A tribute to my father
9:09 p.m.
December, 2000
Dear Friends:
If you�ve got a minute, I�d like to tell you about my father who died last May. He was 87 years old. For the year or so prior to his death, he had been in severe pain as a result of a decayed hip joint, and his quality of life had suffered terribly. The doctors warned him that his heart, already weakened by one infarct twelve years ago, might not be strong enough to withstand surgery, but he was prepared to take any risk to alleviate his distress. I saw him a week before the operation, and he was in better spirits than he had been in months, anticipating a change to his intolerable situation. Unfortunately, he suffered a massive heart attack the morning following surgery, and never did get to enjoy his shiny new hip joint.
My father was born in Toronto in 1913 to poor Jewish immigrant parents. Later, when he was earning a good salary and could afford better, he was unable to shed the feeling of poverty that had so affected him as a child. He never passed up a bargain or a handout, wore clothes that should have been ditched seasons ago, picked up discarded articles that still had some use left to them, and never spent money on himself, eschewing expensive vacations, dining out, and luxuries of any kind. The only exception to this that I can remember is the electronic Conn organ he bought in the late 1960s and replaced with a newer model some years later. Never having had any formal musical training, he nonetheless had a very musical ear. He played the organ without reading music, inventing harmonies for his various medleys, experiencing a level of enjoyment equaled by little else.
My father had wanted to be an architect. He drew beautifully, and he was a brilliant draftsman. But in the early half of the last century in Toronto, certain professions were closed to Jews, and he was told point-blank by his professors that he would never get his degree. Instead he earned his teaching certificate and spent two years as a substitute teacher, again because of the Toronto School Board�s anti-semitic policies. When he did get a permanent appointment, he stayed at his first school for 31 years and at his second for ten and-a-half, retiring in December, 1977. His former students who sent cards and letters remember him as an excellent and inspiring teacher, a strict but fair disciplinarian, always supportive, and respecting individual differences. His former colleagues remember his gentleness, quick wit and sense of humour. He had an unlimited repertoire of jokes, of varying quality. Always punctual, being the first to arrive at a family celebration, he positioned himself at the front door so that he could tell the same joke to each arriving guest.
After he retired, Dad immediately volunteered at the Scott Mission . Later on, he worked at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind , Toronto�s Casa Loma where he played the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ at Citizenship Courts and Christmas dances for the patients of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, and at the Elgin Winter Garden Theatre Centre where he gave guided tours. He was a tiny man, barely 5'2" tall, and he loved to be the centre of attention. He joined the Toronto Theatre Organ Society in the late �60s after seeing an advertisement in the paper for volunteers to install the old Shea�s Theatre Wurlitzer organ into the Great Hall at Casa Loma. As a boy, he and his older brother spent many happy afternoons at Shea�s watching movies. Rebuilding that organ was a labour of love. When the installation was complete, he continued on as the Emcee for the concert series, and made himself available during rehearsals should anything go amiss with the instrument. He suffered his first heart attack when running up the stairs to stuff a rag in a ciphering organ pipe during a rehearsal.
Once Dad started experiencing pain in his knee, a symptom of his deteriorating hip, he ceased almost all of his outside activities. He could no longer work in his backyard vegetable garden, nor walk to the subway station to get to the Mission, nor spend time on his feet conducting tours. He no longer played his precious organ, the hard bench being too uncomfortable. He and my mother played Scrabble daily, and he read a little and dozed some, but most of his time was spent husbanding his strength against the pain, which no medication seemed to ease. I took my son to see him during spring break, and they played Batttleship together several times, and my daughter and I visited just the week before he died. We should be grateful, I suppose, that he didn�t waste away with cancer or some other degenerative disease, and that he had all his faculties right to the end. Never one to waste anything, he bequeathed his body to the University of Toronto Medical School.
As an addendum, a year later his ashes were returned to my mother and we had a small ceremony as we buried them in the backyard he loved so much and planted a spruce tree over them. My brothers both spoke, the oldest about love, and the next one about Dad�s relationship with his family during his latter years. I, being the youngest child, was last and thought to myself, �If Dad were here now with all these people assembled, what would he do?� And so he in effect had the last word as I told one of my father�s funniest jokes, the one about the farmer and his prize pig.
<~~~ * ~~~>
