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My family & its history


Dad's memorial service: Mother's eulogy







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My mother wrote the following the night before we had a memorial service for Dad, 9 days after he died.

Ed had the unfortunate quality of being brutally honest, even when a simple white lie would have sufficed; so when I speak of him I owe him no less.  Let me quote from his memoirs because he said it best:

“Some of the first year of marriage was fun, perhaps ecstacy, but I was a tough sunuvabitch to get along with.  (WAS?)”   That’s true.  And that’s one part of who he was.

Going through some papers, I came across a printout of an e-mail Jeff Jamieson, the son of a good friend of ours, sent me about Ed:

“I’m sorry to hear about Ed.  He lives in my memory as the sharp, funny, curious, rough-and-tumble yet gentle anomaly of a man that he was.  He was certainly a great lesson in vibrant living.  I didn’t know anyone could actively pursue so many diverse interests (marine biology, electronics, acting, tennis…) and not explode.”  And that’s also a part of who he was.

His interests were legion.  There was nature, as in Van Curtlandt Park, for starters.  And in his young years he worked in a dog & cat hospital and on a poultry farm in Mass., and later on his own farm in New Jersey.  And he acquired a walking tractor and cultivated an acre of land.  Even in Clearbrook with land and its use severely limited, he raised tomatoes for a while. The house was filled with tropical fish tanks which he was constantly cleaning, rearranging and replenishing.  There was, of course, a succession of dogs and, on the farm, a proliferation of cats.

He spotted a skunk in the coops one day, said it was probably eating eggs, bought a shotgun*, and went out with it that night.  A little while later he returned, looking sheepish, to tell me that the skunk looked very cute curled up in a nest and he doubted it was eating eggs.  He did shoot at a stray dog to scare it away and accidentally hit it.   That haunted him for a long time.

He also loved learning and felt seriously deficient because he had not graduated high school.  So, he went to night school.  Using a board across the arms of a chair for a desk, he would sit down to study every night.  That was Ricky’s preschool.  He would creep in under the board with his ABC book, settle himself in Ed’s lap, and study too.  But Ed was called before the draft board the day his finals were scheduled, and nobody would give an inch.  No diploma.  After discharge he took the GED, and, using the GI Bill, went on to earn a BA, and later, an MA.**  He loved school, not always the instructors, but the learning.  At the end, watching television, he would ask me, “what am I supposed to learn from that?”

He loved to read.  He enjoyed equally reading a modern novel and a math book.  He had the habit of reading several books at a time.  Books open, face down, littered the apartment.  He would spend hours browsing the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue.  He found a dictionary with a broken spine, marked down to a price we could afford—the first book we owned.  But he dog-eared the pages of books, and I never got him to stop.  A couple a years back when Ricky asked him how he was, he said as long as he could read he’d be OK.  That was heart-wrenching.

He loved to write, churning out poems, short stories, skits, opinion articles, seder passages, culminating in his much-beloved memoirs.  But he never developed artistic distance so he couldn’t proof and polish.  Whenever he set to it, he would write a new version  instead. 

He liked to teach, but was reduced to keeping order in the inner-city school system of New Brunswick.  He hated it.  Still, he wouldn’t transfer because he felt it was important to be there.  And he wouldn’t quit because he felt an obligation to earn a living.  During the school riots, when several teachers wound up in the hospital, he was mercifully spared because, to his surprise, the kids seemed to like him. 

He loved to act—comedy, tragedy, drama—as long as it was a meaty role.  And though it was a  hobby, he took it very seriously, running lines daily, searching speeches for clues to invention.  He had no patience for dilettantes.  At the end, he would ask me the same question over and over, forgetting an answer as soon as I gave it, but in his prime he could memorize the lead in a week.  He enjoyed the timing that brought a laugh and the passion he could tear to tatters.  But most of all, he liked to reach into people and touch their hearts.  To be able to bring tears to a spectator’s eyes was his consummate acting pleasure.

