Tomorrow night will be eighteen years since you left this earth. I hope you found a better place where all your friends and relatives will recognize you whether or not they knew you with your moustache. Only you would seriously ask me (when perfectly physically healthy and mentally healthy for you) if you should shave half your moustache so when you reached the other side people who knew you before would recognize you….

Eighteen years and I miss you more than ever. Truthfully I didn’t miss you for years as I believed you were ready to die–always complaining about your forever gone friends and family–and it seemed to me selfish to want you alive.

I thought you were very old. Now 77 is the new beginning of old age. Oh lets get onto something less depressing.

I moved into my house last Thursday. Lucia came from NY, for the weekend, just to help me. CLo and her husband W came from Atlanta. They were beyond selfless and I’m so grateful. You taught me to be a good friend and that lesson has paid off in spades.

The town I live in has a Wal Mart. I was looking at the 40th of an aisle devoted to Passover and they had Yazeirt candles which aren’t used on Passover but are used on death anniversary’s. I took it as a sign that for once I should be a good daughter and i bought one. I so hope I remember to light it tonight.

I’m exhausted and not in the mood to write. I can’t do you or me or anybody justice and I have to see how much money I have lost in three hours. It’s like a game this money losing thing. Once I made money and now…It’s not the stock market you loved. It’s stacked against all but who work in the highest Wall Street positions Oh let me shut up.

I don’t know if they celebrate death days where ever you are. If they do I hope you get to have a perfect day or maybe they all are. Like you I want to believe…

I guess I should tell you I bought an apartment in New York in 97 for about the amount I would have spent when we looked in 88. The difference was the building was classier, the apartment more beautiful and more renovated than any we saw but oh so small. Though in my imagination now…

I sold it this past October. I know you thought people lost IQ points for every mile they moved out of the NY/suburb area and had an elaborate formula for the IQ loss, but I could sell my apartment for more money than you would have believed and I saw last year that this past spring summer and fall would probably be the last of the good times.

Though maybe they’re going to come back in a slightly different format. Like a bad TV show remade for a bigger audience.

So much has happened. I wouldn’t know where to start. That’s probably my book.

So let me just say I bought a house. Yes a free standing house–but not being a fool I hired people to do everything. It’s much cheaper here. I moved to South Carolina.

I know you don’t think they let Jews in South Carolina but it was actually the first state to guarantee Jews religious freedom. Yes I know that was a long time ago.

It’s a nice place. I truly like it. My house is perfect for one person who likes both solitude and company. It will be perfect later if I need a roommate or help (and have the money for that–the times they are different than any you imagined in my lifetime.)

I’m one person and while I want schools and things to be great, be real, daddy. Schools in Manhattan were only becoming good in the past fifteen years because of helicopter parents–a mode of parenting you invented. Libraries–we might have the best research libraries anywhere but lending ones…not so good.

I actually like the lending library here. Not that I have joined yet. It’s near my house and I will join after I move two weeks from last Friday. And I want the schools to be good. But I love the low taxes–yes I’m a Dem but…

Our new President talks about redistributing wealth. When I personalize I hate the thought. Everybody we know is educated and to some extent a have. Shouldn’t more people be? I don’t buy the notion that many or most people are meant just to be clerks at Wal Mart. This subject is too complex for me right now daddy and I hear you arguing with me in the background…But I know that you believed people should have opportunities and I do believe President Obama means the same.

I’m burnt daddy. Being audited. I know you taught me never to fear the IRS and I don’t but the paperwork’s a bitch. And my frigging lawyer from the apartment sale in New York still hasn’t sent me the paperwork and I need it if I’m going to do my taxes on time, and you betcha I’m going to have them into the accountant before I move. Though getting my taxes to him a year ago plus a week might have caused this problem.They were very complicated and that week was the first leg of my move. The Bear went under that weekend; I didn’t know if I could sell my apartment.
I honestly didn’t think that if a brokerage house folded into another brokerage house the first brokerage house still has to send you a 1099. And four fifths of the things they asked for they have–under the names listed on my 1099′s. So I’m freaked but not overly. It’s just I wanted this time to be stress free. Or just a bit because life without stress isn’t supposed to be good.

