Remembering My Dad

March 25, 2019 at 9:33 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

On Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 3 months and 3 days before his 61st birthday, my dad died of cancer. What I’m going to do now is try to paint an honest portrait of my dad — or, at least, an honest portrait of my possibly flawed, probably horribly incomplete understanding of the person who among many other things happened to be my dad.

Not everything I say here will be flattering. My goal is leave a meaningful record of the man who raised me, and I don’t think that a memorial can be meaningful if all it does is say that so-and-so was a great man who [insert whitewashed list of positive qualities here]. If you are offended by any of what follows, then … well, I was going to type “I’m sorry,” but typing this, I realize that I’m not. I’ve been told that there is no right or wrong way to grieve, and this is how I need to do it.

I can’t promise that this will be very interesting or well written, since I’m writing it primarily for myself. That said, Seb and Jack, if it’s the future and you’re reading this — I hope you at least give it a shot. I wish that one of my great-grandparents’ or great-great-grandparents’ kids had written something like this about them, because I want to know what they were really like, as opposed to just “some old people who died before my time.” To you, Seb and Jack, your grandpa is just some old guy in pictures who died before your time. But he was a real person first.

I suspect that the first impression most people formed of my dad was that he was smart. He was, in fact, very smart, and his intelligence aggressively exhuded itself. He wore glasses, had a beard, and spoke assertively. Interestingly, my dad was not a good teacher. He lacked patience for stupid people or, really, for anyone who didn’t promptly understand what he was trying to convey. He wasn’t an especially good writer or public speaker. Yet I think that anyone who knew him would say that he had a professorial air, and in private conversation, he commanded a powerful eloquence. He loved to lecture and could weave a lengthy, intricate, and well-organized explication of seemingly any topic without any preparation. One memorable time, when I was a kid, our conversation somehow meandered to the point where my dad delivered a comprehensive lecture on the workings of a toilet. Did he prepare for this? I would bet my life he didn’t. I think that the subject just happened to come up and he was the sort of guy who could deliver an impromptu, from-the-ground-up lesson on how a toilet worked.

I’m not ashamed to say that my dad was smarter than me. He had a master’s degree in physics and might have finished his PhD if his project hadn’t fallen through. When he couldn’t finish his PhD, he switched to computer programming and was brilliant at it. He got straight A’s all through high school and college with the exception of one B. (Which was, amusingly, in gym class. But notwithstanding the implication of this wry factoid, my dad didn’t fit the “nerdy kid who got all A’s except in gym class” trope. He went to the gym regularly and was in great shape.) By contrast, science was always my worst subject in school, I quit my education at a bachelor’s degree, and I lasted six months as a computer programmer before my incompetence forced me to quit. I also never exceeded my dad’s skill at chess. So from an intellectual standpoint, I looked up to my dad my whole life. Given this and my dad’s fondness for and skill at lecturing, I absorbed all of his beliefs as I grew up.

My dad was the person everybody came to when they needed advice about big life decisions. Whether you were buying a printer, a car, a house, or anything in between, somehow it was understood that my dad could tell you what to do. And, amazingly, he could. I don’t know of any instance in which someone asked my dad for advice and he steered them in a woebegone direction, but I do know at least a couple of people who disregarded the advice he gave them and whose lives were bitterly worse for it.

Unfortunately, one of the lessons my dad taught me indirectly is that being smart and logical is not a free pass to forming accurate opinions. Even the very smartest people have blindspots, and as someone whose favorite role in a cerebral conversation was to talk, my dad was not particularly inclined toward developing a quality of open-mindedness.

In some respects, his blindspots were amusing. On one vacation with our family friends, it came to light that my dad believed that if a fair coin flips tails 10 times in a row, then it is overwhelmingly likely that the next flip will be heads. This, of course, violates a fundamental principle of probability — that independent events don’t “care” about each other and there’s no such thing as any particular outcome being “due.” Yet my dad constructed a sophisticated argument, based on probability theory, that no one could refute. Everybody present for the debate teamed up against him, battering his conclusion with increasingly elaborate arguments and thought experiments, but we never dislodged the cornerstone of his flawed defense, and so we failed to change his mind. I reflected on this incident for years afterward, and it took me the better part of a decade to figure out what was really wrong with my dad’s reasoning.

