworks. I had no idea my words would move him so. I felt overjoyed that my gift of gratitude, which cost me nothing, gave my father everything.

That's how it goes with gratitude. It's the most valuable, least expensive, grandest gift of all. Gratitude fills fully and feels great.

I only saw my father once more after that day, an unfortunate oversight, which I regret grievously. I went to his house for dinner and watched him play with his grandchildren. Something in the way he looked at me across a room signaled he was looking at me for the last time – he knew it and I somehow knew it too. He lingered with his gaze and watched me walk while thinking what I hope were his thoughts of prayers for me.... I saw and sensed the little-known, and when I left I had an overwhelming urge to return to his house as I drove away for one more “I love you”. I just knew I'd never see him again.

I love how proud you were of every little thing I ever did.

I love that you carried a photo of me in your wallet.

I love when you danced with me.

I love you forever as the finest father.

Nothing and no one lasts. Dad was in his eternal home, and like him, I had looked to the heavens to see a sign, my own wake-up call, telling me with the utmost certainty that I would see him again someday.

I once heard a Rabbi talk about Heaven. He said it is like an apartment building. Everybody gets a home. People who behaved badly live in basements. People who didn't repent rightly reside on lower floors. Higher floors are reserved for good people who happily helped others and followed God's laws. And so on … It's an interesting visual and a merit theory with theological ramifications. If it's true, the one thing I know for sure about this Heaven Haven is that my father lives in the penthouse. He's a top floor father – of this I'm certain.

Grace Note:

Dear Dad,

You left life as you lived life. Quietly, peacefully, accepting and trusting in the glory of God. You had gratitude for all you'd been given and an hour before you died, you delighted in your last dessert – a banana split.

Every generation produces only a few great men, notable by how they loved and who loved them. For you, Dad, that was your greatest achievement … that anyone who ever met you never forgot the kind of man you were.

A good man. One of God's greatest.

How fortunate I am to have known you as my father. How blessed to have been born to you and to have had the privilege to call you Dad.

Thank you for my love of literature, my love of music, my love of animals and all living things. Thank you for your greatest gift of love to me and for instilling in me an endless pursuit of peace, plus inspiring me to love, to faith, to forget transgressions.

I will continue to follow in your footsteps. Though I will never fill them, I still know how to pray. Help me to love like you.

Thank you Dad.

I love you

Just Another Lori Story

SQUIRREL HILL

Squirrel Hill

Squirrel Hill. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Pictured above is the infamous "blue slide" from Frick Park.) "Squirrel Hill" always sounded so silly to me. It is hilly. There are loads of trees and squirrels, gray squirrels mostly. I grew up in Squirrel Hill. I read somewhere that the neighborhood was once a farm called “Squirrel Hill”, then I read somewhere else that it was a Native American hunting ground known for an abundance of squirrels. History is never really right, is it? It’s just stories passed down and added to, like that little word game we played in a circle as kids, adding words to change the arc of any story.

What I never read anywhere was that my childhood neighborhood would ever be a part of history. Certainly not stained and haunting history, sad antiquity, that of a mass murder. A massacre. Not only in my neighborhood, but in God’s house. In a temple. A synagogue. A schul. Generations from now, who will tell the story of Squirrel Hill and who will care?

Our family moved there when I was five. My elementary school was right around the corner and across the street from my beloved grandmother, so I was very cool with school. As a teenager, when I went to high school somewhere else, I did have to walk uphill and in the snow, just not precisely 2 miles as the comics today tell it, changing the arc of that story too.

We wore galoshes. Plastic stupid rain covers that looked like Baggies for our boots or shoes. Moms made us do that and we listened to our moms. We got wet. We didn’t ALL win or always get a trophy. We actually played at each other’s houses and we never worried that studying or playing or praying could get us killed. Because until President Kennedy was killed when I was in Miss Siverman's 3rd grade class, I didn't know what "killed" was. Walking home that day, everything felt different.

Our house was the last in a row of houses, next to a very high hill, almost a mountain really, when we moved there. My friends and I climbed up in that mountain where woods and lots of trees and animals were fun and extra exciting to explore. The mice and snakes and dirt, not so much and my mother couldn’t have been happier when a hospital moved that mountain away and built their tall building half into our backyard, so it seemed to me. With a white fence to separate us off, and forever close my access out of my tiny yard with two cherry trees. I hated it. I missed my mountain.

