Clown Car

I remember when my friend bought at 1974 Volkswagen Beetle-- white with red aftermarket velour interior-- back when we were in high school.  For my tastes, after 1967, the Beetle got too modern, bloated, and ugly, so I wasn't terribly jealous of this purchase, and was therefore able to enjoy the few rides home from school or "Into the Woods" rehearsal I got from him in his VW.  It had oversized rear tires and a big-ass exhaust system.  

Very gaudy.

One brisk winter's day, a bunch of us clammored and cajoled our way into that sweaty little car and cadged a ride through ice-covered winding suburban streets.  A bunch of us.  Me and my friends.  It was exhilarating and terrifying and funny and stupid and high school and fleeting.  It could have ended on the front page of the local newspaper.

"FIVE DEAD YOUNG FROZEN IDIOTS IN NAZI TIN CAN  -- MAYOR SAYS, 'OH, WELL',"

Looking back on that moment in my life, frozen as it is in time and weather and memory, the only thing I can think is that the number of friends I have in my life today would fit far more comfortably into an antique Beetle.  With room to spare.

I don't like those thoughts.  They're sullen and self-serving.  But they're there, I guess.  

It's funny-- when people typically think about aging, growing older than they were or are, I think the things they typically fear the most are wrinkles and grays, crinkles and creaks.  The inevitable breakdown of the body and its internal components.  The changes in how we look.  We're vain sonsofbitches, I guess.  What I never gave much thought to when I was younger was the fear of changing relationships, of the people who just... fall away.  They drift away slowly and you really don't notice it at first.  Time between emails gets longer, texts become more superficial, phone calls are-- well, what are phone calls?  I don't call or write like I should, bubbuluh.  

Oh, I have the trump card, though-- I have twins!  But here I am, writing this, instead of a heartfelt email to a friend of mine who just had a baby and a birthday of her own, I could mail a card to a friend in Chicago who's probably forgotten what my handwriting looks like.  

I could say hello.

My parents like to torture me, probably like yours like to do to you, by asking me how my friends are doing.

"How's so-and-so?"

"Have you heard from thus-and-so?"

"Where's what's-her-name living now?"

"When's the last time you heard from thing-m'-bob?"

When my father started in along this line recently, I abruptly terminated the Comfy Chair-style interrogation by announcing that I no longer spoke to anyone about anything.

"I have 2 friends, I think," I said, "and one of those is debatable."

"Oh," said my father, "well, I wouldn't think too much about that if I were you."

I wanted to hit him, but I didn't.  I had to stop myself and force myself to remember that I was talking to a man who saw his best friend drown in the sea in Israel.  My father, then a young, hot-blooded man, tried to save Gagi from the hungry and brutal ocean one hot sandy day-- but it was not to be.  I wonder how often he thinks about that day.  I wonder how often he thinks about his friend.  I wonder how often he thinks about the Six Day War or the Yom Kippur War or Israel or his youth or his dead sister or my mom or his business or anything.  Probably as often as I think about my friends-- wherever they are.

My daughter loves to point at a picture of my wife and I dancing at the wedding of a friend of mine-- the friend who used to own the white Volkswagen.  She and I had only been dating a few months when the picture was taken.  I'm wearing a rented tux and antique Harry Potter glasses.  My wife looks radiant with a super short haircut and I remember how I used to like to run my hand up and down the buzzed part of the back by the base of her neck.  That was damn near ten years ago.  My mother had the picture framed in a little heart frame and my daughter points at it and makes us take her straight to it at least 30 times a day.  She'll have friends, so will my son.  I know they will.  And some day they'll all pile into an old car together and go tooling around in the snow listening to Dennis Leary's "Asshole", singing it out the open windows as loud as they can, to startle the Orthodox Jews walking along the sidewalk to synagogue.  

Just be careful in the ocean, my babies.  My friends.  

Mr. Fix Shit

In case you've been living underneath a life-size Sphinx made of foam core and cat litter, you know that we re-elected Barack Obama recently.  A bunch of different demographics came together to make that possibility a reality-- so the news media says-- and it's looking like minorities, women, and "the young" played a significant role in the President's validation.

At 32, I guess I no longer qualify as "the young".  I think membership in that particular subsection goes to 18-25 year-olds, it might even go as high as thirty-year-olds, but it definitely doesn't extend to those of us born in 1980.  I know for sure that I'm not a woman, because I just played with myself recently and I came very quickly, and we all know that only happens to men.  (Sensitive ones, especially.)  Now, the more complicated question-- am I a minority?-- gives me a slight pause, and rightfully so.  After all, my father was born in Iraq, then emigrated (read: fled) to Israel, the emigrated (read: ran away from his religion and his parents) to America, and married my mother, a half-Ukranian/half-Hungarian euro mutt.  But, ask anyone who's ever seen me dance, and then tell you without hesitation that I'm white.

White male.









White space.









White.

Am I, though?  Maybe, maybe not.  I don't know.  Guess it depends on who's seen me cut a rug at a Bar Mitzvah recently.  One thing I know for sure is that I'm a Jewish husband (and father, but let's stick with husband for right now.) and while I don't know if the number of Jewish husbands who came out in support of Obama is statistically significant, one thing I do know is that there are some stereotypes about Jewish husbands.

The one with which I'm most familiar is that "Jewish husbands don't beat their wives".  A bigoted follow-up to that is "they just hide their Macy's cards", and that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh.

I realized this weekend that there is also a stereotype about Jewish husbands relating to their inclination to engage in household repairs/improvements, but that, according to which Jewish husband you're talking to/about, the stereotype is radically different.

Take my father-in-law.  He's seventy, doddering, bewildered, hyper-intelligent, super disorganized, mechanically inclined, and attentionally defective.  Nothing makes him prouder than to install something, or create something, or refine something, or correct something around his house, or ours.  As he mentioned to me this weekend, one of the reasons he's so hell-bent on fixing things himself is that he's cheap, and no matter how much sawdust you get everywhere (EV.  ERY.  WHERE.) or how many times you have to drive to Home Depot (three in one day) because you forgot to buy something (that you already owned) it's a damn sight cheaper than picking up the phone and hiring a professional to do it for you.

Which is where this Jewish husband comes in.

Last week, our plumber installed a new kitchen faucet and repaired two toilets in our house.  Total cost: $350.  Could I have done any or all of these repairs myself?  Um, why spend energy, time, and many hot, furious tears to find out?  Are we well-off?  Absolutely not, but my wife and I are both employed, and we make enough money to know that we can call a plumber or an electrician every now and then and it's not going to give us Hoover pockets.

There are things I can do, and there are things I can't do, and there are things that I maybe could do but probably shouldn't do, and I strongly believe that, if I look at a project and my gut says "back away" then that is what I should do.  My wife's dresser drawer came off its track.  A strategically-placed screw solved the issue.  Gut said, "you can do that", so I did that.  Am I going to spend hours fucking around and potentially irreparably damaging the porcelain device that hauls away my family's feces?

Not this Jewish husband.

And not this Jewish husband's father, either.

When I was a boy, and I'm sure for a long time before I existed, my father mowed the lawn of our family home.  He trimmed all the hedges and he painted the outside and inside of the house when it needed it, he cleaned the gutters and unclogged drains and did things to the hot water boiler that I don't understand and he built a big wooden ramp for me to drive my pedal car on and he fixed and he maintained and he used his rough, careworn paws like they were tools themselves.  And one day, much much later, while we were watching out the dining room window together as Frank the gardener mowed our lawn for us, he turned to me and said,

"And I always said, 'as soon as I can afford to pay some motherfucker to do all this fuckin' sheet for me, dat's exactly what dee fuck I'm gonna do'."

I suppose, after all those years, there was nothing he felt he had to prove anymore, and it must feel pretty liberating to send a plumber a check instead of being on your hands and knees on a bathroom floor underneath a sink for five hours, if you don't have to.  My father-in-law and his son have just spent two days trying to install a clothes dryer for my mother-in-law.  They're connecting a pipe using brass wire meant to be used for a bassoon.  And, wonder of wonders: they did it, and they're happier than pigs in shit about it.  And you know-- that's fine, for them.  That's just fine.  

Sometimes I feel guilty or incompetent or like I'm not measuring up somehow to the challenge of being a homeowner, being a husband, being a father.  There are things I should be doing that I don't do, effort not being applied, energy wasted, money flying out the doors and the windows and wallets and pockets.  Then I remember bringing my father glass after glass of 7-Up as he perspired through his shirt, his bald spot glistening in the July sun and his hands bleeding as he manically tore out foot after foot after foot of hedges that lined my family's house.  He just couldn't take it anymore.  Trimming them made him physically ill, or mentally ill-- or both.  And he wasn't quite at the stage where he had embraced the idea of paying someone else to trim them for him.  He hadn't made that psychological leap yet, he wasn't ready to move from one stereotype of the Jewish husband to the other.  He was still in that mindset that it had to be all him, all the time, at every moment, doing every thing: fixing, making, doing, being, providing, surviving, maintaining and straining, all for his family, all for an ideal.  All for love.

And finally, one day, he let go.  He let go of all of that.  Not the love, of course, never that, but of the idea that it always had to be him.  He's able to exist now, in a world of handymen and plumbers and electricians and contractors and gardeners.  And I think he's happier now, and I love that.  A few months ago, we told him that we were going to finally attack the insidiously weeded over flower beds in front of our house, to make the place look less like Boo Radley's residence and more like a place that isn't the scourge of the neighborhood.  His brow furrowed with momentary concern as he asked,

"Mummy-- you're not going to do that fuckin' shit yourself, are you?"

"No," I said to him, privately smiling at the memory of him ripping out hedges with his hands in 1988, "no fucking way."      

Where I Came From

I bought myself a birthday gift today.

I don't know much about it, but that doesn't bother me.  The seat is covered in a coral-hued fabric, there's wicker underneath the cloth.  The back is punched leather, and there's wicker behind that, too.  The little sticker from the antique mall just said, "Swivel Chair - Oak.  $85".  I offered to pay cash, so they gave it to me for $70.  Life is good, you know.

