Bequeathed

I never knew my grandfathers and I presume they didn’t know me. I didn’t know me either.  However, over time I’ve gotten to make my acquaintance. It may have helped if I had the benefit of spending some time with my father’s father.  

Therefore, I have had to invent him and imagine how my dad carried himself with such an aura of equanimity, unruffled temperament and full presence after a childhood of near destitution. He earned money selling newspapers on street corners and was a runner, dashing from the single phone in the candy store to summon a tenant in a four-story walk-up. He made Oliver Twist seem real and never even asked for more.  

I don’t think he ever read a book. Dyslexic perhaps. I say this because we had no books in the house. Newspapers and magazines were stacked up, scrupulously unread by him. Yet he managed to get licensed after two years at Columbia College of Pharmacy, tutored all the way by my mother.

In the 1920s, drugstores thrived largely due to Prohibition. Four ounces of ethyl alcohol was dispensed for medical purposes, of course. I was born when breadlines were the headlines but there was no dust in my bowl of Wheaties.

My father emanated an equipoise. It was as if any piece of menacing news was balanced on his inner torsion scale with slivers of goodness. If I found myself overmatched by the mean streets, he pacified my world.

My grandfather, Louis, must have fled the pogrom singing folk songs or, at least, humming them as he hid under a pile of potatoes. As he made his way onto steerage, did he remember fiddling on the roof and imagining himself a rich man? When the ship pulled into New York harbor maybe he saw pages of Torah in the sky while others saw seagulls.  

Louis passed my father along to be raised by his sister-in-law after my grandmother died. My father was three years-old but he had the DNA to feel comfortable in his skin. He later played the mandolin in a small band, a resource of music and the sun brought from the shtetl.

My daughter Lauren just suggested to me that I may have this all wrong. It could have been my grandmother Annie whose extraordinary genes of centeredness and nurturing survived another day in my father.