Still, Squirrel Hill pretty much didn’t change other than that. There’s a lingo and a tempo and a certain step around that everyone seems to accept, learn, pass on, expand into.

“Are you going upstreet?” That phrase meant walking Murray Ave., and then up Forbes, even though only a small portion was actually up a hill. Shopping at Little’s shoe store, mandatory. (The only thing one can still do today.) Clothes at Newman’s, a family owned store with wooden floors from one hundred years ago that creaked. Fancy banks (It’s the land of Mellon, don’t forget), a post office with that certain smell and faces of fugitives from anywhere except Squirrel Hill; Mineo’s Pizza (best in the world), bakeries galore, including Waldorf, Rosenbloom’s, Silberberg’s…bakeries every few feet when walking upstreet.

Predominantly a Jewish neighborhood then, delis and bakeries ruled most corners in Squirrel Hill. I was good with that! On my way to school, I'd walk by Rosenbloom’s each morning where the bakers stood by the open back door having a break and a smoke and I’d inhale the baking bread smell for half a block before I’d see the crusty baker men. Besides, Rosenbloom’s sold Gems. Dark chocolate ganache dripped thickly over a dome-shaped moist chocolate cake. Pure magic.

The memories of childhood are magic for many of us. My first horse, Whiskey was his name, at Schenley Park Stables. The stables burned down when I was 12. It was a horrible fire. Today, tennis courts cover the memories. My first scary sled ride with my father down a hill at Frick Park. My first serious kissing, with a boy in a Corvette, at “Lover’s Lane”. (It was all about the car.)

Pinball machines. Food. Friends. Drive-in movies. Sidewalks. Courtesy. Smiles. Sanctuary. We were civilized. We weren’t scared. We were Squirrel Hill. We also weren’t known anywhere else, weren’t popular ... or unpopular, for that matter – just a little unknown neighborhood secluded among parks, part of Pittsburgh, but with a distinct utterly unappreciated, at least by me, flavor.

Perhaps that flavor was Jewish. It’s positively the part that put Squirrel Hill on the permanent map of forever now. Because of the irrational hatred of one angry man for a people, Jewish people, based on their beliefs and faith, friends of mine had to die one day in Squirrel Hill a month ago. People I knew. People everyone knew who grew up in Squirrel Hill. We didn’t want to be famous. And no neighborhood wants to be famous for this. For a hate crime, a mass murder, unexplainable pain the community forever has to adjust to again, just like that day I walked home from 3rd grade in a daze. 

We were friends with the Simons’. My parents knew the Simon parents and they had four kids and we had four kids – and they had an oldest girl and three boys just like we did and you know how things were back in the days of civilized behavior, right? The cherished days before technology and crazy took over and made all of us question the meaning of man. Computers and crazy people have us all under control now. We have to undress, redress, turn around, empty bags, and watch over our shoulders everywhere we are. (And do bring something to wipe your feet off after inspection.)

We did holidays and vacations with the Simon family. We ate at their house, they ate at ours. Bernice Simon was a kind woman, a nurse, who spoke softly and kindly and I liked her just for that alone. Her husband, Sylvan, also a soft soul, which at the time was not so fashionable for a man. He liked to kid around, played with all of us kids and always had a smile, something I still envy.

Shelly (Michelle) Simon was my friend for many years. Oddly, it was with Shelly that I went on my 1^st cruise ever, a Carnival cruise. I got sick and hated it and it would be a couple decades before I found a peculiar calling to actually consider working on cruise ships, albeit never again Carnival, by choice.

Anyway, we all grew and scattered, as families do, and lost touch a long time ago. I moved to Florida, later, Atlanta.

Decades passed, I travel the world ... then the Tree of Life massacre put Squirrel Hill as center of the Universe. I knew I would know someone. I just knew. I was fearful like thousands of others, waiting for the names to be released. Then, waiting for the photos. 