I saw it a week ago, and I wanted it then, but my wife and the babies and I left the antique mall last weekend and I let myself think about it for a couple days.  See, I'm a pretty impulsive guy, so I thought I'd see if I still wanted the chair come, Wednesday, say.  I did.  Ten years ago, I bought a wooden swivel chair from K-mart and, well, it's just not the same.  There's no character, no history.  No one's ever farted in that K-mart chair besides me.  I like things that have been farted in, apparently.  You should see my trouser collection.

So, today, I put the babies in the car and, on a whim, I picked up the phone and called my father.

"Hey, want to take a ride with me and the babies?  We're going to an antiques mart to pick something up."

"Where?" he asked, "you mean, like across the street, or like, New York?"

"Well," I hedged, pulling up to their house, "it's somewhere in between."

The antiques mart is 23 miles away from where we live, and is around a 45 minute drive.  The babies were blissfully quiet in the back, and my father did what he does best-- which is keeping conversation going.  He asked me questions about the babies he already knew the answers to, or had forgotten, he chatted about a conference for entrepreneurs he attended where he met the mayor and inadvertently put his foot in his mouth-- this happens a lot.  He talked about successfully suing a local radio station, for what I have no idea, and his thoughts about possibly suing his web design contractor.  My father also wants to sue the hospital where my brother-in-law was diagnosed with and treated for the cancer that quickly killed him, but thankfully that subject didn't come up on this leisurely drive down Route 1.

"I hope this thing actually fits in the car," I said during a silence, "I didn't take any measurements."  I never do.

"What are we picking up?" he asked.

"Oh-- it's an office chair, an antique office chair with a cloth seat and a leather back."

He looked at me.  I looked at the road.

"Where did you come from?" he asked, shaking his head, "I mean, seriously-- an antique fucking chair?  Where did you come from anyway?"

I shrugged.

"You know, I ask myself that question a lot, too."

"I mean, I know I have family on my side that liked music and things-- and my cousin, you know, the one that was in love with my brother, she had an antique show in South Africa a while ago.  But you?  I just don't know what it's all about."

And he never did.  But one thing that was always understood was that, however bizarre and off-the-wall my latest interest was, he would be there to indulge it.  During the late eighties, when the Olympics were held in Seoul, I decided, at age 8, that I was going to grow up to marry a Korean girl.  The language fascinated me, so I would have my father drive me to Darby-- 69th Street-- where there was a small Korean enclave, and I would look at all the strange neon signs on storefronts and windows, and I would make him buy me Korean language newspapers that I would take home and study, and copy onto lined paper.  My lust for antique VW Beetles raged unquenchable for years and, when I was fourteen, a 1966 Beetle-- Bahama Blue-- somehow ended up in our driveway.  I sometimes went off to summer camp dressed in a dark blue, heavy wool three-piece suit in 100-degree weather.

No one ever said "no" to me.  But they probably always wondered "why".

I don't know who they would have asked.

"Look," he said to me as I piloted my wife's Honda Fit towards through the towns leading to the antique mart, "just be who you are-- you always were who you are.  The minute you start to change, you can't live in your own skin.  I never changed for anybody."

"Yes," I said, "you did.  You changed a lot."

It was quiet for a second.

"Yeah-- okay, yeah, I did.  But I knew if I was going to stay in this country, I'd have to change-- otherwise it wouldn't be fair to anybody."

I've changed, too.  I'm a husband, and I'm a father, two times over.  I'm no longer chasing dreams of policing the streets as a genteel beat cop, and I'm satisfied with the humble life of the occasional community theatre performer.  I'm no writer, I'm a blogger, and that's okay with me.  When my wife was pregnant, she was worried that the babies would change us into some unrecognizable entity, that they would supplant our identities.  It happens, you know.  Just look at the Facebook profile pictures of the people you went to school with-- many of their profile pictures have been replaced with pictures of their offspring.

But that's supposed to be you.  There's still a you in there-- isn't there?  That's what identity is, I think; who we are and what we love and what piques our interest.  My identity is comprised of my preferences and my proclivities and my habits and my collections.  My sillies.  And I suppose I'm glad I'm still bringing back silly things from antique malls.  And I think, in his way, my father's glad, too.

Me-ness

Mrs. Apron and I went to the King of Prussia mall together on Saturday. It was the first time I had been back at the mall in years. When I was a child, when my family was bereft of things to do, we all inevitably piled into my family's Oldsmobile, or Buick, or Toyota, or Pontiac or, finally, Saab, and went to the mall. It was the Saab that my father was driving when he ran my foot over in the parking lot in front of Bloomingdales when I was fifteen. That traumatic event marked our last family trip to the mall.

Those treks were getting a bit long in the tooth by 1995 anyway.

As Mrs. Apron and I parked the car at Bloomingdales, I stared at the facade of the immense retail space and said, "That's where he ran my foot over with the car," pointing to the curb cut by the entrance, "right there." I shook my head and laughed to myself because, really, it's funny. And I instinctively reached for my wife's hand, and she took it.

When my family would go to the mall together, my sisters, my mother and father and I, we would invariably split up. My sisters would shop for girl things with my mother, and my father and I would pal around together. I would drag him all over the place, to the K. B. Toys, where my dilated pupils would hungrily gaze at all the enormous die-cast cars in 1/18th scale. It was at K. B. Toys where my father first noticed me, as a nine-year-old, standing in the aisle, bent over, rubbing my hand against the small of my back like an octogenarian with spinal stenosis.

"Mummy," he asked, his brow furrowed, "what is the matter with your back?"

"It hurts," I said simply, my brow furrowed, too.

Scoliosis. Thanks, gene pool.

I would also take my father to the Electronics Boutique, where I would show him the backs of all the computer games I wanted. I invariably chose ones that our computer did not have sufficient memory of graphics capability, (remember VGA vs SVGA, 256 color requirements?) to run correctly, or at all. And these wastes of money that would not perform on our home P.C. were invariably not returnable because, in my excitement to use them, I had torn the box to shreds till it resembled hamster bedding.

That man wasted a lot of money on me.

Looking back on our time at the mall, I can't remember one time-- not one single time that he and I were together that he made me go to Macy's with him to look at sweaters for him, or... anything for him. Those trips were all about me, to fuel my interests and my desires and my wants and my perceived needs, and I had no idea.

On Saturday, I accompanied my wife to the mall for no other reason than for her to purchase new bras at Bloomingdales, because our impending twinnage has caused her to appreciably outgrow her current bustenhalters. Okay, we also got Auntie Ann's pretzels, too, but the bra shopping was the main event. And it took an hour. And all the while I stood out among all that lacy and frill and cups and straps looking like part husband and part pervert-- which I am both-- and I texted a friend to ameliorate my feelings of awkwardness by giving voice to them in those text messages.

And it helped.

I suppose I could have gone somewhere in the mall for myself that Saturday, but I had no desire to do so, and it wasn't just my counterculture distaste for the mall.

As we exited, we passed through the men's department (or "menswear" as they used to call it on "Are You Being Served?") and I saw a handsome cardigan, stylish and conservative at the same time. Ralph Lauren. My wife and I both went to it at the same time and investigated it. I didn't look at the price tag, but I didn't have to.

"I can't have anything for myself anymore," I said, half-jokingly, "because we're having twins and my life is over."

Mrs. Apron smiled at me.

"Or, you could say that it's important for you to still have things that you like so that you don't lose your me-ness," she said.

"Right," I said, "the me-ness of penis."

I don't know what that means, I just said it because it rhymed and it's sophomoric.

My me-ness.

Antique typewriters
Old telephones
Eyeglasses
Short-sleeve dress shirts
Skinny ties
Wing-tip shoes
Monty Python
Gilbert & Sullivan
Thrift shopping
Amateur theatre
Writing
Bacon
Coffee
Chocolate
Brash humor
Sensitivity
Introspection
Brooding
Crappy TV
Cuddle time
Worrying

I don't know what parts of my me-ness I'm going to lose once these twins come-- I suppose every parent loses some, as my parents did. Some of it is willing, some of it gets lost with a fight, and I guess what ends up after being funneled and distilled and wrung out by time and diapers and sleep deprivation and sacrifice will be the essence of my me-ness.

Whether I like it, or whether I don't.

Going to Moscow

Of all the memories I have of my childhood, none are as vivid and, at the same time, opaque and nebulous as my memories of flipping out in the living room.

When we ate at the dining room, as we did every night as a family together, it wasn't the idyllic, stereotypical family atmosphere that is portrayed in televised depictions of a bygone era. It was boisterous and loud and often profane, often happy and filled with laughter-- typically at someone else's expense. I was commonly called upon to do impersonations of people in our sphere, or tell elaborate, funny stories for the entertainment of my parents and sisters. And there were frequently arguments that sprang up like pimples or psychotic dogs due to frisky personalities and opinionated children, but these arguments were quelled relatively quickly, and usually by my mother. The dinner table might have been an exciting place, but it was meant for theatrics, not dramatics.

The living room, by contrast, was a venue where one could thump one's chest and rail against the indignities and inequities of the cruel, unforgiving world, where one could loudly assail the misfortune of having a tempestuously frustrating adolescence. I can remember many an evening, standing at the center of the room yelling at the top of my lungs in that misunderstood way that teenagers do, being hysterical about this or that, things I hated, people who had wronged me or, my favorite topic, how much I hated myself. I would pace the floor, hungrily, like a lion, in a fervent and bloody thirst for validation of my feelings, only to receive idiotic cheerleading from my father, and despairing head shakes by my mother.

In short, it was the room in our house where both growing up and regressing happened concurrently.

When they'd had enough of my rantings, my mother would inevitably retire to the basement to do laundry, and my father would commence doing stomach crunches or push-ups on the living room floor.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING THAT FOR?!" I would scream, practically apoplectic.

"Mummy," he'd say, in between a crunch, "I have to exercise-- go on, I am listening."

But, really, he wasn't. And I don't necessarily blame him, either. I certainly don't blame my mother for disengaging to go downstairs to do laundry, either. I would have needed a break from me, too.

