By Sam Weinman
We were in his kitchen at Blind Brook Lodge, Dad in a chair, me squatting before him with a pair of scissors.
“I suppose you’re going to want a tip for this,” he said.
His hands were too shaky to shave on his own, and his pacemaker prevented anything electric. I held the blade of the scissors close to his neck. “By the way,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to ask about my inheritance.”
We had spent 50 years trying to make each other laugh. My father, Jerry Weinman, was who taught me about language, and treating every word with care — how every great sentence should follow a rhythm in your head. He taught me to know my audience. What he might not have known was my primary audience was usually him.
Dad was overflowing with contradictions: a Jew who escaped the Holocaust at age 3, grew up Orthodox in Washington Heights, then raised three kids who went on to marry Catholics. A progressive whose wife prepared every meal because he couldn’t manage more than toast. A sentimental and affectionate father whose angry voice could boom throughout the house. I didn’t learn how to be a father because mine was perfect. I learned that you could be temperamental and vulnerable and make plenty of missteps, but if your kids could always see the love in your heart, the rest would work itself out.
Dad used to turn Sinatra up in the car and wonder why I wasn’t smitten. “One of these days I’m going to teach you about good music,” he’d say.
He made only occasional progress. On my wedding day, Dad popped up on stage and performed a song he and my friend Kyle Tucker had rehearsed for hours behind closed doors. The song was “It Was So Easy,” and we’d play it for years after — in the car on the way to doctors’ visits, and by his hospital bed.
But that night at our wedding, Dad not only sang. At one point, he pulled out a harmonica and the room erupted.
“I didn’t know you knew how to play the harmonica,” I said.
“I don’t,” he said. “I was hoping no one noticed.”
For months, when Dad was stuck in the hospital and then rehab, we’d plead with our mother to go home. It was pointless. Home for Mom was wherever she could hold Dad’s hand.
When I was a kid, I thought my parents’ marriage was the weird one. They’d yell and slam doors, occasionally retreat to different bedrooms. I sometimes wondered if it was going to last.
By their 50th anniversary, I figured they had a chance. Now they were 63 years deep and still in love, Dad in a bed in rehab, Mom chasing after a nurse with a question.
“Where’s Mom?” he’d ask.
“She found someone else,” I said.
“Well,” he shrugged. “We gave it a shot.”
He was always working on something. He wrote TV commercials, radio spots, and print ads. He sold a line of tennis clothes featuring a logo of a frog, and once wrote a screenplay about a mixed-race gangster who aspired to be the “Jackie Robinson of the Mafia.”
He would tinker on his own sentences for hours, and eventually turn his attention to yours.
He was incapable of sugarcoating. At my brother’s and my Rye High School hockey games, he’d cup his hands from the crowd and yell out instructions, then later draw diagrams on napkins to explain what he meant. He didn’t always tell me I played a good game, but when he did, I figured I must have.
Our strongest connection was around words. I could always make Dad laugh, and with time, I relished crafting sentences that he wanted me to read back. There was no better feeling as a writer.
Some stats: 89 years, 361 days, one wife, three kids, six grandchildren, roughly 50,000 “small pieces” of cake at birthdays, followed by another 50,000 pieces because the first piece was never enough. Dad ran the New York Marathon in 1983 at age 48 in 4 hours, 20 minutes. He made one career eagle, at Mohansic.
He got 87 years in this country after he and his parents were forced out of their first. If they didn’t want him, he’d make another place better instead. My dad was not the greatest American I knew, but he might have been the most American: an immigrant who arrived with little and learned to love baseball and popular standards, who scratched out a few years at City College and served in the Army, then enjoyed a successful career and family.
Speaking for my wife, Lisa, our greatest move as parents was giving our boys a home in Rye within walking distance of all their grandparents. They knew my dad not in some abstract way, but as someone who drove them to school and tied their skates, who had pillow fights with them before bed and would steal the cake off their plates if they weren’t paying attention. Dad was there to marvel at how far Charlie could hit a golf ball, and to offer Will cash for goals and assists. Even in his hospital bed, he relished hearing his grandson tell him a midseason burst was now bleeding him dry.
My dad died at home four days before his 90th birthday. He didn’t go out much at the end of his life, but he’s still there if you know what to look for — when we laugh at bad jokes, when we cry at movies, when we curse after leaving a ball in the bunker. He’s in my sister’s voice when she sings in the car, in my brother’s soft hands at the net. He’ll be in every word I ever write, even the ones he’ll never read.