They astonishingly looked exactly the same to me. Bernice and Sylvan Simon. A tad aged, older, wiser, wearier, but not one iota sweeter. Syl still had that same smile, Bernice still glowed; they still touched each other just as I always remembered they had, holding hands, always, always touching warmly in love – that’s what I still saw – sweet as ever. Like it was yesterday.

But today, they’re gone. So are the brothers I knew. The dear sweet brothers everybody at some time or another saw around Squirrel Hill.

Anybody who ever grew up in Squirrel Hill lost somebody they knew or knew somebody who lost somebody else.

To find anything to be grateful for in grace is the hardest part of all. I guess that they went together, Bernice and Syl Simon… it’s all I have to hang on to as far as grace. They always clung to one another and God somehow made it that these beautiful people, parents and grandparents, were able to cling their way on to whatever eternity awaits their souls stolen while in prayer. They would not have made it alone and I thank God they left as they lived, together and touching.

What I never appreciated at all was how lucky I was to have grown up in a place like Squirrel Hill. I only always wanted out. Many of us did. We wanted to be anyplace except Pittsburgh. To see the world. Make a mark. To matter. A few stayed. It’s so different there now. The bakeries and delis gone, dissolved into new demographics, pay to park everywhere, congestion, confusion, modern mayhem.

But I can still walk up Murray and remember. I can turn onto Forbes, I can still savor Mineo’s pizza, walk a few more blocks and after a week had passed last month, I finally felt brave enough to do just that. I walked past the stores and landmarks. Past a few streets and beautiful gardens in front of houses I’d seen since I was a child. I walked to the Tree of Life Memorial that looks like so many memorials we sadly see on TV every day, except this one is in my neighborhood. Now it’s come home. And I’m not okay with that. Not one bit.

I didn’t appreciate the Squirrel Hill I had. And now it’s gone. Everybody knows its name now.

Squirrel Hill.

In loving memory of Bernice and Sylvan Simon

Just Another Lori Story

HONEST GABE

Honest Gabe

Father Gabe. From the moment I heard, I couldn't stop thinking about Father Gabe. I cried. I was scared. I begged. All in prayer form or at least that's what scratching aside the panic and worry would reveal; prayer. Incessant prayer. And isn't that what we are taught to do? My favorite priest and friend, Father Gabe, had suffered a mild stroke.

Then it snowed in Atlanta, as if to seal the surreal. An unacceptable bombardment of bad events. Really snowed and left me comfortably ensconced, but bitterly stuck for a few days. (No jokes allowed; I have photos that show ankle-deep snow.)

Just returning from working on a cruise ship, I had a long list of things to do, important appointments to keep, people to see, and so on, before having to quickly leave Atlanta again. Mass at St. Ann's was top of that list. And as always, a silent prayer that Father Gabe would be the celebrant. We're probably not supposed to waste God's time on such a wish, but I confess to that sin, thankfully not a mortal one.

I just love Father Gabe. We've shared belly-shaking laughs and childhood stories. Annual retreats where he inspires are a must. And cardinals. Red cardinals. Father Gabe loves them because they remind him of his father and now I love them too because they remind me of Father Gabe. I have a stone with a carved cardinal on my veranda and just mounted a red cardinal mailbox as a tribute. They mean angels in some circles and I am all about angels.

Father Gabe has a way about him … he doesn't stand behind a lectern, he doesn't use notes for his homilies, he sometimes doesn't even end up with what he starts to talk about, but decides another word or idea or God-given graciousness is what he needs to express. He is Honest. Real. He loves us. He loves what he does. Father Gabe's grace radiates from the pulpit yet a piece of that grace stays stuck to him and wherever I see him, I see that grace. I am touched by it and that is why I found myself stuck in the snow, incessantly praying for Father Gabe.

Interestingly, all my personal needs and wants went out the window. No appointments now. No visiting friends, no shopping, no pampering. Only praying. Isn't it funny how everything that matters stops mattering in a millisecond when someone we love stops in a millisecond whatever they were doing that was important to them, because, well, because God decides these things and I don't have all the answers. It does seem to slant towards bad things happening to good people and all, but only from this side of the proverbial fence.