"I think about those times now," I said to my therapist yesterday, "and I think about how they must have just wanted to be like, 'Jesus-- just shut up and go have some ice-cream or something. Go masturbate. It'll all be okay.' Must have been so tempting to say."

The thing is, they couldn't tell me that, because I was too important to them, even if the psychologically purging horseshit I was spewing all over them at one particular night or another wasn't. And I really appreciate the avenue for expression they gave me in that living room, with all its attendant strange pottery and its ineffective lighting and the superbly ugly Ben Shahn painting on the wall.

When I go to their house now, the living room is filled with my nephew's baby toys. The round, glass table that had been a fixture in that room since I was born has been banished to the basement, and we sit on the overstuffed, ugly furniture and talk in even tones, about nothing at all. It's like a Chekhov play, except nobody's even pretending that they're going to Moscow.

When I Make a Tweeter

Yesterday afternoon, my world came to a dizzying, traumatic, abrupt and despairing halt. Used to be, it was the 3 a.m. phone call that brought us to our knees with news of calamity or tragedy. We're barely awake, unable to comprehend the enormity of the words being spoken to us.

These days, our phones light up and there's a little "bop-bop!" or "be-doonk" noise or, if they're on vibe, that disconcerting "vvvvvvvv-vvvvvvvv" going on in your pocket. And you pull the phone out and you look at that little indicator light, blinking its insistent orange or red or green or whatever it happens to be. Flashing, like an emergency light in the night.

Warning.

Something's wrong.

It's just, I don't know, different from any other mundane text message you get from your friend who wants to go back-and-forth for two days exchanging "Royal Tenenbaum" quotes (Chas: "HEY! Are you LISTENING to me!?" Royal: YES, I AM! I think you're having a nervous BREAKDOWN!") you know, somehow you know, that this text message is the big one.

I got it yesterday afternoon at 3:49pm, Eastern Standard Time. It was from my father. He knows that I get out of work at exactly 3:00pm every day, and he knows that my commute lasts for 45 minutes. That classy sonofabitch doesn't waste a hot-shit minute.

I looked at my Blackberry's little indicator light (mine's red) and, as it flashed with urgency, I thought to myself-- this is bad news.

Thing is, it wasn't.

It wasn't bad news at all. What it was was the. single worst thing a 31-year-old man can ever hear from his father, in the year 2011:

"Pls call me when u have a chance
question about twitter"

And my face went white. I mean, it's not like I was standing in front of a mirror, watching myself react to this, but, like, you know what it feels like when you get blanched like that, when the blood drains from your facial capillaries. My stomach also dropped an inch or two. Fortunately, I was sitting on the toilet when I received this email, which is a good thing, because, when my stomach dropped that inch or two, some shit fell out, too.

Don't make that face, Prudie Tudie. It would have happened to you, too.

They say that, when children reach a certain age, the roles of helper and helpee (yeah, that's not a word, I got it) reverse and the child is supposed to assist the parent(s) through the process of aging, decaying and, eventually, dying. I suppose offering assistance as to the specifics of things like Facebook and Twitter ought to be included somewhere in there, but I find myself uncomfortable in the role of technical navigator/advisor-- more than uncomfortable: inept.

No. Not inept.

Unwilling.

Unwilling as I am to assist my aging, Israeli father in the how's and why's of the digital, online age, I dialed his number after only taking a few precious minutes to recover from the substance of his text message.

What did he want to know about Twitter, I inquired.

Oh, you know, how do people answer when I make a Tweeter? he asked. Do they need some kind of phone number?

Buzz-Cut

I can have an ethical dilemma, even about hedges.

During our honeymoon in Bali, ethical dilemmas confronted us everywhere we went. In the artsy city of Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma about whether or not we ought to haggle on the street with a vendor with three teeth and five children to get an $11 painting down to $6.

In beach-front Lovina, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not we should participate in the environmentally unfriendly, exploitative tourist-trap of going out into the Pacific Ocean in a tiny little boat, racing a bunch of other tiny little boats crammed with a bunch of sweaty Australians for the chance of seeing a few dolphins.

Back in Ubud, it was the ethical dilemma of whether or not to spend time at a dog shelter, playing with dogs we knew we would never even be permitted to adopt, even if we were crazy enough to do so. I fell in love with a dog named Bruno, and I donated $25.00, and bought a bumper sticker that said, "I <3 Bali Dogs" that my Focus wore proudly until the red heart faded to pink, and we traded the car in for my wife's Fit.

"Look," I would say to my wife as we fought ass-crack sweat tramping down unfamiliar streets, trying not to get hit by mopeds or eaten by feral dogs, "I just want to have a good time-- I don't want to have an ethical dilemma about everything."

An every-now-and-then ethical dilemma can, of course, be a good thing. It means we're not sociopaths, and that's kind of a good thing not to be. Too much of that horseshit, though, can be mentally and physically draining, as we found out many miles away in Indonesia.

Which brings me back to Pennsylvania, and our hedges.

We bought our house February of 2009. Our house is a charming little twin, built in 1928-- good bones. It has no lawn to speak of, certainly none that requires mowing-- it's all pachysandra. There are, however, hedges that ring the edge of our property, and run all the way down the side of our house, separating it from the neighbor's abode, and these hedges do require some suburbanite upkeep.

Otherwise, neighbors look at you. They keep the tsk-tsk'ing quiet, but their looks are loud.

Since we moved in, I have been tending to our hedges with a pair of manual hedge-clippers. You know the type-- they look like gigantic scissors. In 2009, these fuckers worked like the dickens. Nice and sharp, they sliced through those leaves and little twigs like a champ. Last year, I noticed that they had definitely lost some of their vim and vigor-- or I had. Really, though, I blame the hedge-clippers. Their blades were dull, the nut-and-bolt that held them together was loose and tenuous. Sure, I could have taken them to some hardware store and had them sharpened, probably for half the cost of what I paid for them in the first place, but I didn't think that was very smart. So, like a smart person, I persisted in trimming my hedges throughout the summer of 2010 with dull, fucked up hedge-clippers.

This late spring and summer, which has been unusually hot and unusually rainy, I have trimmed the hedges three times already. And, from the first snip, I knew the manual hedge-clippers days were numbered. On Sunday, I noticed that our hedges, after being trimmed last weekend, were sprouting bizarre, wayard leaf-arms, extending from the even base.

"Listen," I said to my wife, "I can't do it anymore. I'm going to ask my father if I can borrow his fucking electric hedge-trimmer."

Because, really? I didn't want to have an ethical dilemma about it anymore.

Sure, I'm still relatively young and (don't snigger) strong-- and, really, I should be able to take care of our hedges with a set of manual hedge-clippers. But, in temperatures that routinely hover at around 90, with humidity constantly over 80% and little gnats landing in your ears and sweat stinging your eyes-- why the fuck should I? Because an electric trimmer wastes electricity? Because it adds to the already increasingly nascent amount of noise pollution that is plaguing our neighborhood?

Look, whether I use the electric trimmer or not-- this one's still power-washing her deck with a gasoline-based machine, this one's using a power-mower, this one's buzzing her grass with a weed-whacker. There are rotating blades and little engines all over the fucking place. And, if one more is going to help me get the hedges done in half-an-hour instead of an hour-and-a-half so that I can spend more time doing something I actually give half-a-turd about: I'm all for it.

My father dropped off the electric trimmer Sunday afternoon.

"Here you go, Mummy," he said, handing it over to me like it was a golden calf, "and here is the power wire (see: extension cord) it's 100 feet."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now, Mummy-- you have used it before?" he asked, his brow furrowed in anticipatory concern.

Desperate to be spared of a lengthy tutorial in his loud and dubious version of English I lied and said, "Oh, yeah-- a couple times."

"Okay, good-- but listen, this is a trick I learned from Dr. Porter-- always, always run the cord through your belt loop, that way it is impossible for you to slice the cord with the blade."

Oh, Dr. Porter. Our next-door neighbor when we were growing up. An ancient, five-foot-tall troll-like humanoid with thick, black glasses, a nose that looked like the hood of a Volkswagen, and suspenders that hiked up his trousers to his nipple-line. He used to refer to my mother (to her face) as "The Bod" and, in casual conversation, he would routinely ask neighborhood kids if they were "getting any." He was a thoroughly ridiculous individual, but, nevertheless I heeded his safety warning. After all, how could you ignore a self-preservation tip from a man who fell off an eight-foot ladder into a honeysuckle bush below while trying to get a raccoon out of a tree with a broomstick?

No ethical dilemmas for that sonofabitch.

Ah, Homicide...

My aunt is visiting from Australia.

This doesn't happen very often, because Australia is very, very far away. If your aunt lived in Australia, chances are, she wouldn't visit you very often either.

While my aunt is visiting from Australia, she isn't from Australia. She was raised in Israel, but, of course, she isn't from Israel. She was born in Iraq, like my father, and his brother. I'm pretty sure their youngest sister was born in Israel, but that's where she killed herself seven or so years ago-- so we don't talk about that, or her, very much.

While my aunt wasn't born in Australia, and while she wasn't raised there, she is, however, unabashedly convinced that everything is better there. My father took her to the zoo, only to be told that the zoo "is better in Australia." Same with the postal service, medical care, sidewalks, bicycle laws, Chinese food (?), and, probably, American food. I'll bet that blogs written by sardonic nephews are better in Australia, so we won't tell her about this one.

(Shhh.)

I'm not trying to be mean by writing this blog, and I think she's a rather entertaining little woman, it's just that everybody in my family wants to kill her.

"Hi, Mummy," my father said to me after calling me on the phone at around 6:20am a couple days ago while I was on my way to work.

"Hi, Daddy," I replied dryly, "how're things going?"

"Oh, fine, fine, sveetie, fine, fine. Things would be going a lot better if I had a gun, but, you know, otherwise fine, honey. Fine, fine."

I went over to pick up an Ireland tourism DVD from my parents' house and my mother answered the door.

"Hi, how's it going with her?"

