THANK YOU DAD … I THINK

Lessons My Father Taught Me

Their value … re-evaluated

This is solely my experience, true.

But, you had a dad too, or a parent, or a parent surrogate, or parenting figures in your life.

What did they impart to you?

“THINK!”

This was easily my dad’s favorite shriek.

Often followed by a short, screamed, “explanation” about exactly what to think about, and/or the consequences of not thinking.

Here’s one of my favorite THINK! sequences: “THINK! First you’ll start getting B’s in high school. Then, you’ll grow your hair long. Then, you’ll smoke pot. Heroin will be next. Then you’ll be in prison. THINK! What are you doing with your life?”

My re-eval: I understand dad … and yes, I mean that in more than one way. I especially understood when my son was in high school.

I did THINK! But on my own terms.

When I realized they were necessary for where I wanted to go in life, B’s faded and A’s appeared. I smoked pot — a lot of it for a while. Heroin was a big NO! Prison never happened. Everything actually turned out OK.

Life continues to be good.

I continue to think. No CAPS! and no ! required.

“Get a professional degree. They can never take it away from you.”

True statement, but I spent 11 years going through college, then medical school, then a grueling residency before I was ready to move on, and rejoin what we ivory-tower types laughingly referred to as “real life”. Those were some valuable years, full of youthful energy, spent in pursuit of a single goal.

My re-eval: Life would have been radically different had I completed my nearly finished business degree before starting over again as a biology major. If, in addition, I’d continued tripping down my then-career-path of rock-and-roll promoter, who knows where that would have led.

I’ll never know, but I was on the cusp of going “big time” in the music business before I gave it all up to be a scholar.

I still think about the dramatic career switch. A degree plus a successful business doing something that was off-the-charts fun. Who’s to say that I wouldn’t be just as happy and perhaps less pained by giving over a decade of my youth to grinding toward a far-away, difficult, and rigidly-defined goal.

“Except for family, you’re on your own in this life.”

“If you and your brother and sister don’t stay close, I’ll come back from the grave and haunt you.” — My dad.

He said it jokingly, but he did want us to always be tight with one another. With one or two relatively short-lived exceptions, we’ve done so. And, that’s been a good thing.

My re-eval: I’m not sure family is the only thing, but it’s a big thing.

Friends have come and gone, even after years or decades of friendship. Family — my nuclear family at least — has endured.

I’ll give you this one, dad. Score one nearly-unadulterated victory for my father.

“Religion is important”

No it isn’t. Not for me.

My re-eval: I’m happy to know, and am rightfully proud of, my Jewish heritage. The simplifying, unifying concept of one God, the quest for knowledge and understanding, the importance of striving for accomplishment, and other Jewish heritage principles I internalized, have all served me well.

I did attend Hebrew School, every Friday night’s synagogue services, and most Saturday morning’s synagogue services … for five … long … years … before rebelling as a 13-year-old who’d just survived his bar mitzvah.

In spite of the agony of three-times-a-week, three-hour-long sessions, at a school far from my neighborhood and my friends, in retrospect I wish I’d paid rapt attention in Hebrew School. I’d be a fluent Hebrew speaker and far more knowledgeable about my people, their history, and the history of many important parts of this world.

But, all this said, I’m not religious. My father, my Rabbi and all my Hebrew School teachers together, couldn’t pound religion into me.

I have two issues with “faith” over the scientific method as another way of knowing.

The first, and most important, is that, acceptance of beliefs, without objective evidence, and verification of truth, seems unreasonable and likely to lead to faulty thinking or no thinking at all. I could go on and on here, but I won’t.

“Belief” without facts, is the phenomenon that leads people to hold that drinking urine is equivalent, or better than, immunization, at disease prevention.

My second objection to religion, faith, and belief, is the incredible evil man has inflicted upon his fellow men in the name of these three entities.

My father wished for me to be both knowledgeable and spiritual — specifically Jewish in a strongly religious sense. For now, and for years before now, I’ve opted for knowledge and facts.

I’m not anti-religious, anti-God, or anti-spiritual, I’m simply awaiting knowable evidence that anyone’s beliefs are equivalent to verifiable facts and truth. That evidence has yet to be forthcoming.