Father Gabe has worked more lately. As the congregation grows and priests dwindle, there are more masses, more baptisms, funerals, etc. I could tell he shouldered a lot more responsibility than he wanted to, but bravely soldiered forward in solid determination to carry through the needs of others. Caretakers are the ones that need the most care themselves, but don't take time to look after themselves. Others are too self-involved to recognize that need for replenishment. I could see it when I looked at him, but stroke? No. I didn't see that coming.

I remember my first reconciliation with Father Gabe. Talk about scared! I didn't want to confess anything, afraid it might take hours if I were to be totally truthful, and who does that in confession? Honesty. It's the hallmark of reconciliation. The thing is, what about penance? I don't like those sitting around and twirling things and repeating words over and over and wallowing in the worry of why did I confide this or that or.... That's why religions have such a bad rap and why Catholics are more likely to go to a fish fry than a confessional booth, but just once … I could survive this just once, say I did it, and if it was that horrible, never do it again. (The confession part, not the sin part, just so we're clear here.)

But surprise! Father Gabe did not rap my knuckles with a ruler. (Maybe only nuns do that.) He did not chastise me nor make me feel at all accountable for being the bad person I turned out to be. He did not shake his head in dismay or criticize my crimes. He was warm and kind and benevolent and unburdened my heart, instantly making room for his permanent place as my preferred priest in that spot he had cleared.

He did ask me one question about a particular unresolved relationship that reverberated for awhile mostly because I didn't really have an honest answer.

Father Gabe asked me, “Are you sure you are not confusing love with need?”

Years have passed and I still haven't answered that to my satisfaction. Good questions sometimes do not have good answers.

And when I wrote and published a book about my own tragedy, I felt the common author's guilt about writing so honestly and went to see Father Gabe who reassured me that honesty is all there is when telling a story. Honesty. It's true. That's why it hurts so much. Afraid to go and give a copy of the book to the person whom I wrote it for, Father Gabe reassured me that if that person had any sense he would be awed by what I wrote. (That person did not have any sense, by the way. If he was “awed”, I never knew.)

Anyway, I'm pleased to report incessant praying really does work. At least that is how I will remember my lost days in Atlanta. Father Gabe is recovering and will be back good as new, or maybe better – as if that were even possible – some time in the future. I learned that all the silly things I worry about and all the plans I look forward to can dissipate in a flash and it won't matter in the end. I missed Mass and that's okay, because if I had made it, Father Gabe wouldn't have been there and I would have had that tiny tinge of disappointment and then felt guilt and then had to go to reconciliation and then the whole cycle starts again.

And because it is my nature to forcibly find all the good in everything, even the worst of the worst, there are things I think Father Gabe might like to know....

First, Father Gabe, thanks God it was your left side! Think of what you wouldn't be able to do without that right hand working the way it's supposed to! That, and you'll be able to drive again soon!

You successfully found your way out of excessive Masses for the Advent season and having to remember all the different colors of the season and the reason and all of that. You can rest through and come back in Ordinary time.

As soon as I heard about your stroke, I remember thinking, oh no, he'll have to quit smoking … and though I know you'll miss that indulgence, eventually you'll not miss it and you will feel better and breathe better and be able to reward yourself with an extra special chocolate instead.

I'm so glad you have a sister who loves you and was able to come help you and since she is a nun, I hope she raps your knuckles if you do not do what you are supposed to be doing to get back to us as soon as possible.

The short homily thing is not going to work for me. The good news is that whatever neurons were killed off on your left side brain were replaced by long dormant neurons from your right side brain, which will kick in and give you super-homily abilities, surprising all parishioners and you simultaneously, so buckle up Gabe!

God sometimes brings bad things to keep worse things from happening. It's hard to reconcile. Honestly, it's hard to wrap any logic around anything when worlds stop. But I am thankful, Father Gabe, that you made my world stop, so that I could remember what is truly important. Grace. Honor. Wisdom. Dignity. Four words I live by that you taught me, Father Gabe.

And here's the best thing of all: After all these years, I finally figured out the answer to your question: Am I confusing love with need?

NO. Because sometimes, and only with very certain and very special people in your life, there is both. Love and Need. Simultaneously. Your mild stroke, my incessant praying for you, the blasted snow, none of it nor anything else will ever take away how I feel about you, Father John Gabriel … I love you. And I need you too.

Love. Need. Together.

Honestly.

