“I only had the chance to know him for 17 years before he died unexpectedly”: in a new Personal History, Rivka Galchen remembers her father.
Students complained not only about my dad’s Tzvinglish but also about his handwriting. His accent was very heavy in part because he couldn’t hear well, so his speech was more like what he had read than like what he had heard. But his accent could have been managed if he had had decent handwriting. He was a lefty, from an era before lefties were celebrated, and maybe this had something to do with his terrible handwriting.
These forty-five-minute intervals were because, I think, he did everything while thinking about something else. He lived inside a series of dreams, and each dream could admit only one pedestrian task into its landscape. He often spoke of the life of the mind. He wished for my brother and me that we could enjoy a life of the mind. But, as with many phrases, I think my dad used “the life of the mind” in his own way.
I’m now as old as my dad was when he was a dad, staying up, transitioning into restfulness by watching those shows. Why was my dreamy dad such a fan of detective shows? The only other shows I remember him liking were political-argument shows, “Jeeves and Wooster,” and, for some reason that I have yet to unpack, “The Jewel in the Crown.” Was it because those detectives shrugged into dangerous situations coolly? Because they always said the right thing? Ultimately, they were men of action.
During the race, when, on the third lap, I passed a girl whose name I won’t mention to protect her from the indignity of it, she began to cry. To be passed by me was much worse than just coming in last. But my dad had no sympathy for her. The way he saw it, I had shown the world; I had never surrendered.
When my dad’s father died, he didn’t tell me. My mom told me that my grandfather had died, and that was why my dad was away, but that he would be home soon. When my dad returned, he attended our local Hillel each Friday, sometimes with me, to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Often, there weren’t the required ten men present to have a “real” service, with the Kaddish, and this frustrated my father: he had come for the Kaddish. As a child, I didn’t count among the ten—maybe also as a female.
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