Uh brokerage houses. I hate to tell you what happened to most of your favorite ones. You wouldn’t believe it. As I said Bear Stearns well didn’t really fold but is a shell of itself. When my apartment was in contract Lehman Brothers did fold. There’s so much you wouldn’t believe. Frank Rich who used to be the theater critic explains how much we have all changed. It’s an incredible article and sort of sums a lot up. From theater to OpEd. Life is one big stage, and Frank Rich’s the one man I would hunt down and marry if he weren’t already.

You had your stroke on 3/26 which happened to be your 52nd wedding anniversary. Poor mommy had to live with the best of days and the almost worst of days being one and the same for a decade. You died on 3/31–eighteen years ago. You and mommy were bookends as she died a decade later.

My 90′s the decade of my discontent for many reasons–including many that had nothing to do with you or mommy began on 3/31/91 and ended on 10/14/01.

Maybe next time I will explain blogging to you and how in various ways it remade my life.

Ms. Maya Hunt was sitting at her computer watching her rapidly dwindling portfolio. She thought she had $600 every day this year in unrealized (not sold) losses. One 07 statement she had to give her accountant showed 200K in (sold, stock or money market fund never to be seen by her again) realized losses. When times get tough…She poured a triple Absolut and thought she should really invest in liquor companies.

Just as she finished pouring the phone rang. Her cousin Madison didn’t even say hello but began screaming about AIG and Warren Buffet. Madison was walking down West End Avenue and couldn’t care less who heard. She hung up and realized Maya hadn’t said a word. Not even “how are you?” Ill mannered her mother had always called that branch of her family.

Madison saw her pot dealer Frankie who kissed her and began talking about how his brother was walking away from a 300K condo loft deposit. When Frankie and Madison parted ways at 97th Street, Frankie saw his clfriend (client friend) Henry. Damn if Henry wasn’t screaming to himself. Nah, he had a bluetooth on.

Henry, an intellectual property lawyer, was on the phone with his clfriend, Neil, who had just had the last of his margin called. He didn’t know how he was going to tell his wife. Henry tried to sound encouraging as he tried even harder to get off the phone so he could buy some weed from Frankie.

Neil bought a bunch of tulips from a Korean grocery and almost fell on the slushy icing up snow, and walked up the 12 flights of stairs. By the time he arrived in the apartment he thought of something to tell his wife but Maya was sprawled on the couch face down, a drink knocked over and an unlit joint in her hand.

Remember the first time we went to London as a family? Elka and I were in high school, and very into English rock–oh no that was me. We were all into Carnaby Street and English fashions. It seemed so foreign then; the ambulances that blared a noise that sounded a bit too much like Nazi movies; tinned fruit for breakfast.

I apologize for thinking it cute that you and mommy liked Carnaby Street so much and that Elka and I kind of made fun of and kind of loved your blue Carnaby Street blazer you were to wear for the next 20something years. I don’t remember what mommy bought. Mini dresses and skirts I know as she had better legs than I did.

You were younger than I am now. Bummer. I was going to ask if you thought about death and/or getting old and then I remembered two things: that trip where you “misplaced” our passports and other things constantly as you were convinced you were rapidly becoming demented. Your father and mommy’s father had died at 55. You thought if you were going to survive physically your mind wasn’t.

Your mind survived and you went onto as much glory as a CPA can have. It’s strange as I can’t remember you loving the arts particularly, but you loved artists, writers and a certain Russian male ballet superstar who agreed with your political views. Fortunately I have blocked your politics from my mind. Alone we hardly talked politics. After the teenage and post teen years when all we did was fight except on vacation or in restaurants–the neutral zones, we worked hard at getting along.

When I moved back to New York and Boston University said I could take any three courses at The New School to graduate you lobbied hard for me to take Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s course on Death & Dying with you. Wow daddy what I would have done later to have taken that course. But then I didn’t want to take a course on dying and I didn’t want to take a class with you. What if I met somebody? What was I supposed to do? “Oh I would love to go out with you. Let’s just say good night to my father.”

Of course you were a big draw. Most of my boyfriends and male friends adored you. I sometimes wondered who they liked better. I know it wasn’t your politics though I think you toned it down a bit for my friends. Poor mommy. I don’t know if you ever knew that you were permanently kicked out of husband’s night at mommy’s Brandeis group.