He was the kind of guy who always won every argument. To this day, one of the most singularly satisfying sensations I have ever experienced in my life was listening to my dad argue a position I agreed with. Naturally, then, the flip side was that arguing with my dad when you knew (or at least suspected) that he was wrong was beyond maddening.

And some of my dad’s logical blindspots were not so amusing. Like many Soviet immigrants, he was intellectually scarred by his experience of communism. He moved to America to get away from it, but he saw its specter everywhere. Raising taxes for any reason was communism. Letting the government do anything to improve social welfare was communism. Any matter that the government was involved in could be improved by getting the government out of it. If the economy could just be allowed to operate without the government’s interference, then the invisible hand of the free market would magically produce the best possible outcome for everyone.

My dad’s political framework was a very simple one. The central question of it was, to what extent should the government tax the people and provide services? The answer lay somewhere on a slider between 0% (anarchy) and 100% (communism). And while it might be difficult to pinpoint the exact location where the slider should be set, it was easy (in my dad’s mind) to tell whether the slider’s current position was too close to anarchy or too close to communism. Naturally, my dad believed that America’s slider was set way, way, way too close to communism, and so the trivially correct political choice was always to vote for the party that wanted to reduce taxes (the Republicans) rather than the party that wanted to raise them (the Democrats). I don’t think my dad ever really understood how any smart person could vote for a Democrat. Such people were always, in his mind, “young, idealistic liberals” who wanted to save the world but were too naive or too stupid to understand how the world actually worked.

My dad believed firmly that everybody got what they deserved in life. If you were rich, that’s because you worked hard and deserved to be rich. If you were poor, that’s because you deserved to be poor. To back this up, my dad needed only to point to his own experience: he, an immigrant, came to America with nothing, and by working hard, he was able to support his family and buy a house and attain a comfortable upper middle class life. America was truly a free country! Anyone could achieve anything! Except, the “nothing” that my dad moved here with was actually quite a lot of something. He had an advanced degree, a highly valuable professional skill, and white skin. At first we lived in an apartment, but it was an apartment in an affluent neighborhood with good public schools.

What my dad could never see was that his conclusions about the rich and the poor were only valid if the starting playing field were level, and the American playing field is tilted heavily toward the privileged. I, who was raised in a stable, loving home, taught how to read and do math before I ever set foot in a school, railroaded all the way through college, and able to depend on money and a place to live if all else failed, could (and did) screw up a lot more and still turn out okay than someone whose parents and early childhood surroundings were not so conducive to a life of academic achievement.

Another of his blindspots concerned Jews and Israel. I’m pretty sure my dad did not believe in god, but our family technically moved to America as Jewish refugees, and the Jewish heritage (if not the mysticism) was important to my dad. He made me have a bar mitzvah, and throughout my childhood we made token efforts to observe some Jewish holidays and even sometimes go to synagogue. Although being Jewish did not have a major impact on my dad’s life, it did affect some people he knew in his generation, and it sure as shit affected the fuck out of his parents’ generation. As a result, I suspect that my dad felt a keen sense of persecution, if not for himself than at least for his people.

Unfortunately, in the modern world, this deeply ingrained sense that Jews were a persecuted people became corrupted. My dad believed that Israel was entirely blameless in all geopolitical affairs. The worldview he passed down to me — and which I solidly clung to into my early 20’s — was that all Israel wanted was to be left alone, while the Palestinians and Arabs and everybody else in the Middle East just wanted to murder all of the Jews for absolutely no reason (well, unless “being anti-Semitic barbarians” counted as a reason). Throughout my childhood I was fed a steady diet of pro-Jewish propaganda chain emails, the central thesis of which was always that Jews were wonderful, Muslims and Arabs sucked, and the only reason anybody in the West thought poorly of Israel was because (for absolutely no reason except raging, irrational anti-Semitism) everything that happened in Israel was spun to make the Jews look bad by a massive, global, international anti-Semitic media conspiracy.

