When I had returned to New York after my father Paul’s funeral, I already knew that something about his death and my presiding over his grave had changed everything. Oh, did grief ever become me and did I ever use Paul’s passing as well to explain to Leifman, Leibman, and Schneur my aloofness from seminary activities that now ensued.
My three-times-a-day prayer dwindled to two, then one, then none. Then instead of joining the daily minyan, I pulled Ecclesiastes off my shelf to try to find some relief in poetical Jewish stoicism. I tried some Philo of Alexandria, whose skepticism had always appealed to me, but what did I care now about reconciling God with Aristotle? There was a sentence or two in there about transmigration of souls, the great gilgul, but it was a footnote, and one of those Greek things our teachers considered primitive, polytheistic, and lacking any real religious imagination; we had skipped over it entirely in philosophy class.
What did any of this have to do with my dead father? I kept an unsmoked pack of Lucky Strikes beside my hard metal bed in the seminary dorm because Paul had taught me my letters by holding up his pack of Luckys with the bright black and red target: LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Now that had meant something.
“You’re floating off again on me, Norman.”
“No, I’m not,” I lied to my mother.
“That’s okay. We’re both tired, and oh are my dogs ever barking, honey. It doesn’t get any easier. You’ll come by the restaurant tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“You can practically walk over from camp, you know. A short...
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