My dad walked the talk to the very end.
Walk the talk, don’t talk the walk. That’s what I posted recently when Facebook asked me what advice from my father, Paul, I tried to live by. Truth be told, he probably didn’t say that exactly. He would have scoffed at the idea of providing sage advice. But truly he lived it. Quietly and humbly and without calling attention to himself. He did not believe you talked about the good deeds you did. You just did them.
His walking the talk took so many forms. To the blind and visually impaired kids in the Philly public schools, he walked that talk as the “Eye Guy.” Each day, he arose, pen behind ear, an appointment book clipped to mark the day’s commitments. He would walk up and and down those city streets, Monday through Friday, to schools throughout the city. He was the itinerant teacher, social worker, employment counselor, and family therapist. His daily appointment book was flush full of people to see about getting David R. or Chantal L. or Freddie B. an after-school job, or a front-row seat in chemistry, or an application to a scholarship for college. He didn’t talk up the small achievements — the boy who made it to college because he pushed him to apply, the girl who kept the summer job and contributed to her family’s food budget for the week.
Sometimes, walking those streets took a toll, like the time he learned that one of his students had been shot the night before. Or the kid he had come to see was moved elsewhere — to another neighborhood — to foster care.
Walking the talk looked so different to each of his three girls. For my oldest sister, Rebecca, he was the trusted pick-up guy. My sister was a single, fulltime working mom, a teacher. And she needed back-up for her son, Ariel, when she had to be in three places at once. No matter where he had to travel from, Paul showed up — to take Ariel to the playground, to his basketball games, to weekly outings to the ice cream parlor. Indeed, it was only years later that we learned how much he shared with his grandson at those outings. While slurping up those two-scoop vanilla cones, he shared pieces of his life with Ariel that we had never known. It was with Ariel that he shared stories about his army service during World War II — what it was like for a slightly pudgy unathletic Jewish kid from West Philly to find himself in the South Pacific, with a gun strapped to his back and a ship ladder three stories high to climb.
For my middle sister, Samara, he walked the talk on long cross-country drives, between Philly and New Mexico. Samara, with a young child, had decided late in life to go back to school to become a doctor. And when it came time for her to complete her training — in rural and urban clinics throughout New Mexico — Paul drove out to step in as the babysitter in chief. When Samara graduated med school in Albuquerque, Paul drove back and forth once again, across the flat midwestern plains and through the Rocky Mountains to bring his 5-year-old granddaughter Adina and Samara back East to a new life and the doctoring career that awaited her in her hometown.
For me, Paul walked the talk throughout my early years in New York City. I moved a lot in those days, from sublet to sublet. Each time I had to move, Paul would pull up to the stoop, first in his station wagon, with a mattress strapped to the top, and then in a U-Haul, carting endless boxes of books and records — my main possessions in those years — up and down those four- and five-story walkups. He’d do it in a single day, getting up at 5 am to show up at my doorstep, 90 minutes later, ready to work. He’d singlehandedly cart the boxes and the dresser I had picked up at the local Goodwill. It was sweat labor, and he never complained. Not about the baseball game on TV he was missing or the tickets he had to give up to the opera. At days end, we’d sit down to polish off the day’s special at the local diner, and off he’d go, for the drive back home.
For my mother, Eleanor, Paul walked the talk as chief assistant to the teacher-in-residence. My mother was a Hebrew School teacher, teaching 8- to 12-year-olds three to four days a week, Jewish history, Hebrew, and prayer. She threw herself into the task with a passion — our dining room table was always a cluttered hive of books, mimeographed work sheets, and cut-outs of the Hebrew alphabet. Paul ran the mimeograph machine, collected the books, and cut out those aleph, bet, gimel letters.
Paul continued to walk the talk as a teacher, father, and husband — even in retirement. Then one day he couldn’t walk at all. It started two years earlier. While reaching for a can on the top shelf of the pantry, he felt a weakness in his arm. He discounted it at first to the 30 laps he had swam at the Y pool the day before. But one week later, his arm still felt weak, and then two weeks and then three weeks, and then one month. When the weakness in his arm became more pronounced, traveling down to his hand, he had to stop driving. Instead, he took the bus downtown to volunteer at the Library for the Blind.
By this point, he (and we) knew something was seriously wrong. One doctor’s visit led to another, then to another, and then to a neurologist, who after prodding and extensive testing, told him the weakness that had traveled up the arm and then the other was not from his laps in the pool. It was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. When Paul called to tell us all the news, he laughed. How ironic, he said, that an unathletic guy who preferred watching nine-innings of a baseball game with the sound down and the radio tuned up full blast to “Aida,” would have a disease named for a famous baseball player.
With one hand fully inert, still he continued to walk the talk. He could no longer drive to deliver the frozen chicken dinners to his meals-on-wheels recipients. So he would sit at the dining room table, inserting single pieces of rye bread into packets that someone else would have to deliver to the seniors waiting for their weekly dinner.
In the months that followed, we watched helplessly as the disease crept from one part of his body to the next. His activities grew increasingly more limited, and he moved to a wheelchair. Never once did he bemoan his fate, at least not out loud.
Instead, he did something quite extraordinary. He decided to leave something behind. And so he started typing, first with two hands, and then with one hand, and then with whatever fingers worked for him, pecking out the story one key at a time. It was not just his story, but the tale of his family as well as my mother’s — their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, the cousins — whatever he knew about their lives in Russia, why they made hasty exits, and journeyed over rocky seas to new lives in America.
At some point, his fingers stopped working altogether. And so it fell to me to be his muse. He sat by my side and narrated while his speech was still strong. I typed. And I learned more about those days before he married and became a father. Soon he would share with me, as I typed along, all those stories he had once shared with Ariel from his days in the army.
Here’s just a sample:“My total time in army service was just over three years and yet my memories of those years constitute a major portion of this autobiography,” he said. “At the age of seventy-five, [when my disease was diagnosed], the time I served represents only 4 percent of my present life. But I think that period was important for several reasons.
“I took part in a great movement that brought the end of the axis power’s attempt of world domination. I lived away from an atmosphere of love and caring and culture, and yet was not disabled when I lived under different circumstances. I learned there are many bright and talented people, who because of their low expectations, accept a lesser job than they are capable.”
Three years after being away, he retrieved the house key he had kept in a safe place through infantry barrack drills and ships hoisted upon the rough seas. He walked back to his house after three years, to be greeted by his sister, his parents, and the love that awaited him.
He was more than 200 pages into his tale when the book ended. He had lost his ability to speak and so I had to stop typing. Before he could no longer narrate, though, he had named his story: “My journey through the twentieth century.” And then, he provided this subhead, as if an afterthought: “All history is based on the writer’s perceptions and prejudices. This is a report of my unremarkable journey. So this is what I thought I saw and how I think I felt at that time.”
His journey was hardly unremarkable. He had touched so many lives. Most assuredly, to the very end, he had walked the talk, not talked the walk.
Love you dad. Happy Father’s Day.