"Oh," she said, smiling, "you know, great-- hee hee hee!" My mother then bared her teeth and pointed her index finger to her head and mimed pulling a trigger. I could hear my aunt in the living room, screeching about the "bleck" people with whom she was on a tour of Tel Aviv a few weeks ago.

"Dey were so hend-some! End so smah-rt! Dey eesked such wan-da-fool qvestions!"

And so on.

Everything with her is a critique ("Oh, vy deed you hev to make pa-stah! Eef we are going to hev carbs, I would rah-tha hev bread!") and I suppose it's a good thing that a.) my parents don't have guns and b.) she's not staying with them in their house, though I'm sure it feels like it because, for someone who doesn't especially seem to enjoy their company, my aunt is over there constantly.

And they haven't killed her yet.

I don't really mind her very much. When she says something that pisses me off, I just smile wanly and say something like, "Oh, really?" or "Mm, that's interesting," in a tone that clearly indicates that it isn't. Passive-aggressive? Sure. Do I care? Nope. Because, as my mother so astutely observed a few days ago, "Look, in a week, she's going back to Australia, either in an airplane seat or in a box, so what difference does any of it make?"

And she's right, of course, in that charmingly homicidal way of hers. It doesn't make a bit of difference, not one bit. She's old-fashioned and racist, and she's also 4'10" and jiggly old woman forearms and a high-pitched voice and she loves to hug. She's not the devil, though, the first time I saw her on this trip, she was wearing black pants with a rendering of flames shooting up from the ankles.

"I hate to be the one to tell you this," I said upon walking into the dining room where she was drinking coffee, "but your trousers are on fire. I thought you'd want to know."

I volunteered to douse the fire on her pants with her coffee, and she laughed hysterically and seemed to hug me for the next fifteen minutes. No, I won't let those big, bad parents of mine kill her.

Unless she gets really out of hand.

Up My Conch

Some people think I’m a snob. And, maybe, they’re right. After all, I haven’t worn a pair of overalls since I was four, I don’t say things like “How you’s doin’?” and “I gots fitty cent,” and “I enjoy watching Dr. Phil,” and I’ve never driven a car with rust accents, spinners, or a confederate flag license plate.

I’ve also never eaten at Red Lobster.

You can’t get away from their commercials though. They’re insidious and infectious and invading one’s subconscious. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a “Red Lobster” commercial and viewed a powerful hand crushing a lemon slice, sending orgasmic spritzes of juice hurtling towards an unsuspecting lobster tail or succulent shrimp piled high on a bed of fluffy rice.

It’s sealicious.

Be that as it may, however sea-ductive (okay, I’ve got to stop that now) the commercials may be, I’ve never been moved to enter a Red Lobster. They’re… around, sure, and I loves me my Sebastian legs, but, for whatever the reason—attribute it to snobbery if you must—I’ve abstained up until this point.

No one’s ever said, “Hey, Apron-fucker, let’s pile into the Volvs and head on over to Red Lobster.” Of course, I’ve never said that either.

Sometimes, I feel guilty about this… call it avoidance of Red Lobster. I mean, what’s the fucking problem? I like seafood. I like reasonable prices. There really shouldn’t be any reason why I wouldn’t go there. Is it the chain-ness of it? No. Chain-ness doesn’t stop me from lustily mouth-fucking a #7 at McDonalds on certain inauspicious mornings.

Maybe it’s the feeling that seafood is somewhat more… special? That it shouldn’t be reduced to some corporate formula, passed down to dozens and dozens of restaurants nationwide?

Why not?

When we were younger and smoother, my parents used to take us all out for dinner maybe once a month at a restaurant called The Little Inn. It wasn’t terribly far from our house, and it was mainly a place that catered to the hearing aid/diaper population. Elderly men would take their wives there to indulge their social security checks and enjoy the waning hours of their autumn years by sleepily sucking down some lobster bisque. The men would dress in impossibly-hued green blazers the shade of astro-turf and the ladies wore Mennonite-style floral dresses and purple hair was the order of the day.

Oh, and there were fucking animal heads and guns on the wall. Lots of guns. Lots of heads.

You’d think that dead deer and fucked-up fowl taxidermized and staring at you would freak one out as an eight-year-old child, but it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I greedily wolfed down surf-and-turf like it was nobody’s business. Inevitably, there would be sibling squabbles, which eventually got so heated that we were banned from returning. Banned, of course, by my parents.

Maybe having never been to Red Lobster was due, at least in part, to the Little Inn Effect (“LIE” – ooh!) I might very well have been… conditioned, in a way, to believe that seafood was something that ought only to be consumed at tables dressed in starched white whilst being stared at by dead… voles, or whatever the fuck those things were on the walls.

Yesterday, though, in honor of my birthday, my Red Lobster cherry was popped. By my father. At 12:05pm, I arrived for our lunch date at a park located down the street from the hospital where I work, and, as I got out of my car, I noticed my father standing by a picnic table, and on it were two enormous take-out containers. As I walked up to him, I artfully inquired,

“What the fuck is all this shit?”

“Red Lobster, Mummy. You can choose which one you want—shrimp scampi or shrimp jambalaya.”

And so, two tall, dark, handsome Jews sat in the park together, on the younger one’s birthday, eating seafood from Red Lobster. And, you know what? It was fucking great. Those cheddar biscuits? Amazed my balls off. My father, who must have been in a nautical frame of mind yesterday, remarked,

“I asked your sister if she wanted to come to lunch with us, but she said, ‘no’, which is okay, because she has been so fuckin’ up my conch lately.”

Bottoms Up. To Life. Up My Conch. Happy Birthday. I love you.

Under the Lemon Tree

My sister closed on her house on Wednesday. And her birthday was Thursday. All this goes to prove, of course, that she is, basically, the center of the universe, and events as we know them sort of just happen... around her.

My parents are taking her out to dinner tonight.

My eldest sister is taking her out to dinner on Sunday.

At some point in the coming week, it will be my turn. Indian food. It's like Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee-- the ceremony just goes on and on and on. A veritable orgy of festive adulation.

Today is my father's birthday. There will not be much festive adulation to be had on his account.

On my way home from work yesterday, I picked up the phone to call him.

"I know you don't really give a shit about this," I said, "but I wanted to wish you a happy early birthday."

"Oh, Mummy," he said, laughing, "that is not... it is not even on my radar. What the fuck do I care about my birthday?"

"Well, I don't know, but I care about it, and it's on my radar. I just hope that you have a good year, that's all."

There was an uncustomary pause.

"Me, too, Mummy. Me, too."

The man's had it rough of late, but he's brought most of it on himself. Still, it doesn't change the fact that a year of chasing around a young baby, and chasing around after that baby's incompetent parents has aged him immeasurably. His attention wanders. He doesn't hear. His eyes sometimes appear vacant. This heretofore indestructable sabra, this Israeli desert warrior, with scars of battle on his shoulder and on his chest, seems to be fading.

Fading from importance.

Fading from view.

Well, from my view, anyway. I hardly ever see the guy anymore, and I live literally 5/10ths of a mile from his front door. Going over to that house fills me with immense sadness, so, generally, I avoid it. Interacting with him brings on depression, frustration, agitation and angst-- and so I avoid that, too.

All he wants to do is talk to me about my sister. And the house she bought, that sits four doors away from ours. It sits, waiting, inertly, unknowingly, waiting for the incomparably incestuous, meddlesome mess that is my family to begin. Well, not begin-- metastasize. It's been this way for a long time-- it's just spreading like a cancer through this formerly taciturn neighborhood. My family is a virus.

Save yourselves. Save the cheerleader.

I never really understood my father, and I suppose that's just as well, because he never understood me either. I can remember being an intrepid, precocious eleven-year-old, banging out obscure scripts in the playroom upstairs, on a tan electric typewriter with dark brown keys. I loved the thrum and the warmth of the electricity surging through the typewriter as I created elaborate interactions between primarily middle-aged male characters who behaved in a farcical way. I would eagerly present them to my father, who began to learn English as a youth in Israel by watching John Wayne movies, and he would read these things with a look of utter consternation.

That man didn't know what the fuck I was about. And I couldn't help but reciprocate.

I couldn't fathom the things that were important to him-- a business selling girdles and other undergarments for fat ladies and athletes. Business trips to Virginia and out west. I didn't get it. I didn't understand why he was so fixated on me learning math. And when we would do math homework together and he would take out his old Texas Instruments Galaxy 40x calculator (which he kept in its original vinyl slide case) two thoughts immediately leapt to my mind:

1.) I was definitely in for it.

2.) I was most likely adopted.

I mean-- why did a person who was related to me even own something that looked like that?

A couple of weeks ago, a nurse at work loaned me a book called "The Lemon Tree," a story about an Arab family and a Jewish family, and, on a larger scale, the founding of Israel and the grave complications that arose from the creation of a Jewish state. When I finished reading the book, I felt that I had learned more about my father than I had in thirty years of knowing him. I felt like I had finally tasted the dust and the milk and honey and the cordite and the cactus water and the olive juice and the lemon juice of that life he'd left behind.

And, while he'll never stop driving me absolutely crazy, probably even after he's dead, today is his day-- whether gives a fuck about it or not. That man-- oh, God, that man-- he's always on my radar, as I know I'm always on his.

Lords of the Flies

My wife let the word "bullshit" loose at the dinner table at my parent's house last night, and my mother was hysterical with laughter.

"She's really one of us now," I said, and my mother laughed even harder.

"What?" Mrs. Apron asked, the picture of innocence.

"I've never heard you talk like that before!" my mother exclaimed, laughing still, in her gray sweatsuit-- her Sunday evening, don't-care-a-damn outfit.

"Oh, please," I said, "her mouth is as filthy as any of ours."

(It's thanks to me, of course.)

Mrs. Apron was born to a family where swearing was not tolerated. It is not tolerated by her mother. I recall a visit to her parent's house several years ago and her father made the mistake of telling his wife that he was going in the backyard, "to pick up dog shit."

"THE WORD IS 'POOPIE!'" Mrs. Apron's mother shouted with strained vocals.

The word, my friends, is poopie.