“Question everything”

Except, of course, my father.

My re-eval: That’s not entirely true, but boy, if you decided to question him, you’d better have been prepared with a series of cogent arguments AND prepared to deliver them, clearly, rapid-fire, with volume!

I still question everything, even the opinions I hold about religion. Generally I do it quietly, at my own pace and with a strong sense of my own fallibility.

I’m a doctor, recently retired. I was also once a researcher. I’ve taught, directed, and mentored younger physicians and students easily as smart as, and many far smarter than, me. Most subscribed to the mantra of “question everything”.

My education and training are heavily rooted in science. I’m not a lawyer or a mystic and try not to twist what I perceive as truth, or can convince others is truth, to my own ends.

I love you

Not said to me once by my father.

He was not an emotive nor an expressive guy, and I fully understand that now, and have for years.

He was a stalwart dad, and — as it turned out — supported me always, in all the important ways I’ve described above.

If love thrums in the background, and support is present in the foreground, that feels like “I love you” to me.

Maybe that’s the reality a man raised by two taciturn immigrants, in a hard-scrabble, post-war, oppressive world, brings to his son.

I never had the chance to ask, but it seems reasonable.

My re-eval: I’m OK with that. Some important life lessons can be imparted non-verbally.

I’ve made my own omissions and mistakes as a dad.

I do however, say “I love you” to my son, and to others. Often.

It may be overused and borrowed, but I end every phone conversation with my son Shawn with “I love you.” I do it because, if I never speak with him again, I want “I love you” to be the last words I ever said to him.

Harold Burg

My father. Just “Harold” and “Burg”. No middle name.

If you asked him about it, he’d say

“I grew up too poor to have a middle name.”

He was the youngest of three brilliant Jewish boys, raised in an immigrant neighborhood in New York. Lou, the eldest, became a successful attorney. Bernard, the middle child, was an architect. Harold became an engineer and worked for decades in the aerospace industry. Then, when the bottom fell out of aerospace engineering, he “re-purposed” in middle-age and became a lawyer.

When Harold’s children — me, my brother, and my sister — were old enough to realize it, we all suspected that our dad was more than a little “put upon” by his older brothers.

All three boys attended City College of New York since it was free, local and admitted Jews. It’s still a bit hard for me to believe that in my parents’ lifetime there existed colleges with admission quotas and bans on Jews, and others. According to CCNY’s website, “We’re the place where Albert Einstein first presented his theory of general relativity outside of Europe.”

That’s good company for three smart boys.

My dad joked that, while at CCNY, he was an Iota Rho Tau (IRT) fraternity member. The IRT (Interburough Rapid Transit Company) was part of the New York City subway system and was how my dad traveled to and from college.

His parents were immigrants. Abraham, his father, arrived at Ellis Island in about 1911. An Austrian 14-year-old, who spoke no English, he had traveled alone on a ship, with a few coins sewn into his pants’ lining, so they wouldn’t be stolen. He became an electrician and was a deeply religious, quietly peaceful man.

His wife Ida, a Russian immigrant, was a stonily, angrily, perpetually-muted crone who wore all black, always, and frightened children, always.

She died alone, the day’s-old smell of her putrefying flesh alerting neighbors to her death.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect that the rare times the quiet was broken in my dad’s boyhood home was to yell.

To my knowledge, there was little to no love expressed, or perhaps even present, in my father’s upbringing.

There was however a quest for education, enlightenment, accomplishment, and insight. Strength, wariness, and the power of the individual were also part of the mix.

Onward

As a child, I, when alone with my sibs, referred to my father as “the deep-sea dweller.”

Now that phrase, full of childhood puzzlement and limited understanding, has new meaning.

My dad was there and there for me. He was often hidden from view in various ways, but created an enduring powerful presence, challenging me to think, to live a rich full life, to achieve, to learn, and perhaps, to be a more complete, better, version of a man than he himself was capable of.

Acknowledgments

My tremendous thanks and gratitude to Terry Trueman, Jennifer McDougall, and Sally Prag, who gave of themselves, read weaker versions of the story above and made it significantly stronger with their input.

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