January 1, 2014--My Father's Son

There is a story my Aunt Madeline took delight in telling. It was about something that happened twenty years after her brother, my father and my mother retired and moved to Florida.

Every six months Madeline would call to tell it to me yet one more time. I enjoyed hearing it again and again and took pleasure in her unrestrained joy when she recounting it.

You remember your cousin Irving? The dentist from Jersey City? He called all excited to tell me about something that happened on a visit to New York City.

"You'll never guess who I saw," he said.

"Who?" I asked.

"Your brother. David." 

"Where?" I asked, very confused. "Were you in Florida?" 

"Like I told you," Irving said, "I was in the city." 

"New York City?" 

"Yes." 

"That can't be," I told him, "He's lived in Florida. For twenty years."

"Maybe he's here for a visit." 

"I would know it if he was here. He's not here." I could hear he was becoming annoyed with me. 

"But," Cousin Irving insisted, "I saw him. In Greenwich Village. Walking along the park."

"You're wrong!" I yelled at him. You know me, I'm not shy about expressing my opinions.

"Well, I did see him in New York. And you know what's most amazing? I haven't run into him in more than twenty years, right?"

"Whatever you say," I said. "But," to humor him, I asked, "What's so amazing?" 

"Though I haven't seen him in twenty years, he looks exactly the same."

Aunt Madeline and I always laughed at this because, as she told him, "You didn't see Dave, you saw his son Steven who lives in the Village and looks just like him. I mean, he looks like how Dave looked twenty years ago."

Madeline long ago departed but I was reminded of this story the other day when I caught an unexpected image of myself reflected in a store window on Sixth Avenue. What struck me was that after twenty years, I now look just like my father did the year before he died.

Then about three years ago, visiting my 103-year-old mother, as she is inclined to do these days, we were talking about the past. It was and is for her the most vibrant time of her life.

She suggested we look at old family photographs. This gives her great pleasure. She has them loose in neatly-labelled boxes, not arranged in chronological albums. So a formal picture of her parents as bride and groom in late 19th century Poland is as likely to be found among photos from Passover dinner five years ago, or of me as a six-year-old, or Cousin Chuck at 12 on Brighton Beach showing off his Charles-Atlas-toned body.

Falling out of the box was a picture of a bearded, patriarchal figure clearly from the Old Country. "Who is that?" Rona asked. "I don't remember seeing him before."

"I don't know," my mother said, testing her memory. "He looks familiar, but . . ." I could sense her becoming frustrated at what she took as more evidence of her decline.

"I think maybe it's your father's uncle. He was a very learned man. Almost a rabbi."

"One thing, though," Rona said, "He looks just like Dad did."

"And Steven," my mother said, smiling at me.

Indeed he did, I thought. Not a surprise, but--

Last winter, two years later, we were back in Florida, again in my mother's living room, again listening to her stories from the Old Days, and again going through fading photographs.

On my lap I had the same box in which there were pictures of adolescent Chuck and her parents' wedding portrait.

"Let me take another look at Steven's great-great Uncle," Rona asked. "The one who looks so much like dad."

"And Steven," my mother recalled, with her cognitive powers intact.

"Where is it?" I asked, rummaging among the pictures of past Passovers and cousins' weddings and bar mitzvahs. "I'm sure it was in this box two years ago."

"How could it be missing?" Rona said, beginning to get annoyed at my inability to find it. I suspected wondering about the state of my own decline.

"Here. You look." I thrust the box over to Rona, who was curled up on the sofa.

Systematically she took each of the dozens of photographs out of the box and, while she was searching, stacked them in what appeared to be some kind of order.

"I can't seem to find them either," she confessed. "Whatever could have happened to them?"

"It's happening to everything here," my mother said. "Nothing is not where it's supposed to be. And everything is missing."

"No, it's not Mom," I said, reaching across to take her hand. "Everything is still in place. You're very careful about that. The apartment is perfect." And indeed it is.

Mystified, Rona put the newly-organized photos back in the box. "It's the strangest thing," she said to herself.

I  thought--are we losing the past? My father. Aunt Madeline. Cousin Chuck. My great-great uncle. The list is lengthening.

That's what time does, I rued. The circle is closing. Would I be next?

After a moment of sadness, I consoled myself by recalling that the image in the Sixth Avenue store window where I caught a glimpse of myself looking like my father did a year before he died was fully two years ago.