At my parent's dining room table, the swears fly like, well, flies.

"What the fuck is with all these goddamned flies?" I asked my mother, swatting the air in front of me, brushing aside yet another savage little black bastard.

"They're coming from the sink," my father said, "the plumber asshole is finally coming over on Tuesday."

"Does he have to come on Tuesday, for Christ's sake?" my mother yelled, "the baby's here on Tuesday!"

"Uggh, please! The baby is here-- who give a shit if the baby is here? We have to get rid of these fucking flies! The plumber is not going to be banging on pipes! FUCK!"

"I DO NOT WANT HIM HERE WHEN THE BABY IS HERE TRYING TO SLEEP!" my mother shouted. It worked.

"Okay, I will tell him to come Wednesday. Jesus Christ."

Coming home can be entertaining at times, and, at times, it was entertaining even last night, but even I have to admit that it was kind of gross sitting around the dining room table, trying to enjoy sugar cookies and coffee, with flies in the air. You try to ignore them, or pretend that you didn't just see one on the wall by the door to the porch, or on the table, or on the floor, or on the fake plant in the corner. My mother poured my father a glass of orange juice and nonchalantly placed her hand over the top of the glass and held it there.

"Are you fucking serious?" I asked her.

"What?"

"If you don't do that, is a fly going to kamikaze itself down there?"

"Well, would you want to find out if that were your orange juice?"

She then placed a paper plate on top of my coffee mug.

It was kind of gross. I mean, my parents aren't poor people. Last night, there were two Volvos and two BMWs parked outside. Admittedly, the BMWs are bottom-of-the-line, and leased, at that, but still, we do okay. We're not driving Oldsmobuicks anymore. And yet, last night, I felt like I was sitting around a table in Ethiopia. All of a sudden, my parents' dining room felt like a Sally Struthers commercial. I feel dirty even as I sit here, in my own home, devoid of all discernable vermin and pestilence. Filthy, in fact. I'm scratching my hair periodically, eyeballs scanning the air in front of me for any sign of a fleeting little bugger.

It's easy to picture us-- sitting around, cursing like pornography-peddlers or homeless troglodytes with big, steaming piles of doo-doo surrounding us as we scoop heaping spoonfuls of beans or fingernails into our hot, steaming swear-wielding gullets.

But that's not us. Swear to fuck.

Off Track

I try.

My God, do I try.

But, gone are the days when you get an "A" for effort. Or even an "E."

I don't deal well with ineptitude, especially my own, of which there is an abundance. Everywhere I look, there are failures positively grafittied with my own personal tag. Some of these blunders are small and rather innocuous, some of them are, well, larger. This house is a testament to my incompetence, my attempts at manliness and homeownerhood. For almost two years now, I have been striving against my Jewishness in a futile attempt to subvert every stereotype about men of my particular faith:

We're just no good at putting things together, or taking things apart, or building things, or creating things other than screenplays.

My maternal grandfather and my father locked horns very early in their relationship. My grandfather had been attempting to subvert our religion one day in 1973 by putting together a table. Of course, I wasn't there to see it, but I can easily visualize him, in his brown plastic eyeglasses, rumpled dress-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pack of Marlboros showing through the thin fabric of the breast pocket, his gray suit trousers, argyle socks and Florsheims, standing in the living room with his hands on his hips, staring vacantly at a pile of wood and hardware, and an instruction manual on the carpet that might as well have been written in Farsi.

I can see it, plain as day. Because, now, I've been there.

He called my father, in a state of extreme frustration, no doubt, because men in my family, on both sides, do not ask for help. My father came in and, don't you know, he didn't just help, he put the table together in under fifteen minutes. Well, my grandfather freaked. He didn't want a magician, and he couldn't have known back then that he'd accidentally called one, he wanted someone with whom to commiserate-- an equal, not a better-- someone with whom he could share frustration, swears, sweat and, eventually, after maybe an hour or two, victory.

This was not a shared victory, and my grandfather knew it. It was a victory won by some hairy Middle Easterner with a two-foot-tall Jew-fro who was having sex with his daughter. And, way past his genteel, middle-class breaking point, poor Zayda popped a gasket. He didn't speak to my father again for three weeks.

While I had hoped that my father's brute strength and modicum of mechanical competence would be passed down to me, it seems that I have inherited only the ability to recognize my own bumbling nature, and I am truly Zayda's grandson. Yesterday was Tuesday, my day off that I somehow always manage to squander, and I decided that yesterday was going to be the day I was going to re-hang our louvered sliding closet door the right way (the previous owners of the house had hung it upsidedown, signaling that I'm not the only domestic retard in the world).

After catching my finger, twice, in the track and shouting several unfriendly words, I managed to get the door off the track.

[Sidebar: whoever invented louvered sliding doors should be disinterred and have his coffin and bones blowtorched.]

The pegs which go into the slots were driven into the door so hard that I had to use at least three tools to pry them out and switch them. In the middle of this process, I left the door lying on the bedroom floor so I could meet my wife for lunch at her work. By the time I came back, I was disoriented and the dogs kept running through my legs and generally getting on my wick but, wouldn't you know it, I got those pegs back in the door and, after catching my finger between the door and the track yet again, I re-hung the door.

Exactly.

The.

Same.

Way.

It.

Was.

Before.

That is to say, upsidedown, again. I stood there for a while, looking at my handiwork. I had my hands on my hips, corduroy trousers, beige socks, beige shirt, brown v-neck sweater, plastic eyeglasses, and I was tempted to scream, to laugh, to say "fuck it" and go watch some television or look at some porn or call someone, anyone, more competent and more heroic than I. More than that, I wanted to call Zayda and tell him, right at that moment, that I loved him more than I ever did when he was alive. More than any of us did.

Our Choice

It's nice to know that, at thirty, I can still be surprised. Not just surprised by just anybody, mind you-- like some lunatic in a clown wig and no pants on jumping out from behind my kitchen cupboard or by someone on reality television saying something coherent. No-- surprised by my wife.

After seven-and-a-half years of togetherdom, she still surprises me. I like it. Maybe it's because she doesn't do it by jumping out from behind the kitchen cupboard wearing a clown wig and no pants.

Though, I admit-- that would be surprising, even in this house.

"I don't want to feel guilty anymore for holding you back from doing what I know you really want to do with your life," she said to me on Sunday night.

What I really want to do. Sheesh. You have to dig to find the answer to that one, don't you? You have to rip through layers and layers of hurt and anger and despair and frustration and lots and lots of Band-Aids that have been applied to allegedly long-ago-healed wounds. But, if you're brave enough to look-- really look at what lies underneath everything that I've been, and everything that I am, and everything that I'd hoped I would be by now, it's not hard to see what I want to do with my life.

I know. You know. She knows. My mother, God bless her, she knows, too. She knows everything-- remember?

A long time ago-- God-- seven years ago, I remember jogging with my father on the track of my old high school. I was training to enter the police academy, and he and I had a very deep conversation, devoid of his usual bombastic humor and rants. I had been dating the woman who would become Mrs. Apron for about four or five months.

"Mummy," he said to me, "this relationship you are in is getting serious, and this decision to become a cop-- you cannot make it by yourself anymore, because it doesn't just affect you anymore-- it's two of you now. This is the end of you making choices just because-- fuck! I want to, you know? Maybe you will marry this girl, I don' know. But you will be two, not one. And you have to think about that. You have to think about her waiting up for you, not knowing if you're coming home-- if some crazy fuckin' asshole drug addict jump you in some alley. You have to think about what it's gonna do to her."

And I did. And I went ahead and enrolled in the academy anyway. And, at 23, I washed out. Chicken arms not quite strong enough, thank you, (they had yet to spend seventeen months on the street lifting 300 pound patients on stretchers all across Philadelphia). But my beautiful girl knew what I was doing. I had made the decision to enter the academy before I had met her and, so, when we met, my becoming a cop was part of the deal. It was part of what she had signed on for, no different than the other things about me she couldn't change-- the acerbic humor, the obscure Peter Sellers references, the affinity for neckties, the affection for my doctors, the tether to the community in which I grew up, my propensity for swearing, my lust to write.

It was all there for her to see. No hiding. No games.

On the track that day, in the summer heat, my father confessed to me that, without telling my mother, he had taken $80,000-- practically the sum-total of their lifesavings, and dumped it into his failing business to try to save it, which I guess he did because, seven years later, it's still here. My mother found out about it, and, well, it wasn't pretty.

"I can't believe I did it," he said to me as I stared at the beads of sweat on his head to keep from looking him in the eye as we bounded along the track, "but I did it, without telling my wife. I tell her everything, but I knew I had to do it. Don't ever do something without telling your wife," he warned me.

And so, in 2009, the bug not yet out of my system, I approached my wife with a police officer application for my home town department. She would not hear of it, and so, crestfallen, I tore it up and forgot about it. But not really.

Here we are, though, a year later and me about to finish three years at my non-profit, looking for something to do that has a career trajectory, something to advance to. Patrol. Sergeant. Lieutenant. Captain. After our talk on Sunday, where my wife released her hold on fear, on anxiety, on uncertainty, I put in two applications for deputy sheriff positions with the county. "It has to be a department that will pay to send you to the academy-- they've got to hire you first," my wife gave her condition, and I agreed. Practical to the end, and I love her for it.

It was a good talk on Sunday night. With minimal tears on both sides. It was a rational, logical, almost middle-aged discussion. "If you're going to do it," she said to me, cracking a smile, "you'd better just fucking do it, because you're getting old."

I liked our talk. I liked it a lot. Not just because I got what I want-- hell, I haven't gotten anything yet. I've still got to get an interview. I've still got the written test. The psychological test (pray). The physical agility test (pray harder-- some departments have added swimming). I've still got to get appointed a probationary patrolman. And then I've still got to get through the academy. Oh, and I've got to find departments who will hire me and then pay to send me there. It's a hell of a long-shot, and it may never happen for me, but at least I can take the long shot in the knowledge that we're really doing it together. Before, the choice was made by me, alone. Now, it's together.

