Untitled
December 18, 2018
Played
3.
Over Thanksgiving at my mom’s house I filled up a large cardboard box with some of my father’s books, most of them thicker and heavier than bricks. On the day we left, as I struggled with the box’s ungainly size and weight down the uneven stone path to the driveway, it occurred to me that I was carrying my father, that all the tomes I vowed to read to somehow keep him alive were probably in total about as heavy as his withered body as he lay in the ICU with his eyes closed and snorted in his last breath.
The photograph at the top of this page is from our Thanksgiving visit, the first one without him. He’s in this picture, in a framed photograph on the right side of the mantle. It’s from his 90th birthday party. All his siblings were gone by the time of that party, but Paulina, the wife of his closest brother, Dave, was there. She also came to his funeral and talked about her earliest memories of my father. She would come into Manhattan to visit Dave at the apartment where he was still living with my dad and their mom, my grandma, and Paulina would wait as the two of them glowered intensely into books for their college studies at a table in the kitchen, and then, for a break, the three of them would go out into the evening and roam all over the city, stopping at every bookstore they saw, walking and talking nonstop about ideas and history and politics and art and books, books, books.
That’s me in the painting above the mantle, in the red bathrobe, attached at the shoulder to my brother and by my gaze to cartoons. My mom painted it 45 years ago. More recently, to entertain the second pair of brothers in the photograph, she created the fire glowing at the center of the photograph. She’s staring into the fire, so you can’t see her face, but her face as it was when she was a teenager, before her life caught fire, is visible in the portrait to the right of the big painting above the mantle. It’s one of the few portraits by my grandmother, who preferred to paint seascapes with no one in them. She must have wanted to capture something with the portrait of my mom, just like my mom wanted to capture something in the painting of my brother and me staring into a television, just like my wife wanted to capture something with this photo of our two sons in front of the fire, just like I want to capture something with these words about the brief fire of a human life. It plays warmly on our faces for a few moments.
(to be continued)
Cardboard Gods 
Damn bro. You sure have a way with words. Beautiful post! Can’t wait to read the rest.
It is always such a wonderful feeling when I visit this site after a time and there is a new series of writings just getting started. This one had me really emotional. Time passing, what were pass down, what we choose to highlight and remember. It is really something. Tears in my eyes…. Thanks Josh!
Thanks Josh. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your Family. Take Care and Keep On Writing. I need a New Baseball Book from you.