Just Another Lori Story

The Watcher

The Watcher

There are at least three of us in each of us.

Whatever do I mean? I hear you asking.

This happens to you, too. No, wait.... This happens to us. No, wait again... while I search for the correct words/tense --- okay, here it is: I know this happens to me.

See?

Ram Dass talks about this concept in his writings, as do many other spiritual types and meditation mentors. So did Sigmund Freud. So did the psychology teacher in high school.

ID --- Ego --- Superego

Parent --- Child --- Ego

Doer --- Seer --- Watcher

Etc...

Still confused? Here are thought bubbles above my head explaining:

You're alone at home.

You spot a mess, as you walk by it.

You think to yourself: That mess really needs to be cleaned up....

Then, from another level, completely out of nowhere to now-here, comes a different voice:

Clean it up now. Don't just walk by....

And then, a quick comeback:

I don't want to right now. I'll do it when I want to!

Recognize any of these voices?

Cognitive you? Parent? Resistant child?

You laugh to yourself as you flash-notice your own thoughts and processes.

And then...! Just when the conversation has reached its natural conclusion, a final, rational, more rhetorical and observant other voice (yes, that's 4 voices, if you're still here) notices; simply notices the other three voices and what just transpired.

That! That, my friends is the “watcher”. True you.

However you want to think of it, the point is this: I am not alone. You are not alone. We are not alone.

I'm in there together, with the watcher, and with the God-self kernel of my origin. True Me.

Just Another Lori Story

HE saved ME

HE saved ME

As a young girl, I fell madly in love, because that’s what most young girls do. Deeply, irrevocably, pathetically, in love. With a football player, at college, no less, because that’s what wild uncontrollable young girls do. Especially girls who are raised in very prohibitive, punishing homes, with a parent who is extremely strict and constricting.

Eighteen years old, away at university, completely free from parental prison for the first time in my nascent life, and head over heels besotted with Big Man on Campus football fella, Brad. Yes. One of those. I was one of those girls, who rushed after ball players while others rushed sororities. I don’t know why. Maybe those men accepted me easier than the ladies did. Curvy and cute, I satisfied a craving that young jocks effortlessly spot across cafeteria crowds.

We “jock flies”, as we were called back then, were deemed “easy”, and held horrid reputations within our peer groups, but posited pure envy as the reason for sister treason.

Being a ball player’s “girl” meant all sorts of special accommodations were granted, including field access at football games, broken dormitory rules forgiven, unattended classes not recorded as such, and lots of free stuff. Teenage college kids like free stuff, just so you know.

Anyway, oblivious to gossip or rules or class schedules as posted, along with Bobby Bowden as the head coach – yep! That Bobby Bowden! – Brad and I carried on our amorous little liaison until we established as “true love,” and then most naysayers let us alone. We were a couple. We would always be a couple. This was real.

Oh sure. As real as a thought bubble, which would say, “Are you kidding me?”

You came to college … you crushed on a football player … who had no interest in football to begin with, but used it to get a scholarship … you had your little affair … and then he will go back to his little hometown … and marry his high-school sweetheart.

Exactly. That is exactly what Bradley did, except first he got his high-school sweetheart pregnant, because then they had to get married. (Because back in the age of dial phones, slide rulers, and propeller airplanes, that’s what people did. If you got pregnant, you married immediately to hide the obvious deviation from biblical directives.)

We had had our fun. Brad was done. I was devastated.

I stayed distraught for a long time. I felt duped. I believed despite Brad being a football player, which instantly established him as a “player”, which translated to trustworthiness not included, did not, in fact, account for the exceptional exception of ME – the perfect paragon of smart, precious, fun, and therefore, permanent.

Apparently, I miscalculated. Especially the permanent part.

Of course I was never going to find another love like Brad. I could never adore another man in that same vein. I moved on, had other boyfriends, but Brad was the one that held my heart, and for many years, I carried the torch that scorched only me.

Brad became a physician. He desperately wanted to be a veterinarian, but the demanding schooling required daunted him, so he pursued podiatry.

While Brad was in residency, I ran into him in a podiatric hospital, surprising us both – well, him, much more than me, let’s just say. “Coincidences” are part of my mainstay in life, so much so that I don’t even believe in “coincidence” for the most part. I was there to apply for a job, Brad happened to stroll through the lobby at precisely that slim point in time, no … that cannot be called “coincidence.”

