Dear Old Dad

Das was an Oddfellow. When he died, his long-time partner and fellow Oddfellow, Izzy, said that when he (Izzy) went, he wanted to be laid out with the pinochle deck they played with under his lodge sash. As a sixteen-year-old, I was thus confirmed in two beliefs which I hold to this day: loyalty between friends and the likelihood of pinochle in the hereafter.

Dad was born in Kiev but, thanks to the good instincts of his parents, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, making him about equal parts British and Yiddish. Thanks to his education at Royal Britannia High School, Dad could recite The Lady of the Lake at the drop of the sword. (It couldn't have been Pewaukee Lake, because we sat in that boat for hours and she never showed.) He also preserved in the oral tradition a little ditty called "We're on Our Way to Heligoland" which went:

We're on our way to Heligoland
To get the Kaiser's goat.
In a good old Yankee boat
Up the Kiel cannal we'll float.
I'm a son of a gun to meet a Hun,
We'll make them understand,
We'll knock the Heligo--
Into Heligo--
Out of Heligoland.

Needless to say, Heligoland is no more, and I believe the song is why.

Dad was the master of asides. He never said anything over his breath. In case you missed the bunch line, he was not above telegraphing it home with a little behind-the-scenes kick in the pants. Little things. Guns, for example, he referred to as Gentile birth control. He rationalized a fondness for pork chops by saying Mother's cooking rendered them unrecognizable to God. The best stuff (I assumed) started off promisingly enough in the scatalogical but ended up in the Yiddish. As a result, the only Yiddish I know, I can't use. He used to joke that he would "trade me for a horse and shoot the horse," a bon mot which at one time must have had horses rolling in the aisles in the Ukraine.

Since Dad was a CPA, during tax season we hardly saw him at all. In fact, he almost didn't see me, born as I was on March 14, one day before the old filing deadline. I do seem to remember somebody popping in with ledgers under his arms, but it may have just been birth stress. As a child, though, it was a lot of fun tagging along with Dad, that is if you didn't mind shlepping the briefcase on a surgical accounting strike through Muskego Rendering, or scrambling between the slag heaps at Blue Island Steel hunting down an elusive W-4. Today it would be known as reality accounting.

Dad was a great guy, but he was too trusting: there were always guys who looked like Bud Abbott hanging around the house. There were misadventures: a partnership in a credit-clothing store where a guy could walk in, put five dollars down, and have a nice suit to skip town in. Eventually Dad's partner took the five dollars and skipped. All of us four boys, needless to say, has a surfeit of men's wear, my brother Howard being possibly the only bar mitzvah boy in a zoot suit. (The long silver watch chain really set off the Torah covers.) Dad also dabbled in the stock market, continually surprising analysts by buying high and selling low. He took a bath, too, on the export of clogs to Taiwan, but who knew at the time how that was going to turn out?

Our house was mortgaged so many times, I used to turn in themes written on the backs of promissory notes. (That was only fair, though, since Mother used to keep our diplomas next to the phone to jot down numbers. My National Merit Award had the Roto-Rooter number on the back, which at least made it functional.) Mother's job was to grab the pen out of Dad's hand every time he tried ot sign his life away. He always said his greatest asset was Mother, or something to that effect. Knowing Dad, we couldn't tell if he was kidding or not. Considering how much he lost on business deals, she was very nearly his onlyasset. He was a true romantic, though, and used to type Mom little poems on the office Underwood to tenderize a particularly tough piece of steak. I've talked this over with my brothers, and this (the romantic nature, not the steak) seems to be one of those traits that skips generations (unlike, say, baldness and bowlegs). Mother, for her part, always said Dad could have had his pick of women and chose her. As far as I know, this is the only straight line in the Feldman family that was never pounced upon.

On the subject of the opposite sex, I must admit Dad never gave me a "man to man," preferring to let market forces run their course. In fact, Dad game me only one piece of advice on the opposite sex. I can see him now, sliding down in his favorite easy chair, recently skinned in plastic by Mother (significantly lowering its coefficient of friction), and blowing the ashes off the front of his white shirt. "Women," he said. To this day, I've found that to be true.