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On Museum Day, I Experience my Father as Sad and Human
“Some things with people you can’t change.”
It’s museum day and my father and I are at the LA County Museum of Art. Weeks earlier he had asked me to set a date.
“You’ve been so mean lately,” I said. “Why would I want to go?”
“It’s what we do,” he said, standing in front of my desk, arms at his side, face blank as if recently swept. His response was maddening and comforting in equal parts. How is it I want to annihilate my father in the office but, without fail, enjoy our days to the museum? On museum day, just the two of us, my father is never a bully.
So here we are doing what we do: meeting at his house at 9am, driving into LA in an hour and fifteen, eating at Canter’s 24-hour Jewish deli (since 1931) — white fish, blintzes, chopped chicken liver, matzoh ball soup, Dr. Brown’s Cream soda and poppy-seed hamantashen for the ride home. When he goes to the bathroom I slip the waitress a $20.
“My father’s a bad tipper,” I say, finger to lips.
When it’s just the two of us, I can ask my father anything and surprisingly he answers. Nothing is off limits.
Q: “Do you feel any differently now that Matya has died?”
Matya was my father’s 102 year-old mother from whom he was…