My dad was one of the smartest people I will ever meet. And he thought this.

In college I had a friend who lived in Dayton, which isn’t far from Columbus, so we sometimes carpooled. Once, when my dad drove me and Kevin back to Cleveland, the conversation took some or other turn on account of which my dad had occasion to share with us his Middle Eastern foreign policy, which was (I am not exaggerating) to nuke literally the entire Middle East except for Israel. This was obviously the right thing to do, my dad believed, and the only reason it wasn’t put forward as an option by American leaders was “political correctness.” Naturally, Kevin and I balked at my dad’s recommendation of casual genocide. We tried to argue that most of the people in the Middle East weren’t terrorists and just wanted to live their lives, same as him, and killing innocent people is, you know, wrong, but such feeble observations did nothing to shake my dad’s resolve. I remember him saying that we were just “young, idealistic liberals” who knew how to “nitpick” his proposal but didn’t understand the world well enough to come up with our own solutions. Well, he was sort of right. To this day, I don’t know how to resolve the Middle East situation, but I still don’t want to nuke the place.

If I talk a lot about politics, it’s because politics played a role in the distance that eventually developed between me and my dad. I wasn’t one of the stereotypical kids who go through a “teenager phase” in which I hate my parents. All through my childhood and college, I liked hanging out with my parents and thought highly of them. To this day I think my parents were cooler than I was, if “coolness” is measured by the number of friends you have and by how active your social life is. It was never hard to talk with them, in part I suppose because my dad didn’t mind doing a lot of talking. We watched movies together, played board games together, and my dad and I sometimes even read the same books. In college, my parents would come visit me and we’d see plays and have dinner together.

But by the time I graduated college, the worldview that my dad had so meticulously sculpted in my brain had formed significant fissures. It couldn’t withstand the bombardment of facts and arguments that weren’t occluded by the logical blindspots that my dad had. I was no longer satisfied with being called a “young, idealistic liberal” (in part because, ironically, I wasn’t actually a liberal) or being seen as a child to lecture to. I wanted to participate in conversations with my dad as his peer. And in retrospect, this was really stupid. I knew that something was wrong with my dad’s Republican philosophy, but I was too lazy to do my research and learn how to articulate an alternative worldview. As I mentioned, my dad was a logical powerhouse, so even when he was wrong, you really needed to know your shit if you expected to get any concession out of him. And I did not even remotely know my shit.

Sensing that I was no different than who I’d been as a child — because I wasn’t — my dad continued to talk to me in much the same way as he always had. I tried to argue with him more, but my positions were half-baked and he dismantled them easily. I took offense to the fact that my dad didn’t award me the respect I was due, but in reality I wasn’t due any respect. We both had blindspots. His caused him to ignore essential facts of history, economics, and sociology, while mine caused me to flee to Madison, putting distance between myself and my dad forever.

One of my dad’s more stereotypical “dad” qualities was that he wasn’t overtly affectionate. We didn’t start saying “I love you” to each other until he got cancer. But he loved me, and I always knew he did. Never once did he say a single word to make me feel bad about any of the money he had spent on me over my life, or more generally, any of the sacrifices he had made for me. He gave without any question of resentment or debt. If I ever imposed on him for a favor, he responded promptly and helpfully. Not long ago, my wife casually mentioned to my mom the title of the book she was reading me. It wasn’t a particularly special book; the title was just given in passing small talk over Facebook messenger. My mom told the title to my dad, and my dad got the book right away and read it himself so he could talk about it with us. His expressions of fatherly love were not always explicit, but they were felt, as he took every opportunity he could to indirectly connect with me. Toward the end of my last visit with him, I thought about what I should say to him before I said goodbye to him in person for the last time. The words came easily: “You were a good dad. You gave me everything I needed to have a good life.”