As they met one Saturday night a month and most of your friends and immediate cousins were dead or worse–worse meaning living in Florida–that was a big thing. Mommy could still see then and would literally graph your nights as you needed to be out every Saturday night or have company. I think I vowed then to truly learn to like myself as we’re all left alone at certain times in our lives.

I have to remember all the little things about you. What made an artist ask if he could draw you when we were at a restaurant your last Father’s Day?

After you died a nurse from the hospital called and spoke to Elka–mommy and I were at the diner:
I just want you to know how handsome your father looks.

In retrospect that’s kind of weird but it was very comforting. You never faded into the woodwork. I was so proud when we meet somewhere in Manhattan as you looked so great. Though I hated it when maitre de’s would try to give us the private banquette for lovers. You of course found it funny, and funnier when I would say rather primly “he’s my father. Please.”

When I came home from the former Soviet Union, I remember thinking how old and tired you looked. It was the first time I had ever thought that about you. You were 75 and had less than two years left on this earth.

One night you were waiting for me on a Ralph Lauren bed outside 40 Carats in Bloomingdales. I was two or more hours late as I was working in Jamaica and the subways had been out. It was the first time I added “not quite frail” to you. You said you were going to leave if I hadn’t come then but I know you would have waited.

The Academy Awards were on four or five days later. I told you I wasn’t going to watch and you yelled at me for not watching a “historic important” event. You didn’t understand the concept of having to be up at 5:30 to be at work on time, and I was so energetic and young….You went on and on. I ended up yesing you just to get off the phone. I yes’d you a lot. You would plan a trip to Europe for me, I would get there and change all the reservations. You never minded. You just had to be right, had to do the planning and probably would have traveled for me or with me if given the opportunity.

I always have wished that wasn’t our last conversation but you know, we had enough great ones.

On March 31, it will be eighteen years since your death. I badly need a center. Somebody to talk to. I hope you don’t mind if I chose you.
Both this house thing, and blogging have me crazed. Many of my blogging friends have stopped blogging or blog randomly now. I don’t feel part of a community. When I first began to blog I loved that feeling of being part of a fairly new grassroots movement. Sometimes I feel very much my age, suffering from early dementia, and jealousy of every younger blogger who can remember her name and do ten things while spelling her name for the order taker because the web site’s she’s ordering from is down. I know I sound bitter and really don’t mean to. The past two and a half years have been overwhelming and the two years before that–constant dental work–weren’t a picnic. I should take all my skymiles, earned from the renovation, and go somewhere, but I live at the beach and would feel too guilty. And the rapidly dwindling resources…unfortunately a lot are dwindling because of the stock market not my buying. This has led me to scale down the renovation. Oh life, can’t live with it or without it…

I feel sad that blogging wasn’t around when I was in my 30′s or even a bit later as I led a much more exciting Sex in the City type life. Few people care about memories, it seems. They want it to happen today or preferably sometime tomorrow if they can learn about it today. I will probably feel different about this after I move in and the shock of actually living in a house I own with all my own stuff wears off.

I just ordered a day bed with extra mattress for the guest room and a very conservative, for me, couch. Almost everything else can wait until I’m in the house. The kitchen cabinets are coming next Wednesday. Guess I’m free to tackle taxes and find the source of misinformation the health insurer underwriters have about me. Though how I can prove I never was hospitalized, without doctors notes affirming to that, is beyond my understanding. Please excuse my frenzied anxious state. I know that if pre-existing clauses end next year, they’re going to add a clause saying it doesn’t affect me and me alone. I am my father’s daughter. We major in worrying and thinking up absurd things that nobody else would think of and then it does come true. I’m very into positive thinking and I strongly believe we’re in charge of our destinies to a point, but old habits die hard–and the to a point means we have to acknowledge somethings in life can’t be changed just because we want them to be

The next will be more relevant to today. I found myself reliving a memory and wanted to write it without including my father’s POV. Frankly his views befuddle me though I understand more than most people. I suppose I will be going back and forth from memory posts to what’s wrong with the world today?
Hi Daddy
Do you remember when you told me that if I went with you to a meeting of the Mir Young Men’s Club, I would meet a bootlegger?

