My dad would have turned 97 over the weekend had Alzheimer’s not hijacked his brain. As it was, he made it to 92 after almost a decade of cognitive impairment. And a miserable decade it was. The old man was playing tennis or walking four miles a day into his 80s. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He was thinking that maybe when he turned 100 he would stop driving — at night. He even conceded that sooner than later he might stop driving the Interstate after midnight.
As it was, he drove until I had to conspire with his doctor to get his license revoked. By then, there wasn’t a block party or a barricaded marathon course that was safe when he took the wheel.
He hired an attorney to sue the state and he fired the doctor. After a lengthy search, he found a doctor who was almost certainly the oldest working physician in the state. Now the old man had an ally. Nothing at all wrong with you, the doc said. Hell, yeah: get behind that wheel and burn some rubber.
My dad was destined to be pissed off. It wasn’t safe for him to stay in his house, but occupying an assisted living apartment is no one’s idea of a good time. We used to call him the last angry man even when he was in his 50s, and with each passing day there were more reasons to be resentful. He kept the blinds closed and the lights off. He lived in darkness, but the candle of outrage burned eternally.
After he turned 90, I knew I didn’t have much time to ask him some important questions. And I had long wondered if he had any regrets or if, in fact, he had ever made a mistake. After all, these Greatest Generation guys aren’t much for diffidence. They saved the world for democracy — a task that couldn’t have been accomplished if they had wasted time wallowing in introspection.
He pondered my question. I figured he was probably confused (as he usually was by then) or perhaps pondering the best way to express himself. Finally he spoke:
“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I regret.” He paused once more before adding:
“I trusted you.”
His response wasn’t as devastating as you might expect. In my family, there was only one unforgivable sin: being stupid. And a nonagenarian suffering from Alzheimer’s had just fired off the smartest comeback of his life. Devastated, no; astonished, yes. And, in a twisted but Gelfandian way, proud.
Now, just because I’ve given you the wrong idea, don’t think that the old man was anything but my fiercest fan and defender. There are a brain-full of dynamics in play here. From my dad’s perspective, winning his driver’s license when he was 15 had confirmed his manhood. Had he received a bar mitzvah at the traditional age of 13, Lou Gelfand would have heard a rabbi say, “Today you are a man.” But the bar mitzvah never happened. The old man had gotten into a fierce argument with his local rabbi and that was the end of that. Synagogue options in Tulsa were limited. An apology was out of the question. When my dad turned his back on someone, it was end of story.
So now, living in the assisted living building he despised, there was my old man’s pride at stake, but also his competitive zeal. He was going to show me that he was still the man of the family even if he had to hire attorneys and sue the state of Minnesota. (Which he did, but to no avail.)
Greatest Generation dads were often a bit uncertain about how to connect with their Baby Boomer kids. My dad, for example, despised authority but also was forced to obey it when he enlisted in the Army during the run-up to World War 2. The paradox left him puzzled as to his role as a father. Was he supposed to be an authoritarian or a friend?
And that’s where baseball came in. It was a way to split the difference. Like my dad, I was always going to be a little guy; and, like my dad, I was a lefty. So when I stepped up to the plate in my first t-ball game, the old man had already taught me how to slap the ball toward third and exploit that one-step advantage to first base. I don’t think I ever pulled the ball until I was 13.
But the rulebook was just as important as the score. It was easier for the old man to teach me the rules of baseball than it was for him to teach me the rules of a genteel society — rules that were often oppressive, bigoted and just plain stupid. Unlike, say the infield fly rule which, while complicated, made perfect sense. Mastering that rule was a rite of passage for me, and while it didn’t exactly define my masculinity, it was a step in the right direction.
In the meantime, we played a lot of catch in our backyard on Cretin Avenue. (I know, an ironic name for a guy who vilified stupidity.) The grin on his face when I captured the biggest fly ball he could throw was the safest way for a repressed ex-soldier to express fatherly love. And it was enough.
Tennis was another matter. The tennis court was his personal space and I rarely got a peek at it. When, at the age of seven or eight, I showed some interest, he took a rotted and warped wooden racket out of the closet and handed it to me. So much for tennis.
I finally bought my first racket when I was 40 and out of shape. I wasn’t really getting the hang of it, but I couldn’t say no when he invited me to hit with him at his tennis club.
Although he was in his late 60s, my dad moved me around the court without mercy, waiting until my heart palpitated before putting me away. After the nearly fatal rally, he would walk slowly to the net, where I would meet him.
“You OK?” he would archly ask. I was never quite sure whether he was genuinely concerned or simply emphasizing his superior skill, but I suppose it was both. And then the process would be repeated.
Over the next year or so, I began running a few miles a day and started taking lessons and going through drills at a tennis club. By then, my dad was 70 but was still a technician on the court. The ball seemed to hit the sweet spot of his racket every time, a skill I never came close to mastering.
But now we had long and competitive rallies, and when I sensed he was about to go for the money shot, I would put a little slice on the ball and hit a drop shot that barely made it over the net. Shameless, I know — a game of manners between father and son became a game of menace that only Freud could have loved. And, of course, when we met at the net I would say, “You OK?”
Looking back, I see that the baseball fields and the tennis courts were nothing but stages where we wordlessly asserted our affection and pride and eternal struggles for dominance and that the foolish games were inevitably going to end with his car keys in the trash and the sour taste of pyrrhic victory in my mouth. The numbers had always been right in front of me, but I never quite knew the score.
—
No bad beats last week, just beats. The bankroll now stands at $878, and while I’m not going to be broke after this week, I might be broken. That’s why the money is mythical.
New York Jets at Miami
I think this one simply comes down to which team is more determined to lose. The Dolphins have traded away just about any player who was capable of making the roster of any other NFL team, and while the Jets are truly terrible, they are, unlike the Dolphins, not historically awful.
The pick: Jets 20, Dolphins 10 — Jets minus-3 for $70
Washington at Buffalo
Could be Keenum; could be Haskins. Keenum can rise to mediocrity at times, Haskins probably not. All I know is that the line seems absurdly high, which means I’m almost certainly wrong.
The pick: Bills 20, Redskins 6 — Bills minus-9 for $70
Green Bay at L.A. Chargers
Yeah, Aaron Rodgers is an offensive tinder box just waiting to explode, but this game might be played in slo-mo. The Chargers run just 60 plays per game, making their offense slower than all but four teams. That’s one reason they’ve gone under in six of their seven games since the first week of the season. They’ve also scored more than 20 points just once since the first week. Last year, they averaged 27 points per game, but something has gone horribly wrong since then.
The pick: Packers 20, Chargers 17 — Under 48 1/2 for $70
