Archive for June 25th, 2010

Father’s Day was last Sunday and tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday.  I feel really bad that I’ve never talked about him.  Not that I would have talked about my mom, but since she killed herself it eclipsed everything on the family front.  I’ll relink that story here for newer readers but I took it off the menu because it’s not something you want in your face all the time.  Anyway…

Both my parents were New Yorkers and architects.  They moved to Vermont, then DeSilva Island, CA, where I was born.  When I was 4, my dad got a teaching position at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, so my parents, my brother and I moved to the bible belt – a strange place for a family of Jewish athiests/agnostics.  But it became home.

Btw, it’s funny that when I talk about my father, I call him “my father” or “my dad”, but he was neither of those things, he was always Papa or Pop.

He became a professor of architecture; I loved visiting him at work, hanging around those giant marble halls where everything seemed so important and at the same time intensely creative.  He loved technology and I remember him being thrilled when the University got one of those humongous computers where he, the 2-finger typist, could happily entertain himself for hours.  It’s safe to say I get my humor and technological curiosity from him.

His students loved him.  I still have a t-shirt made so many decades ago when his entire 5th-year class surprised him by wearing his face across their chests – the “Mort” shirts.  His friendships were deep, his personality self-deprecating, loving and kind.

When I was 12, my parents divorced, ending that screaming match of a marriage.   He moved just a few blocks away so we were still able to spend quality time together, but abbreviated as it is when you’re not living with a person anymore.  I didn’t notice it at the time, busy growing up as I was.  The suck of it is that I moved to NYC when I was 17 and didn’t go home that often, so my memories are cloudy and mostly through the eyes of a child.

He died in 1988 at age 61 of a heart attack.  He’d been remarried for less than a year which was heartbreaking in its own right.

But I’m not writing this with sadness in mind.  He’d have gotten a huge kick out of all the adventures I’ve had, am having.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say, just to acknowledge him.  Love you, Pop.