Anyway, we agreed to have dinner at my apartment that evening, and Brad showed up with steaks, green beans, and Pepperidge Farm lemon layer cake, which to this day when I see that cake in frozen food aisles everywhere, still reminds me of that night.

Dinner was delicious, but we were uncomfortable. Brad, married with a child … me, wondering what happened to “us”, and why … still swooning with a wound I didn’t know would fester so strongly so many years after the silly affair. Because it was silly, right? Aren’t most college romances silly little experiments of adult life? Happenstance?

Brad left my apartment rapidly after dinner. Discomfort engulfed us during digestion. We barely had conversation that wasn’t stilted and awkward. He was married. He had a child and another on the way. Proper behavior isn’t scripted for these sorts of encounters. He kind of ran down those steps as I recall, away from me. Forever.

Though I never forgot him or any of the feelings, we didn’t see each other again. Decades passed, I failed at life’s tests for the most part, but managed to carve out an existence that included amazing world travel, multiple exciting careers, and several moves to several states. Oh, and other loves, all of which led to nothing. Some fun, but nothing. White picket fence dreams, little doggies (and for me, big horses, too), children, the proverbial “Leave it to Beaver” life, not to be mine.

Nearly 4 decades later, now in the age of psycho crap … people talk to dead people … computers have taken over for brains … phone trees with foreign tongues have replaced actual English-speaking drones … everything costs so much but we don’t know why … cars drive themselves, and don’t do much better than we did … and terrorists threaten to end all of this bliss instantly, if we don’t give them, wait … what exactly do they want? So, in the midst of all this madness we call our current world, I get a call….

An old friend whom I haven’t connected with since college calls to tell me about Brad.

“Have you heard?” he asks, “about Brad?”

“No.” I answer, in complete shock that this is even happening at this moment in my otherwise completely chaotic life. “What happened?”

Okay, admittedly Facebook, that dreaded spy and fantastically addicting foolish platform that has reunited me with all people from all my life (is that a good thing?), brought me back together with friends from afar, and here I was talking to Brad’s college roommate, who was always a good guy back in the day, and still. He explained that Brad had retired, given up his practice, and was now in a nursing home, with advanced senility, or Alzheimer’s, or whatever the label of the week is for people that lose mental capacity. Brad had had a very hard life, consumed by addictions of some sort, his wife had left him and then committed suicide, his whole world had fallen apart over a long period of time, and now he was losing his mind at a rapid pace.

The picture painted was bleak. Dire. Shocking and disturbing in a way I can’t say. But mostly, that silent for so long wound awoken. I didn’t even know it was still there. How could that be? I had long ago gotten over the love.

Or not.

I wailed. Internally, then externally. I guess it’s true, all the mushy poems and stories about love. It never ends. It goes dormant, it smushes down into crevices we cease to care about, but it never ever dies. Not if it is real. And when we uncover that bottom of the bottoms, there it waits … love. In a different form, perhaps, but positively, absolutely resolute in its determination to alter our purview of all loves before and after. Love. It’s a permanent poison. One we ingest over and over in the hopes that it will consume us.

Recently, I went to visit Brad. I knew what to expect.

A lockdown facility with all sorts of silly (to me) rules, but nowadays with the world the way it is, they “protect” their residents, herald HIPPA as the new king of caution, and without permission from powers that be and powers of attorney, visits are limited, supervised, and often prohibited.

Using my wordly wisdom and clever circumvents, I tracked Brad down at the local YMCA. (No, I won’t reveal how I knew he was there, or how I found him.) I found him rocking in a rocking chair. Recognized him right away, even after almost forty years. Tears took shape behind my eyes and I pushed them away, needing to be joyful and optimistic that Brad would even know who I am.

Taking a deep breath of resolute belief, I walked the few steps toward him and sat down next to him. He watched me walk toward him.

“Hi Brad.” I smiled wide and sat down.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Were you a patient of mine?” he asked. He looked at me curiously, kindness etched in his please forgive me for not remembering gaze.

“No. I am Lori.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, and stared harder at me in instant recognition. “Oh, Lori! Yes, I remember you….”