I knew that the club consisted of people from your parents generation and you were the youngest active member. I was eleven and in lust with the lure of both gangsters and FBI agents You had told Elka and me, many times, how when you were a boy during the depression you would go to Montauk with the bootlegger and ride shotgun–which makes no sense considering your youth and your fear of guns.

You probably went once or twice but in your stories you went often and while you didn’t explicitly say you were central to the operation a daughter can dream. And you knew that. After you died mommy told me that half your stories were made up and she was so surprised that I of all people fell for them Of course she wouldn’t tell me which half nor would she tell me how much you embellished. My parents. What jokesters.

Off we went from the garden apartments in Queens to some stuffy over furnished dark dingy, smoky but with doilies apartment somewhere in the Bronx. Everybody but you and I had white hair if they had hair at all and that did include the few women. Before the solemn reading of the minutes they made a big fuss over me.
“What a shana maidela.” “You look just like you looked at two.” I heard that one until my 30′s when the last of them died out and never considered looking like Shirley Temple a compliment. Or even looking like me at two. Note for you if you ever comeback to life: a girl wants to be known for her age appropriate beauty not her toddlerhood.

Then they told me how much I looked like you. And I did. We had the same deep set eyes and smaller than I would have liked mouth. I liked that one because it meant people forgot that I was adopted. Fortunately neither you nor mommy would mention that fact but thank whoever for that meant you too were good looking.

I have never forgotten that apartment or the meeting. There was rugelach (a pastry) during the reading of the minutes and new business. New business basically consisted of discussing who died and was buried in one of the cemeteries The Mir Young Man’s Society had sections in. In the cemetery you and mommy are buried in, The Mir Young Men’s Society is next to The Jewish Actors and even I know some of the names. Once Elka and I were wondering around as you had taught us to and we found Barbra Streisand’s father, between our society and the Jewish Actors.

I don’t remember what else was discussed People sat in folding chairs. The room became hotter and hotter and I could smell jars of schmaltz herring (in a an onion and white sauce, I think) being opened. I still think herring except for kippers a vile and gross food. The smell and smells of tuna and egg salad beginning prepared made me sick and I wanted to leave but didn’t dare say anything. I knew you wouldn’t make me eat anything as you thought the same of tuna and egg salad as I did You were worse as you thought if mommy didn’t make chopped foods you would immediately die.

So we sat in the stuffy stinky room and I wondered where my bootlegger was. I wondered if he looked like a gangster on TV or more like an FBI agent. You let me watch an hour of TV a day and most of my TV time then was consumed by “hip” shows catering to teenagers which I would be in a year and half–77 Sunset Strip Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6 which took place in Miami Beach and whenever we went I would take Elka and make a pilgrimage to the house boat.

I didn’t know that the houseboat wasn’t part of the show until right now when I Wiki’d it. I’m assuming that you learn about Wikipedia and other things where ever you are. Since you’re not on this earth I can make assumptions or not that I couldn’t normally. I do stick to truth in stories. It’s just the world’s changed so much in the past almost eighteen years and I don’t want to waste time explaining unless I do. (Uh, I sound just like you.)

I don’t know how I was able to watch TV in peace as we only had one set and you insisted on watching with us. Maybe “my shows” took place on your poker, pinochle, civic associations or classes at The New School nights. I think poker and classes were on the same night–more about your life outside work, and your work in other letters.

But I think I also watched FBI type shows and was confused as to whether I wanted to be an FBI agent, not that girls could be, or a gangster. I can’t explain how excited I was about meeting the bootlegger. You had told me so many great stories.

When you introduced me to an old frail man on crutches I wanted to kill you. Somehow I hadn’t accounted for the decades gone by since the depression. Your eyes were smiling. You looked as if you wanted to laugh loudly. I remember thinking “he’s trying to teach me some important life lesson,” but I still can’t think of what it could be. That I hadn’t factored in the passage of time? Daddy we all learn that one when we’re ready. That I shouldn’t expect one thing, when the possibilities are infinite?

I got my revenge quicker than I would have imagined. We went to the Botanical Gardens or The Bronx Zoo. When you looked for parking, on the street, so you wouldn’t have to pay, you the world’s most careful driver, drove the wrong way down a street and you got a ticket.