I remember a different conversation about entering law enforcement, again, held long ago. My father and I. Again. We were in the living room of the house in which I grew up. He and I were on our knees together, holding each other fiercely, both of us sobbing hysterically while my mother hid in the basement, pretending to do laundry, probably crying just as hard.

"Why?" my father pleaded through his snot and his tears, "Why do you want to do this? Why? Why? Why?"

His impossibly huge hands and thick fingers dug into my shoulder blades and pulled me even closer to him, and the roughness of his jungle-thick stubble ripped against my cheek.

"I love you, Daddy," I choked out-- because that was the only answer I could think of at the time that made any sense. I couldn't think clearly enough to talk about valor or about justice, or service, or about bringing a clean face and clean morals and clean judgment to the uniform, of re-instilling a community's pride in its police, about delivering on a promise to serve not only the public, but the public image of law enforcement, about having people go, "Yes, he's my cop. He's mine."

I just couldn't think clearly enough to say all of that. Maybe, seven years later, I'm thinking clearer. But I still love my Daddy, and I still love my wife. And I still want to be a cop.

Now we get to see if they want me.

What Am I'm Going to Do?

Hold onto your Deal-a-Meal cards, my little kitty-cats: both of my sisters are looking for houses.

Sister #1: 33, Recently married, has a baby, is a total fucking trainwreck.

Sister #2: 42, Unmarried, has lots of stuffed animals with unusual names, is a total fucking trainwreck.

Sister #1 has practically no money. Her husband makes a decent living, but a significant portion of his monthly doughage gets forked over to a Baby Mama.

Sister #2 has an appreciable amount of money and is a very smart shopper.

Guess who just got their offer on a house accepted?

You got it! Sister #1! You're SO SMART! Look at you. Somebody get you a fucking ribbon or something.

Now, of course, Sister #2 was the one who started looking for a house first. See, she was living in a very expensive condominium favored by elderly, widowed Jewish ladies, recent divorcees, pricks with neckties and male-pattern baldness, and the QVC-obsessed.

Oh, and mice.

Now, a normal person would do something, well, normal-- like call an exterminator, insist that the mice be eradicated as part of the exorbitant condo fee she is paying, or purchase a Vietnam-era ex-Army flamethrower and deal with the mice herself: Rambo-style.

Sister #2, however, did none of those things, though I could picture her one-day wigging out with loads of big bullets strapped across her chest. She moved in with my parents. At first it was "temporary." That was in February. And, as Joan Baez so wistfully sings, "And February was so long, it lasted until March..."

And April.

The way the real estate market is going, don't count out those languid summer months either.

After spending several fruitless and futile weeks being depressed and looking at real estate porn, she finally put her condo up for sale last week.

All of a sudden, Sister #1 was inspired, and contacted my father.

"Daddy, I want a house."

Veruca Salt, anyone?

Well, as is his way when she calls him with a polite command, Daddy hit the ground running, only ceasing briefly to fly to Israel to carpet-bomb his Great-Aunt Twat. Even while he was thousands of miles away, he was texting Sister #2, making sure she was dutifully schlepping Sister #1 around to look at houses.

You know, because Sister #1 has a baby, and is, therefore, more important.

My father got back from Israel Saturday morning. On Monday morning, Sister #1 put a low-ball offer in on a house. On Monday evening, it was accepted.

This is how we fuckin' roll, 'Cuz.

Don't ask me where the money for the down-payment is coming from. My father swears up and down that it's not coming from him, and that his name isn't going on a single mortgage document. I suspect the Mexican cartel and/or generally unshaven men in overcoats and sunglasses.

My father called me this morning to ask me questions about short sales, since, having been through one myself, I am now, apparently, the Grand Vizier of Short Sales. I told him that it was absolute Hell. Our closing date was postponed no fewer than six times, sometimes postponed on the afternoon of closing-- that the sellers threatened to call the police on me, that township inspectors threatened to take the roofer to court, that the sellers were deadbeats and owed thousands and thousands of dollars in back taxes and repair fees to people who had done work on the house.

I told him that, had I to do it all over again, for the sake of my physical and emotional health, I would have walked away. And maybe the yellowed scotch tape that is holding the various components of this house together will all simultaneously disintigrate when I write this: but I probably should have.

The fact that the house Sister #1 will be purchasing is in short sale is the least of the problems. The fact that she's going into this with a guy that she mercilessly complains about and cuts down every day is perhaps more unsettling. I discussed this with my father on the phone.

"Look-- if they stay together, the house is theirs, and that's great. If they don't stay together, well, then we're going to have a big fuckin' problem, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I know. I know! But what am I'm gonna do?" he yelled. His Israelisms always come out when he's excited. You should hear him when he's stuck in traffic.

"I'm just worried that, when this whole thing gets fucked up and all-of-a-sudden she doesn't want the house anymore, it's going to become your problem," I said to him. There is ample evidence of a pattern to suggest that this would be the case.

Daddy, I'm sick of:

my college #1

apartment #1

condominium #1

my car #1

my car #2

my car #3

my business

And he's gotten rid of all of them for her. *Poof!* as if they'd never existed. By taking care of her kid all the time, they're basically, in my opinion, doing the same thing with him. I know that's not nice to say, but give me a break-- my family's in crisis.

"Mummy," he said, "I know you're worried about me, that it's going to be my problem. What am I'm going to do?"

What am I'm going to do? The emotional death-knell of my father. A man who is trapped by his ability to see the future and his intense love for his oftentimes misguided, foolish, impetuous, bull-headed children. (Mr. Apron included, batteries extra.) The difference, I suppose, between me and Sister #1 is that, all the messes I have ever made in my life, and there have been a good many of them, I have cleaned up on my own. You know, like a reasonable impersonation of a grown-up.

It's none of my business, of course, and, when we're all having dinner at my parent's house, my mother "doesn't want to talk about it," so we gossip about it with Sister #2 in hushed tones in the dining room while my mother is doing the dishes in the kitchen and my father is doing stomach-crunches on the floor of the living room. We never have to worry about Sister #1 hearing us, because she never comes over to my parent's house for dinner anymore. Just to drop off her son, and pick him up. And complain about her husband. And wash her hair in the sink, leaving copious mounds of black curls all over that she doesn't clean up.

It's okay, though. Daddy'll do it.

If You Hear Far Off Explosions...

... it's because my father is in Israel.

He's going there to threaten his cousin, or his aunt-- I kind of forget which-- with a lawsuit. And hopefully he's just going to threaten her with a lawsuit, and not bodily injury. Because, although I'm not entirely sure, that may possibly be a crime in Israel.

See, a month or so ago, my father's uncle, we'll call him Uncle Schmenkman for the purposes of this blog, died. He was very old, as the uncles of 61-year-old men usually tend to be. He was being cared for by the woman my father is going to sue/threaten. Reportedly, she wasn't the Florence Nightingale, dress-your-wounds-and-sing-to-you type. She was more of the Annie Wilkes, chain-you-up-and-hobble-you type. She, allegedly, verbally abused Uncle Schmenkman, called him names, mistreated him in other, unspecified ways and, in the days leading up to his death, made him change his will to effectively screw my father, his brother, and his sister out of potentially rather a lot of shekels.

Because I am loathe to use real names in this blog, and because I'm not even really sure if she's an aunt or a cousin, we'll just call her "Twat."

So, anyway, Twat scored the vast majority of Uncle Schmenkman's coinage, and my father and his remaining siblings are now kind of left high-and-dry. Which sucks, because my parent's house needs a new chimney, and I have around eight-and-a-half years of student loans left to repay.

And so, after weeks of screaming on the phone in a delightful mixture of broken Hebrew and broken English to sisters, cousins, aunts, and lawyers, my father finally last night boarded a plane to go back to his Motherland to, in his words, "straighten this motherfuck out."

Nothing broken there.

Last night, he texted me to say goodbye before taking to the skies. Even the most practical, least hysterical member of our family acknowledges the fact that it's always good to say "goodbye" and "I love you" before getting on an airplane, because it very well could be the last time.

I called him immediately after receiving the text.

Me: "Hi."

Him: "Hi, Mummy."

Me: "So, how are you?"

Him: "Well, you know, I am sitting here with a bunch of... {lowers his voice}... I guess they're Israelis..."

I'd guess so, too.

Me: "Well, I'm sorry you have to go back there for such a shitty reason."

Him: "Yeah, well, it's okay, Mummy, you know. I'm not going back there to take fuckin' pictures or jump in the Dead Sea, you know?"

Me: "Yes, I know."

This morning, I sent him my standard Daddy's-travelling-communique:

"Hi. Are you alive?"

Not six minutes later, I received his reply, indicating that he had just landed. I can't keep time-changes and time-differences and time-zones straight in my head. I did wake up and immediately check www.nytimes.com for reports of a plane going down en-route to Tel Aviv, because that's how I roll, bitches.

Relieved, I texted him back:

"Yay! I love you. Have a good trip. Try not to get arrested."

My father has a knack for getting into trouble, especially when he is not closely supervised by my mother. Her thin-lipped disapproval is usually enough to appropriately and efficiently reign him in and, without it, I feel that my fears for his safety and that of others around him is legitimate.

Reasons?

1.) Though I have no absolute proof, his active participation in two Israeli wars leads me to believe that he has almost certainly killed people. Sure, anyone is capable of killing someone but, once you've already done it, the door to repeat performances is pretty much wide open.

2.) His temper is volcanic. One Sunday morning, when we were kids, he absolutely popped his jugular because my sister and I were crunching too loudly on our Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I almost shat myself at the table.

3.) He's already extremely pissed off. We're not the kind of family that drags other family members into court all the time, like the people on "Judge Judy" or whatever. When we do, it's because we've been pushed to the absolute limit. Actually, we've never sued anybody. This will be an Apron family first. Just like my sister's kid is the first grandchild, and like I was the first one in our immediate family to own a microwave.

4.) He cannot stand the following people: authority figures, soldiers, police officers, politicians, lawyers, family members, other Israelis, being away from home, being stuck in traffic, being late, being challenged, being frustrated, being constrained by generally accepted standards of social decorum/civil law. This, to me, bodes ill for this particular trip.