He enjoyed photography; I don’t know what I’ll do with all the negatives.  He enjoyed developing.  I had a dark room built for him behind the garage in Clearbrook, but by then he couldn’t remember the demanding sequences, the temperatures, the subtle mix of colors, and finally abandoned it in frustration.

He loved fishing, fresh and salt water.  One of the most miserable days of my life was when I agreed to accompany him fresh-water fishing.  We slogged endlessly through weeds and brambles, and were devoured by biting things.  I couldn’t master the skill of the cast.  It was a disaster.  Summers, for a while, he went salt-water fishing daily in his boat.  To accompany him on that, too, was a disaster.  He could sit for hours in the sun, catching nothing, moving rods and line back and forth across the boat.  Haul anchor, chug a bit, try again.  It was impossible to read, I never hooked anything, and I just wanted to go home.

He liked walking, driving, tennis, pool, bowling, chess and cards.  He took up scuba diving but gave it up as the costs mounted.  He liked to build and repair things—and was good at it.  He built the chicken coops by himself.  He succeeded in interfacing the typewriter with the computer when the serviceman failed.  He diagnosed the problem with the garage door opener when the electrician couldn’t.  He figured out how to fix the Bendix washer when it stuck and showed me how.  He took a correspondence course in electronics and built a television set.  It would get the color bands, but no picture.  But he took chances.  When he was having trouble with the electricity in the coops, he stuck his finger in a socket to test it.  That he only felt a tingle did not reassure me.  Several days later, I couldn’t find him around the farm and he didn’t answer when I shouted around the house, so I phoned Hy, looking for him.  I had visions of him lying electrocuted.  Hy suggested I check the bedroom.  Sure enough—sound asleep.  He could sleep!  I went shopping early once, leaving him still asleep with Ricky in his crib.  But I forgot my keys.  I rang, I banged, I shouted.  Finally, I got the super to let me into the vacant apartment above ours.  I was frightened to climb down the fire escape, but more frightened of what might have happened in the apartment.  You guessed it—sound asleep.  Years later he suffered from insomnia.

He was offended by prejudice and discrimination but he was a man of his times, too.  Breadwinning was the man’s role; housekeeping the woman’s.  That I worked meant that he had failed..  I rarely disputed it because such discussions were counterproductive.  But he taught himself to change and in his latter years he became an ardent feminist—one of the first signs being that he urged me to apply for our first credit card in my name.

He was an anomaly—quick to anger at small, unintentional things but stalwart when it was important.  Teaching me to drive, he was impatient and critical if I, for example, ground the gears.  But when I hooked the banister with the bumper and pulled the railing off the back steps, he just repaired it and said nary a word.  When I had a car accident, there was no word of reproof, only support.  He liked to be waited on, but when I broke my ankle, he didn’t leave the house for the six weeks it was in a cast, waiting on me hand and foot.  To pass the time, he redid the kitchen. 

I’ve talked too much and left out too much.  Over the last years, I watched him die.  As long as he could, he fought it.  He still performed in Clearbrook, he still for a while, painstakingly, memorized lines.  He had—what irony!—no patience with those who insisted they couldn’t memorize.  He would ask, of the dementia, “How can I lick this?”  But he was fighting the midgard serpent.  When he could no longer remember his children’s names or that they were grownups, he still remembered them.  Did they need to be picked up?  Had they been fed?  Were they put to bed?  I thought I had done my mourning, that I’d be happy for him that it’s over, that it would be a relief.  But all I can think of is that I’ll never see him again, that he’ll never again walk this earth, of  his last struggle, simply to breath.

As Jeff says at the end of his note,  “It’s not seemly that he should end his days deprived of that great, restless, seeking consciousness.”


[My notes: *I remember this as a .22 rifle. **My memory is that he found the Masters' education classes trivial and stopped attending without formally withdrawing from school.]

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