Letter to Dad #2

 

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Well Dad,

I've had so many ideas for what to write this week that I really don't know what to write about: everything from Iran to Ukraine to Mel Brooks to family reunions to multiple bullying music critics to the loneliness of friendship distance to the absolute epidemic of people around my age with colon cancer (two people I know died of it in the last week, another is stage 4). Given my stomach trouble and our family history I'm a little amazed it hasn't been me. It's such a testament to your toughness that you survived so many health scares and so much despair at your health to make it a few months to 80. I think you were motivated by your absolute sense of responsibility: it inflamed you, it inspired you and you steamrolled all challenges. It's a sense of responsibility and noblesse oblige that I can only wish I share as my age advances too, but I wouldn't know how.

I'm not motivated by responsibility as you understood responsibility, I'm motivated by watching and bearing witness, I'm motivated to leave some kind of record behind, to tell not just my story but ours. And in many ways, I'm motivated by you. Not in the way you wanted me to be, but I owe your sense of responsibility so much. I'm motivated to leave a record behind that shows that your responsibilities paid off and were to some use. It may not be the use you thought, but you saw the world was changing so quickly right before you went. Today's world is active, active, active, and I feel alone in living a life of contemplation. As I get older and see the frustrations of so many successful lives around me, I feel more and more alright about it, almost even happy. Short of starting a loving, stable family, there is no more blessed life.

I think your favorite book of the Bible was Samuel 1: you always loved Saul, whom you rightly called Shakespearean. I've always loved Genesis. You and I both remind me of our namesakes. You gave me the Hebrew name Avraham, and I always related to his mental troubles, his iconoclasm, his fanatical temperament, his desire to forge his own path among the unfamiliar, not to mention the voices in his head...

But you, Jack Tucker formerly Yakov Tikocki, always reminded me of Yakov: a great businessman without an athletic gene who took his paternal responsibilities so seriously that he fucked them up. But as you aged, I think we both related more to my other favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, the most beautiful and profound poetry I have ever read. 'Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity/What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?/One generation passeth away, another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever./

The world is always in crisis. The only time it wasn't was in my childhood. But our family, our story, from the Russian Revolution to the Nazi occupation to the Polish civil war to the American success to our many, many fights, is the proof that some form of us survive, some form of us muddles through, some form of us will be here to tell our story from generation to generation, all the trials and triumphs and frustrations and defeats. To everything there is meaning, there is dignity, there is as goodness in the world as evil, and what matters is to tell the story: tell it to the next generation just as you did to us.

I love you Dad, I will always love you, and I will honor you in every way I know how to do,

Talk soon,

Evan