5.) He wears dress shoes without socks and carries a gigantic wallet, held together by a rubber band. Do you honestly think this man gives a shit about anything?

I'm always a little uneasy when my father goes away. He used to do it a lot, for business. He used to have an office in New York City, but those days are no more, and I think that's a good thing. One of his clients in New York called my father in absolute hysterics one day.

"What the hell did you say to my secretary?" the client cried, "she's sobbing in my office like a little girl-- I'm afraid she's gonna jump out the window!"

"I did not do anything," my father said.

He never does.

It Ain't Over Till It's Passover

Yesterday afternoon, we were having a conversation with a friend of mine whose family is "very Jewish." This is a term that I use to describe anybody who knows more than seven words of Hebrew and doesn't regularly consume shrimp.

Anyway, we were discussing preparation for Passover in her parent's house.

"Oh, do they do that shit where you take all your bread and throw it in the river?" I asked.

There was a slight pause in the conversation.

"That's the wrong holiday, sweetheart," my wife pleasantly chimed in.

That about sums up pretty succinctly and accurately my relationship with Judaism. It's very... surface. It's often very... inaccurate. And it's kind of funny, because, more often than not, I feel like being Jewish is such a large part of my identity. It's certainly a large part of my nose.

But what is it about being Jewish is me? It's not the traditions-- the keeping of Shabbat. Kissing the mezzuzah prior to entering a Jewish home and/or leaving one. It's the Woody Allen stuff. The neuroses. The hypochrondria. The guilt. The wry humor. The... poor posture and glasses. The complaining. The incessant desire for self-analysis.

All Jews should have blogs. That way they wouldn't need therapists so much. Oh, shit-- does this mean I should be paying you $150/hr? Um... could you please bill my insurance?

Sometimes I feel like a jewpostor. I mean, I did my time in Hebrew School-- from age 8 to age 13. I have an Israeli father, and that's not easy. But, really, most of the time, I'm just a big faker. When we go to synagogue, which is very rare, my eyes glaze over the Hebrew and it might as well be Japanese. All the fucking prayers sound exactly the same, and if I read about ninety-year-old Joseph impregnating Sarah or Leah or whoever the fuck it was and the rabbi thinking she was drunk because she was praying silently and the burned goats and the burning bush and the seas parting and all of that one more time, well, I think I might puke up my gefilte fish all over everyone.

I mean, gefilte fish already looks like it's been puked up. Who would know the difference?

I feel like a jewpostor during Passover. My wife keeps Passover, and I do it, too, in solidarity with her, because I think marital solidarity is important. I mean, we can't do everything together. Like, when she's menstruating, I don't walk around with a heating pad on my groin, nor do I paint my penis red, but, in ways that we can have marital solidarity, I try to make that happen.

I think being unified with your spouse is a shitload more important than being unified with God because, really, if you piss Him off, what's going to happen to you? Probably nothing. Don't believe me? Try pissing God off and then pissing your spouse off and see which is more uncomfortable.

Passover is always difficult for me because I love eating, and Passover is an extremely restrictive time as concerns what you can put into your body. I'm a carboholic: cakes, breads, croissants, pastries, muffins, sandwiches-- I'm all about the yeast and the bread and the rising. So far, it hasn't all gone to my tits and my ass-- but I keep waiting for it to happen like my 10th grade health teacher warned us it would.

One of the many things I don't like about organized religion are rules about what you can and can't put into your body. Most of the Jewish rules about food I ignore with relish. Actually, I ignore them with shrimp and pork. I don't give a fuck what some inbred graybeards thought a thousand years ago about cloven hooved animals or bottom-feeders, and if someone wants to tell me that I'm not really Jewish because I like lobster tail, then they can go fuck themelves up against a brick wall. But, for Passover, for my wife, I play along.

It's a week? How bad can it be?

There's a little constipation from the matzah, sure, but it passes, if you'll forgive the pun. I don't mind. It is what it is. I just can't help but feel a little, well, guilty. Maybe that's just the constipation, though.

The one thing I do like about Passover are seders with my family. When my father lived in B'nei Brach, his seders started at sundown and would go until 2 or 3 in the morning, with everybody completely shitfaced, probably including the children. Since coming here in 1972, my father has been appropriately Americanized, and, like most Israelis who come to America, he's his own rabbi and his own God. He's realized that he doesn't need to do all that shit anymore, that, having fought in two wars to protect and defend Israel-- he's earned the right to, well, chill. Consequently, our seders are usually over in 15 minutes.

This bothers my wife, and I understand that. "Are we ever going to go to a real seder?" she asked me one day. I could have gotten insulted by that question, but how can I, an ardent jewpostor, have anything to say about that? Only, they are real seders-- conducted by one of the thousands of the motherland's saviors, one of its valiant warriors. One of Israel's hairy-chested, bombastic, good-natured, affectionate, passionate sons.

Whose favorite meal is shrimp stir-fry.

Happy Passover.

The Girdle Man

I went to have breakfast with my father on Thursday morning.


"We should do this more often," he said to me afterwards. "And you should be the one who is inviting me."


At least he didn't say that I'm the one who should be paying.''



My father always says what he is thinking. At least, I think he does. If he holds back, well, that would be scary, because I wouldn't want to know what is going on in his head if it contains a vault of things unsaid.



In dubious English.



He invited me to Saxby's, a burgeoning coffee chain that has franchise shops sprouting up like zits in this particular part of the world. The first time he asked me out to breakfast with him, he told me to meet him at "Sexboys." This was, to the best of my knowledge, an unintentional malapropism. Since he has been corrected, he persists in mispronouncing its name, but now does so cognizent of the error, and he now jokingly refers to our breakfast haunt as "Sexyboys," "Sexy's," and, most recently, "the Xylophone place." That last one I can't figure out for the life of me. My wife, in great consternation over this moniker, proffered, "Well, do they play xylophone music there?" In a stunning role-reversal, I put my hand on her shoulder and said,



"Honey, don't think so much."



When I pulled into Sexboy's parking lot, there was only one other car there-- my father's jet black BMW. I can't help but shake my head when I see this car. My father has a notorious hatred for cars, and they don't like him very much either. His first year in this country, he backed a car into a patrol car during a traffic stop for speeding. The next year, some maniac slammed into his car in a shitty section of Philadelphia. My father threw his car into drive and chased the guy for five blocks. At a red light, my father jumped out of his car and stormed up to the driver's side of the offending vehicle only to be greeted by the muzzle of a pistol being pointed at him. He wisely retreated.

Since the rockin' 1970s, my father has obliterated several other vehicles-- Oldsmobiles and Buicks, a Pontiac Bonneville. He's never killed a foreign car, so I guess it's good that, somewhere in the mid-1990s, my family decided somehow that it was too good to drive American cars anymore. Though a 1987 Volvo 740 GL quit on him in the middle of a snowstorm on the George Washington Bridge. My father took out his briefcase and stormed away from the car. "It abandons me? I abandon it! Fuck that!" he said when he got home two days later.



My father has always had a strained relationship when it came to cars. "A car is to get me from Poin' A, to Poin' B," is his most notorious vehicular catchphrase. Then what, you might argue, is a man espousing that philosophy doing behind the wheel of a BMW? Well, all I can say about that is, we're human beings. And what would we be if we weren't constantly contradicting ourselves? We wouldn't be being very human now, would we? Make too much sense and people will start calling you an animal.



Getting out of my car at Sexboys, I turned and caught a glimpse inside the window of my father's BMW. Thank God for cameraphones:

My father's BMW looks like a cubicle in a "Dilbert" cartoon. If you look really closely, you can see a sticky-note placed right in front of the speedometer. I guess this isn't really as dangerous as it looks: my father never looks at the speedometer anyway. He might as well have Post-Its covering the side and rearview mirrors, too.

I got my usual: meat, cheese, egg, bread-- coffee: whole milk and the sugar container upturned for forty-five seconds. He got his usual: light cream cheese on a sesame seed bagel-- coffee: black. When our food was on the table, I looked at the two disparate meals and wondered if I would be getting the bagel and black coffee someday, my unhealthy, poor-postured son seated across from me consuming copious amounts of sodium and sugar. Some day, maybe. Hopefully. I don't know.

Our breakfasts together are, well, unpredictable. I never know how they're going to go. Yes, there's always pontificating and swearing and at least some laughter. Or at least a derisive smirk and snort. There's always coffee. Ever the Israeli, he gave me my first taste of coffee when I was eight years old, and it flows through whichever veins of mine are not obstructed by pork detritus. Yes, I eat pork. And he eats shrimp. And God laughs at us, and at those who keep kosher. I think he's only ever really disappointed at the people who shoot each other in the world's alleyways, and when Joy Behar opens her mouth.

I told my father that I will be leaving my job in August to return to the streets as an emergency medical technician. It's funny-- I was afraid of telling my parents this because, as someone who holds a bachelor's degree (admittedly, it's in theatre, which is as useless as holding a bachelor's degree in strawberry cupcake development) and a master's degree, I was worried they would chastise me, maybe appropriately, for wasting my intellect and my life on a, well, manual career of certain poverty and servitude.

But, you know, my father rose to the occasion like the hairy, Israeli phoenix that he is. He didn't cut me down, or berate me, or make me feel guilty. He didn't tell me he was wasting my life. He was just my Daddy, and expressed his fears that I could be hurt in an ambulance accident, or be attacked by a psychopathic patient.

"Or partner," I chimed in, reminding him of the thick-necked paramedic who once tried to brain me with a clipboard.

He smiled. "Right. Or partner."

Lots of boys grow up thinking that their fathers are brilliant men. My wife's father, for instance, is a brilliant man-- and I suspect that being brilliant isn't easy, because my father-in-law takes forty-five minutes to put on a pair of pants and, if you go to "Target" with him and you're not careful, he will outright vanish-- possibly teleported to a Mensa meeting. A longtime friend of my wife's family described my father-in-law this way,

"He'll never look you in the eye. His eyes are always up, staring at some invisible chalkboard-- that only he can see-- and it's probably got all these complicated equations on it-- stuff you and me would never understand."