We rocked and sat in the sun, and pieced together a stilted conversation recalling whatever Brad could remember, with me filling in certain details in an effort to help him remember more.

At some point, I bravely said, “Brad, you know, as a young girl, I was desperately in love with you.” I paused long and looked at him. “And I still love you.” He turned his head to look right at me, teared up, and reached over and grabbed me in a big bear hug. For a second, it scared me in its strength. He is still a very large man. In fact, I didn’t remember Brad being so much bigger than me. Either that, or I’ve shrunk much more than I realize.

I don’t think anyone had told him that they loved him for a very long time. Brad burst with emotion. Emotion that touched me deeply.

We made our way back to his assisted living facility, and dined together over their not so delicious nursing home fare, but delved back into the way past, because often people with cognizant losses are better able to remember the distant past than the present.

Some things about Brad remained intact. Other things struck me as superbly odd. Pieced together memories made a mental collage like a shadow box in Brad’s brain. Bits and fragments forged together that didn’t really go together. As a Picasso painting, subject to interpretation.

I played piano for him in the lobby, hoping to remind him of his college days when I played for him every night after dinner. We looked at photos, straightened up his apartment (as much as he would allow), I tuned his guitar for him, and well, what else is there to do with someone who is losing their mind and knows it?

“I have Alzheimer’s,” Brad abruptly announced at some point.

“I know,” I said. I waited for him to say more about that or how he felt about it, but he didn’t.

Eventually it was time to leave and we walked out to my car. I told him I would visit again. And I might.

No “coincidences”, right? I don’t believe in coincidence, in the sense that everyone uses the premise as a catch-all for strange occurrences in otherwise predictable lives.

I thought about Brad all the way home, and I still think of the amazing way God brings back some people into our lives to show us how He saves us. To teach us His lessons. About life. About love. About everything.

Here was a man I loved. Here was a man I desperately wanted to keep loving throughout my life and forever – to have a family with, to grow old with, until the end of my time.

But God had a different plan for me. A less painful plan. Which always felt more painful to me as I lurched loveless through life, but now … now, I know better. He knew that if I got what I wanted then, when I didn’t really know anything about what I really wanted, I would’ve ended up in the worst possible situation … maybe dead, maybe divorced, maybe devastated by a drug-addicted physician husband, certainly destroyed by early-onset Alzheimer’s, and potentially a very young widow.

Because we can’t know. We can never know what lies ahead on the route we pursue. We are mere passengers, struggling to drive. Instead, we are instructed to sit back and enjoy the journey. We don’t. We want control.

I didn’t get what I wanted. But I always got what I needed.

As I drove the long drive back home, over and through majestic mountains of beautiful scenery and glorious fall foliage I hadn’t witnessed in decades, I wept. For the beauty of it all, for all my falls from grace, for Brad and his certain slide away from all he ever knew or loved … which includes me.

Grief is complicated. It’s a constant pinch in the soft part of my gut. It hurts. It hurts in a way I don’t have words for. I have lost and lost and lost loves, over and over again, and I realized Brad was the beginning of the losses; he was the first one to break my heart; that even though I thought I had long ago left that loss, I had not. Pain is permanent. The broken-hearted kind of pain. It never leaves.

And there are no coincidences of our coming together, Brad and I, either then or later or now.

It fills me with a renewed sense of gratitude for the amazing work God did. HE saved ME.

Thanks, God.

Just Another Lori Story

When Whitney Went Away

When Whitney Went Away

I remember clearly when Whitney went away, because believe it or not, I was jealous. It was February 2012 when Whitney Houston died and I wanted to die too. In fact, I had thought about dying for many months beforehand, so when she made it through the veil, leaving God's green earth and passing into God's great Heaven, I mourned my own tragedy more than I mourned hers, yet I couldn't help my exaggerated emotions of envy.

Why? Yes, you must be asking, why?

As I slammed a racquetball against a racquetball wall at the gym, I asked that same question day after day. Why? Why did I want to die? And why did Whitney's sad departure accentuate that want and affect me so?

Every thought lead to that poor ball being beaten harder. How could she leave and leave me here? Why did I care so much, and why at that particular point did the anger, anguish, and stress peak into pathetic pity?

