funeral home to pick out a casket. It was the most surreal experience I had ever had at that point in my life. You meet with one of the people from the funeral home and they take you into a large room filled with a variety of different caskets. In effect, it’s a showroom, just like a showroom at a car dealership, but experiencing this for the first time made me a bit woozy and felt like I was in some kind of strange dream and that I wasn’t really there. I guess “surreal” is the best way to describe how I felt. I remember my mom choosing a casket and asking me if she thought my father would like it.
My sisters and their husbands arrived on the twenty second of November. I stayed up late into the night on the twenty third writing the eulogy. My mom asked me to speak about the love she and my dad shared and one of my sisters asked me to add a line that “family was the most important thing in my dad’s life.” I also wrote that “in his life and in his time my father saw sickness and tried to heal it, he saw hunger and tried to feed the hungry, he saw sadness and tried to end it, and amid a discomfiting world he never compromised on his ethics, integrity and honesty.” I was too grief stricken to read the eulogy and instead the rabbi presiding over the service did. I remember seeing my mother dressed in black for the first time in my life. I remember her strength and her resiliency, her courage, her devotion to my father and to my sisters and I. It was she, who in the darkest days of our family, held the entire family together.
My sisters stayed in Philly a week after the shiva, or mourning period, ended and then had to return to their families and jobs in Israel. I remember going with my mom to donate all my dad’s clothes to a charity and how sad that felt. I told my mother that I felt very badly that I was not there at my fathers side when he passed away and my mother replied “he was in a coma and would not have known if you were there or not.” I told my mom, “Yes, but I would have known.” In all the years that have gone by since my father’s passing I still wished I had been there by his side and to lend support to my mom at a time when she needed it the most.
My mom eventually decided to move closer to the center of Philadelphia where she could be a short bus ride away from the theater, symphony, and museums she and my father so dearly loved. I would come in on the weekends and help her pack and also to dispose of things she no longer needed or wanted. She moved into an apartment complex where her best friend and her husband lived. Initially I was concerned that my mom was moving from an apartment complex where she and my dad had many friends, but my mom was not a recluse after my dad passed away, and my concerns were allayed when she made many new friends in her new home. In January of 1986 my mom came to spend a weekend with me at my home in Maryland. I enjoyed taking her out to fancy restaurants every night and to movies during the day. When it came time for her to return home to Philadelphia I remember watching her get on the train and standing there as the train faded into the distance, as she, for the first time in more than forty-four years, returned home alone. I felt so sad inside for her as I stood there staring at the now empty train station and then I slowly walked out of the station to my car to return home.
PART TWO: Washington
I moved to Oakton, Virginia, part of the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area in June of 1978. I was hurting and needed a change of scenery after my divorce was finalized and found the Washington area everything Philadelphia was not. It was a vibrant city that had restaurants from all the corners of the globe, from Cuba, Bulgaria, Turkey, Ethiopia, Vietnam and many other countries. Philadelphia was the typical city that had Chinese and Italian restaurants and was just beginning to have its first French restaurants. The television news in the metro D.C. area had a lot more international content than did Philly, perhaps because it was centered in our nations capitol and having been a political science major in college as well as a current events junkie I was in heaven. Washington had somewhat of a European flavor with restaurants that had seating outdoors. I read somewhere that the government employed more engineers, lawyers, and scientists than anywhere else and this helped make the Washington area a highly educated workforce and the high end restaurants and shopping malls catered to this clientele. Because it was a transient area where people moved in and out all the time it had a totally different type of population than Philly which was a city you were born in, retired, and died.
When I was in Philly most of the people I knew never traveled beyond Atlantic City, New Jersey or the seashore and even New York to them was a foreign place. I had met very few Philadelphians who traveled to other cities in America and few if any who visited other countries. Philly was known as a blue collar town where fights routinely broke out at sporting events, and even the local hockey team, the Flyers, was known more at that time by their moniker, “The Broad Street Bullies” for all the fights their players started in games where pummeling their opponents and leaving them bloodied at times seemed more important than winning the game. Washington was not that kind of town. It had an international flair, with embassies from a hundred different countries, dozens of restaurants from different countries, and an educated workforce more in tune with what was going on the world, and not just their own neighborhood.
June was a strange time to move as it was the beginning of the summer when most people took their vacation. The sweltering heat of August in Washington was one thing it did not have in favor of Philly. I somehow became used to September as the beginning of change more than Spring or any other season. Perhaps this was due to twelve years of elementary and high school and five years of college and graduate school beginning in September. It just seemed as though everything began in September. The Supreme Court began its sessions the first Monday of every October but in September people looked forward to the start of the courts upcoming session and the possibility that the upcoming Court session could result in a decision that might fundamentally change the way we lived. Spring was always a welcome relief from winter, especially a harsh winter, but few things begin in Spring. The superb college basketball playoffs are coming to a conclusion by the end of March and springtime was a month that came after the end of the football season. The weather was great in Spring but more often than not Spring seemed to symbolize the end of Winter and just a short few months until the summer vacation season began. Washington was a great football town and it was exciting to be a part of the community, especially during the Redskins championship run. It was the one thing that brought the entire communities of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. together, with everyone having a common interest in seeing the Redskins victorious and people desiring seasons tickets had their names put on a waiting list that was eleven years long.
September seemed to be the beginning of things. Families were back from their vacations, their kids started elementary and high school, and college semesters began. The summer was a time to relax and forget one’s troubles and take a break from the maddening crowd. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge was routinely backed up for miles as thousands of Washingtonians made their weekly trips to Ocean City, Maryland every Friday during the summer. Most companies did not bring on new hires during the summer months and waited until September. In many ways September seemed to be the harbinger of change and everything new, whether it was a new job, a student entering a new school year with different teachers and books, businesses ramping up to close out the year in as big a way as possible, and government beginning as well as the federal government’s fiscal year ended September 30th and the new budget would signify changes to come. Everything in September seem to be geared to change. You are saying goodbye to vacation time, and the days are growing shorter and shorter as the summer draws to a close. I always found that saying goodbye is never a happy thing and that there is no sadder word than “goodbye” and September seemed to signify saying goodbye and beginning something new at the same time.
I loved living in the Washington area because of the constant change. There was building going on all the time, whether it was new businesses or homes. It never seemed to be roads, unfortunately, and the traffic in the Washington area always seemed to get worse and worse. It was one of the few places I lived where working seven miles away entailed an hour sitting in my car every morning. Washington did not have everything over Philly, however. There was no feeling of ethnicity to the Washington area. Unlike a Philly or a Baltimore it was not a city of neighborhoods. Philly had its Chinese, Black, Italian, Irish, and Jewish neighborhoods that all contributed something unique to the flavor of the city. Where the