I don't know if my father is brilliant or not, and I'm not sure I remember ever thinking, when I was a boy, that he was. One thing I know for sure is that he and I are well-matched, in spite of the disparity in our command of the English language, and how different our breakfast choices may be. My wife's father has his invisible chalkboard. My father has his dashboard cubicle. It's all the same, really. More or less.

"What do I know?" he said to me one day, during a discussion about one of life's greater questions, "I'm just a girdle man." This he said with a twinkle in his eye, parrotting something I said to him years ago. He's the president of a company that makes undergarments for women-- and men-- and I said to him one day, not in anger, but definitely with great insensitivity, "Daddy, you're just a girdle man." I said it to him after he asked to see some piece of creative writing I'd done at age 12.

Just a girdle man. God, what an asshole I am. At least he's able to laugh it off now. Come August, I'll be "just an EMT." The son of a girdle man.

Praise be.

My Hoodie

You might be surprised to know that my favorite article of clothing is a hoodie.

Of course, in 2010, the hoodie is easily the most ubiquitous and obligatory element of clothing for people my age, and ten years younger, and older. Christ, every asshole you meet these days is wearing one, whether they're male or female. It's great because, in today's world, if somebody pisses you off, or tries to steal your purse and make a break for it, just grab onto their hoodie and choke the balls off of them.

The hoodie is like the leash and choke-chain of humanity. It's great.

Lots of people who wear hoodies look like hoodlums-- and I guess it's no accident that you can't say "hoodlum" without "hood." I don't think, personally, that I look like much of a hoodlum in my hoodie. Then again, I wear it over a dress-shirt and neck tie, and nice pants. Not only that, but, on the left breast section of the hoodie, I wear an enamel pin from the late 19th century with a beautiful rendering of the Union Jack and the words "Victoria League" engraved on it, which significantly deceases any potential hoodlumness. I don't think neckties and Victorian man-jewelry are the traditional accessories for those who typically don hoodies. I would never wear a white hoodie, because I think I'd look too much like a K.K.K. member with an identity crisis.

My hoodie is green, Philadelphia Eagles green, actually, though that is not the reason why I like it so much. You know me-- I could give as much of a shit about the Eagles as I do about Icelandic tap-dancing. My hoodie was given to me by my father, and maybe that's why I like wearing it so much. I don't wear everything he gives me, though. He's in the garment-making business, like all Israelis who aren't engaged in diamond-smuggling, camera sales or international espionage. He once gave me a pair of boxer-briefs to wear that his company made and I wore them once for six minutes and promptly threw them in the trash.

"They were crawling up my asshole like a tactical assault team," I complained. "No thank you."

But I do like the hoodie. A lot. I'm beginning to think, maybe too much.

When I look at pictures of me on Facebook, or pictures that wind up on other people's cameras, I find that I am wearing the green hoodie with uncomfortable regularity. There I am, sporting it in Pittsuburgh on my sister-in-law's couch!

Oh, there I am, shoveling snow in my green hoodie.

Hey-- I'm on vacation in beautiful, sunny Maine in my hoodie.

And now my hoodie goes to the Poconos! Looks great with my new green pants-- I'm a fucking St. Patrick's Day float.

When my wife taught pre-school at a small, Quaker elementary school, there was a child who had some definite Aspergian tendencies-- very rigid and literal. Oh, and he wore the same coat to school every single day, regardless of the weather, and regardless of whatever odor happened to be emanating from the coat-- he was oblivious to everything but his unalterable desire to be thus attired. In the Indian/Pakistani comedy, "East Is East" there's a young child who also exhibits this constant need to be attired in a huge, puffy coat with a fur hood, in spite of the contraindicated temperature. And his father routinely refers to his mother as a "bah-stad beetch," which is nice.

I worry sometimes that my irrational childhood tendency to obsess over a particular food or article of clothing or car have not transferred over into my adult life, because that could mean several unsettling things about who I am. I can justify it however I want-- I don't like wearing big coats, and the hoodie is insulated. It hangs on one of my bedposts and it's just so easy to throw on. It serves the purpose of a coat and a hat.

Um... I'm obsessed with it?

I suppose I'm not completely obsessed with it. I mean, I'm not wearing it today, and that shows that I can take a break, right? I wash it regularly, so I know it doesn't smell of salad dressing and generalized funk. I've never reached into the pocket and had the sensation that some insect or small mammal was crawling all over my hand. And that's good, right?

When I was a boy, I had a quilty piece. It had once been a quilt, but when the quilt had been loved and worried into near oblivion, all that was left was the quilty piece, a ratty, gray, smelly, knotted thing about the length of two inchworms having sex. When my father decided it was time for me to stop sucking my thumb, an activity always done in concert with fondling the quilty piece, he hid the damned quilty piece from me. Several times. I always found, of course, my eyes lighting up like the heavens as soon as they laid eyes on it, under some books, or inside his bedside table. Now I feel like it's almost time for some responsible adult to hide my hoodie from me, though I know I'll be very sad that.

Not as sad as I was when my quilty piece was M.I.A., of course.

Limousine Farts

As I type these words, my great-aunt is dying in Pompano Beach, as the great-aunts of many other sensitive, Jewish boys have done for years.

It's nearly impossible for me to think of my family as a thing, as a thing with many different parts, each one in its place, without Aunt Mickey. But soon, very, very soon, she'll be gone. Her stomach is riddled with holes. Her colon is torn to shreds. She's lost thirty pounds in two weeks. It seems that years of taking care of her erratic, bombastic, obscene, unpredictable and Alzheimer's-ridden husband has taken its toll and, while he is still going strong and physically healthy as a thoroughbred at 93, she will be finished, mentally brisk but physically in tatters, at 82.

She was told at the hospital that bowel surgery might save her, but she elected not to be saved-- a pretty predictable choice for a zealous atheist.

"Why should I go through all that?" she asked my father, who went down to Florida to visit her in the hospital, "my children don't need me, my grandchildren don't need me, my husband doesn't know me. I have no friends. Why can't I just decide that it's time to go now?"

Why indeed?

"Look, Mickey is a ball-buster," my father said to me in my dining room last night, coming over for an impromptu pow-wow. I smiled at that, because it's apparently true, and true to the last. "Nobody can tell her what to fuckin' do-- ever. I've known her for thirty-five years-- she was never sick-- not even one day. So, what? Now all of a sudden she's going to have nurses asking her, 'Do you have to make?' Stick some thing up her ass twice a day? Feed her like a baby? Fuck that. Mummy, she's doing it her way, and she's very happy."

A ball-buster is how Mickey will always be remembered in our family, and she would be proud of that moniker. In fact, she might even have left instructions for it to be carved onto her headstone, because that's how she rolls. She was a legend in the music industry far before it was commonplace to see a woman at the head of a Board Room. She had no problem telling men half her age or twice her age to go to hell and I have no doubt that, when she ran meetings, pit-stains and swamp-ass were the order of the day for her underlings.

She was the only person I ever knew who kept a black cook in her house, like Jack Benny or something. Back when she lived in New Jersey and would only summer in Florida, she and her husband would take the train and her "boy" would drive her Cadillac down to Florida so it would be there for her to maneuver erratically throughout the palm tree-lined streets.

And did she ever.

I can remember being in the backseat of Mickey's many Cadillacs as a child and silently praying and nearly wetting myself as she careened through the opposite lane of traffic and acquainting the barge-like car's wire-rimmed wheel-covers with the sidewalk. I also remember, as a very young boy, taking extreme delight in removing my shoes at her place in Jersey and running down her expertly-waxed parquet floors and sliding at least eight or nine feet. I remember watching Three Stooges shorts while lying on her enormous bed with my sister, and I remember finding the first piece of pornography I ever saw in my life: a Beta-Max videocassette called "The Hornymooners."

I remember the bathroom at her place in New Jersey, which was mirrored wall-to-wall, and the inside bathroom door was completely mirrored so that, when the door was closed, you saw your own reflection approximately eighty-seven thousand times. The mirror above the sink was also completely framed in gigantic theatre dressing-room high-wattage lightbulbs, so that you thought you were defecating directly on the Equator.

As we aged, one special treat we looked forward to as kids was going to stay with Mickey at her place in Florida for a week or two weeks, I forget. This event would happen when we got to be around sixteen. My eldest sister went first, of course, and took one of her best friends at the time. They behaved so poorly, and made Mickey scream so ballistically, that they were summarily banned from ever coming back. A few years later, the same exact thing happened to my other sister, who brought our cousin.

I never got my Florida vacation at Mickey's place, but I've made my peace with that. Chances are that it might not have had a happy ending anyway.

My oldest sister and Mickey repaired their relationship and it was better than before. For years, they spoke on the phone nearly every week, and, because my sister is the oldest, Mickey often talked to her like a friend, a confidant, and it indeed harkened back to the early days of my sister's life when Mickey played such an active role in bringing her up after my mother divorced her first husband. My sister is taking Mickey's decision to end her life this way extremely poorly, and with a lot of hostility and frustration. She loves her great-aunt, her last link to her grandmother who died so very young. And Mickey loves my sister.

"I'll never forget," Mickey told my father at the hospital in Florida, "taking your daughter, maybe when she was seven or nine, to a play on Broadway. Had my boy pick her up in a limo... and I was farting all over that limo's beautiful leather seats, and she was horrified! She said she never knew that Aunt Mickey farted! 'Aunt Mickey,' she said to me, 'you can't fart in here! This is a limo!' And I said, 'Honey, I fart wherever I want!'"

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this-- which is unusual for me-- usually the post kind of just pours out and writes itself. I'm not asking for "Awww, I'm so sorry" comments, though I'll take them, but I'm not really pining for sympathy. I'm not terribly sad, it sounds strange to say. As Mickey's son said on Thursday when she was sent home from the hospital with hospice care, "Friday's my mom's birthday, and I think it's going to be her best birthday ever."

And so maybe I just want to send out my wish that I hope Mickey's birthday, her last birthday, was her best ever.