Less than a year after a fateful fall, which left me limping and in constant pain, everything had fallen apart for me. Before my unfortunate accident, I was an ice skater. Before the fall, I had a happy-go-lucky life, doing what I wanted to do, traveling all the time, laughter came easily (in fact, I had just finished performing stand-up comedy at a favorite club), I liked my freedom, and I had no debt. None.

Before that change-of-life incident, I felt in charge. I had a wide circle of friends from all over the world; there were to-do lists easily conquered; trips to a beachfront condo; dreams and plans for future fortunes.

In a split second, as with all accidents, every second thereafter altered irrevocably. Most important of all, I lost control. Completely. Game over. I lose.

And I continued to lose starting that day and every day afterward. Privacy, vanity, sanity, and yes … money. Friends, privilege, driving, freedom. All gone. All important things ceased to be so. Jail without bars. Death row.

Stripped of my independence, being utterly dependent on the kindness of others and strangers, brings an awareness of one's humility in a torpedo-like strike. It's not as if I got an opportunity to get used to disability. It's not as if I had a husband or anyone else at home to hold my hand and tell me it would all work out and that I would be okay. I was not okay. And I would not be okay for a very long time. In fact, I may still not be okay. It may never be okay, at least in the same way, for me again.

As the long road to recovery began, after a week in the hospital and emergency surgery, depression paid me an unannounced visit, but refused to leave – even when asked. Imagine your worst nightmare never going away. That's what it was like.

Good friends turned out to be not so good. Food was scarce for me and hard to get. (Except for pizza and Chinese take-out, which got boring after many days and the Chinese delivery guy grew afraid of me, because I insisted he help me by bringing in the food.) Going anywhere meant a taxi, which cost a lot of money. (Yes, my right leg --- lucky me --- no driving.)

And so on....

Then, physical therapy threw me over the edge. Too intense; both the therapy and the therapist.

It's not like I was sitting securely on the ledge of life at that point anyway, but falling again, especially into the mental meltdown miasma, meant an overload of critical components required to survive, failed.

So what's so special about survival? I mused. Certainly not amused by any of the sequential events that stole my existence from me, it occurred to me that maybe my life wasn't worth fighting for. Maybe I'd had a good run and this was it. The more I thought about that, the more it took hold and wouldn't let go.

Oh, and did I forget to mention the pain? The endless, excruciating pain that denied me sleep, kept me crying, and sometimes denied me my own breath? The pain. Intolerable.

Which brings me back to Whitney.

She was in pain. I don't know what kind of pain. None of us know why anyone else hurts. But here was a worldwide celebrity with the voice of an angel, rich beyond comprehension in funds and friends, gorgeous, with gargantuan talents, and she's in pain. She may not have meant to take her own life, but on the other hand, maybe she did. Maybe she just wanted the pain to stop. That's why most people kill themselves. Not to die, but to stop the hurt of living.

I thought about my pain a lot. Because if I didn't, it intensified to make sure I wasn't forgetting it was the new boss of me. For the first time, I understood why people want, no, need, to escape that type of pain. Incessant, unrelenting, pounding, pain. If prayer to end pain goes unanswered, then prayer ponders punishment of another sort. Prayers eventually become pointless, especially in the same vein as such pain.

Since suicide became an predominant idea, I slipped over that edge of sanity and visited the realm of ruin. I didn't have much strength to tour the vast expanse of nothingness, and maybe that's what, in the end, saved me. My complete lack of strength.

Some say it takes courage to kill oneself. It takes conviction and it takes a strength of will so strong, that it can conquer the indomitable will to live, which is incredibly stronger.

I made it out of the pit of pathetic. I don't know how, but God's Will is the strongest of all Wills, and I will be forever grateful that whatever I had to go through to find the forever of me lead me to a whole new life and a whole new view.

I wish Whitney had waited. I wish she had found her way out too. I wish I hadn't been angry and jealous and wanted to go with her to wherever she escaped to.

When the radio plays her songs, when I hear I Will Always Love You, when I think of those sad, bad days, I weep for Whitney and I weep for me.

Some memories are simply to painful to remember, and I remember when Whitney went away.

Just Another Lori Story