*Pass/Fail*...
In his head: Friday 1963 America; pop’s
teaching experience of 21: only a veteran
of marriage to mother for exactly five days—
October 25 & the Selective Service has him
standing on a line in his underwear and
lower Manhattan’s 100 Whitehall Street—
plus, at front a-this line he’s on: a bunch a-
bodies gettin’ blood siphoned into vials.
My father’s jiggling: Like twenty guys
just passed out; ev’rybody’s laughing
and the ARMY guys, you know how they get,
all yellin’ and screamin’, makin ev’rybody
turn around an’ shut up—
A few hours further in all this, after
they graded his intelligence test, my father’s
sitting one-on-one in a small office at a small desk
w/ a guy in tight-uniform holding up his scores
in a militant right hand: You just graduated
with a B.S. in Accounting from N.Y.U.,
the guy says, and did this lousy!
Heaviness jiggles again.
After he’d finish’d the draft’s written exam,
my father comes outta Whitehall’s testing room
to walk into a guy named Bob Johnson—an old
Flushing High, 1959 frat brother—a guy he
hadn’t seen in, like, 4 years & they start
holy shitting each other, shakin’ hands.
Their reunion picks up from shared realities
of just graduating college & Bob goes: So,
how’d you do on that written exam?
& my dad whispers: I purposely flunked it.
Bob’s like: Why? & my dad says: ’Cause I
didn’t want to be a forward artillery observer
in Vietnam—
Ho-ly shit! Bob is shocked.
Why didn’t I think of that? he says—
& my father then said he never saw the guy again.
Crazy, right? He was crafty, that Myron. Let’s back up a little bit:
OK, one wild Friday night in 1961, a sprightly 16-year-old girl named Elaine Wieder from Jamaica, Queens got all gussied up and went with her Gamma Kappa Delta high school sorority sisters to an NYU Beta Sigma Ro fraternity party near Washington Square. (O, to be young.) Elaine was dancing with a guy named Gerry Storch, but when she heard someone make a loud, rambunctious, “barbaric yawp” as he burst into the party, she looked over to see who it was...
Myron Ernest Siegell was born on November 7th, 1941. His parents, Benjamin and Pauline, were of Romanian and Ukrainian descent and lived in the East Village on 11th Street between Avenues A and B, right near Thompson Square. Myron grew up with his older brother Stuart, went to Flushing High, then graduated with a Bachelor’s in Accounting from NYU.
He told me once that, not only did he do folk singer Pete Seeger’s taxes, but Woody Guthrie’s taxes as well. Completely blew my mind. He even did Woody’s son, Arlo Guthrie’s taxes. It is impossible for me to not picture Myron with black horn-rimmed glasses, a pocket protector and one of those white-scroll adding machines — a total “square” in some smoke-filled office on Wall Street, meticulously calculating the deductions of my freewheeling folk heroes of the mid-century soundwaves. He said Woody would sit on the floor and stare out the window, waiting for the meeting to be over.
(By the way, who names their son Myron? And not just Myron, but Myron Ernest? Of course he was going to become an accountant!)
About 20 years ago, just starting my career, my dad was doing my taxes and he emailed me to confirm my occupation. Figuring he’d roll his eyes and just call me for the actual answer, I replied: “Lavatory Aviator.” No response. A week later I brought in my mail and there was my tax return. Wanting my refund, I immediately signed it, sent it to the IRS and embarked upon my exciting new career as a “flying shit-box pilot.”
He always let me be his crazy son. And I always did everything I could to make him laugh.
OK, trigger warning: I sincerely apologize in advance if this next section offends anyone or anyone’s family name. I simply couldn’t not include this:
Ready? Here we go: I don’t know how I even knew the line; I was only 10 years old. Around the dinner table with me sat my two older sisters, Alisa and Linda, and mom and dad. They were chatting about a friend of theirs, and, upon hearing said friend’s name, I blurted out a line that wreaked absolute havoc on my father’s functioning. Given recent events, this is odd to say, but one of the greatest things in the world was my father... when he couldn’t breathe. Everything jiggled and shook, turned read and teared up. In that moment, he was laughing so hard he was halfway outta his seat. What I said was: If you’re Lipshitz, then my ass talks. (Sorry!)
Easily an all-time favorite memory. I’d never seen someone lose it so badly. From that day on, all I wanted to do was make his belly shake. But recently, all he wanted to do was kiss the toddler and newborn cheeks of his granddaughters. That, and get the hell outta rehab and the hospital, and get back on home to mom. 60 years they were married. She was 18, he was 21. All those years together. I don’t know how you did it. All those holidays, cruises, meals, fights, illnesses, quiet moments, misunderstandings, and joys.
I love you, mom.
And for the longest time, that simple phrase was one of the hardest things for him to say. Myron had a world-famous smile, but, man, was he aloof! Stoic and aloof. Whenever my parents dropped me off at the airport, I’d say “I love you” and practically had to force him to say it back to me. It was so hard for him to say, his eyes would well up when he finally relented. But those watery eyes, they meant everything to me.
But then, all of that changed when my parents rescued that loud little long-hair Chihuahua, Riley. Dad would be all, “I love you, Riley” and “How’s my sweet baby boy” and mushy Riley this and are-you-serious Riley that. Linda and I would look at each other like “What. the heck. is happening right now? Where was all of that while we were growing up?”
Riley annoyingly barks at the slightest movement, but there’s no denying that that dog opened up my father’s world and helped him better express himself. My mom, too. So, to my little brother Riley, I am grateful.
What my dad lacked in words of affection, he made up for in gestures both grand & unassuming.
Every year for my birthday he’d take off work and take me (and sometimes mom) into the city to places like the Natural History Museum, MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, the Intrepid—anything monumental enough to launch me properly into the next year of becoming.
He taught me how to draw Saturn so the rings looked like they were spinning. He taught me how to play chess, how to use chopsticks, and how to pull dandelions from the grass with a screwdriver.
In 1986 he taught me the edge-of-your-seat thrill of rooting for a winning baseball team. And in 1990, he taught me that if you take your son to the Douglaston Movie Theatre to see The Hunt for Red October, you could watch all 2 hours and 15 minutes of it, then go into the bathroom and hang out just long enough to be able to sneak into the next showing of Major League just as it was about to begin.
Like I said, he was crafty, that Myron. He was always calculating something.
The summer after my junior year of college, I was staying with my parents before I had to be at a job in the North Georgia Hills, and instead of me just taking a flight, dad had the idea to drive me from Boca Raton… all the way up... to Atlanta. He gave us the gift of one of those classic father-and-son road movies. Over the tires and miles, we talked about our lives and all the feel-good things you’d expect from such a box office hit. Time to hash things out and heal. We stopped for the night in Macon, Georgia and he got me a beer. I ordered Chicken Romano, had one of the best meals of my life, and then we went back to the hotel room to watch Michael Jordan win his 6th NBA title. Absolute perfection. The next day he dropped me off, I said “I love you”... and then he turned the car around... and drove the long road south... all way back home. Alone.
I still have your old dandelion-pulling screwdriver, dad. I still have a copy of our “Lavatory Aviator” tax return. And... in my head... I still have the sound... of the last thing... you would ever say to me :::
“I love you, too.”
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