For all the space that I devoted to it in this memorial, I don’t think that my dad’s intelligence was his proudest characteristic. I believe that the quality my dad most prized in himself was his optimism. I don’t have any memories of my dad saying, “I’m smart” or “I’m logical.” But many, many times throughout my life I heard my dad say, with a touch of pride, “I am an optimist.” He believed that everything would work out, if not for the best, then at least for the good enough.

As children, we believe that our parents are all-powerful immortals who can fix anything, and at some point everybody learns that their parents are just ordinary people. Except, in a way, I never did. In a manner of speaking, my dad really could fix anything. In high school, I could come to him with any existential fear — the economy is failing, the environment is on the brink of collapse, terrorism could destroy us all — and my dad would respond with one of his trademark off-the-cuff lectures in which he argued with ironclad logic that, in point of fact, everything was fine and would continue to be fine, and to the extent that it wasn’t, the free market would eventually take care of everything. I was a lucky person whose father could, in a very real (if somewhat intellectualized) sense, make anything and everything okay. It should be clear by now that, if I were to hear any of these lectures again, I would no longer believe in the accuracy of most of their evidence or any of their conclusions, but I still treasure the deep sense of optimism that my dad — and, of all the people in my life, only my dad — could instill in me.

In regards to his cancer, my dad was similarly optimistic. He had some kind of rare lung carcinoid that was supposed to be slow progressing, and there were many treatment options available. To a degree, this optimism came to fruit. The year that he was diagnosed with cancer, I saw my dad four times — Memorial Day, my cousin’s wedding in June, my wedding in October, and Thanksgiving — and every visit was just like a normal visit. I learned of his diagnosis in April 2017, and my dad continued to work for over a year. By the time my parents came to Madison in September 2018 to meet their grandson, my dad wasn’t working anymore, but he could still walk around and argue. Lesions aside, he looked and sounded normal. He rocked his crying grandson to sleep, and then he (civilly) argued with me about politics after I baited him with questions about Donald Trump. He lived as though he might live for many years.

I have no idea how to fucking end this, so here’s my favorite “Boris’s dad” story from my childhood. I had amassed a giant cache of candy on Halloween, and somehow or other I told my dad that I wanted to save the best candy for last and eat the less exciting candy first, as (I imagine) many children casually do, and which in 99.9% of circumstances is an insignificant life decision that passes without comment. Not for my dad! He embarked upon an impassioned crusade to convince his elementary-school-aged child that “saving the best for last” is a corrupt philosophy for pessimists and fools. As proof, he offered the following parable. To this day, I don’t know if he’d made it up himself or heard it somewhere. I wish I’d asked him.

Two philosophers each have a cluster of grapes. One of the philosophers is an optimist, while the other is a pessimist. The pessimist wants to save the best grapes for last, so he looks for the nastiest, wrinkliest, most rotten grape on his cluster, and eats it. It’s horrible. He then looks for the second-nastiest, second-wrinkliest, second-most rotten grape on his cluster, and eats that, and so on, so that at each point in the process of consuming the cluster, the pessimist eats the worst grape available. Even when all the shitty grapes are gone, he eats the worst of the good grapes, such that he never enjoys a single grape of the entire cluster.

The optimist, by contrast, looks for the plumpest, juiciest, most inviting grape, and eats it with great delight. He then looks for the second-plumpest, second-juiciest, second-most inviting grape, and delightedly eats that, and so on, so that he’s always eating the best of the available grapes. And even after all the good grapes are gone, he looks for the best of the worst grapes, so that he enjoys the entire cluster all the way down to the rottenest grape. This is why, my dad argued, you should not save the best of your Halloween candy for last, but instead always go straight for the best of everything in life, and that way you will enjoy it all the way down to the end.