A Booklet My Dad Made for Me

And for himself. Plus a comb, with a case, that I gave him.

My father, Paul, used to make lots of books for me when I was a kid — out of things like cardboard and loose sheets of paper and string. Some had his transcriptions of my dictated short stories and poems; others covered subjects from history, with a particular emphasis on the evils of capitalism. I adored them, as I adored him. He was my joy. My mother, Bunny — whom I also loved, desperately — was emotionally quite cool with me: her focus was on herself — her aspirations to be a published author, her circle of friends, her boyfriends. My mom was beautiful and elegant; my dad was overweight, with a big potbelly, and his teeth and toenails were rotting. Mom had a steady job, as a librarian; Dad kept losing his jobs (as a teacher and social worker), and he was very poor. Sometimes he worked as a dishwasher, other times as a mover. He’d make some money donating his blood plasma. His prized Underwood manual typewriter and his shiny pocket watch were frequently at the pawnshop. When Mom and Dad divorced, before I was a year old, she won custody — so I only got to see my dad every other weekend. The one exception to this schedule was that he always had me on Christmas. My mom’s mantra, as far as I was concerned, was: “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.” When I was with her, which was most of the time, I was to stay quiet and in my room, while, at the other end of the apartment, in her bedroom, she typed away at her manuscript on her electric Smith-Corona. At my father’s apartment, he encouraged me to draw all over the walls, to play records on my little plastic phonograph, and to play instruments, like his guitar and a zither I had. He and I also sang together a lot — at home, and then as we went on our many walks through Lower Manhattan.

This booklet is mostly a diary covering the week before Christmas in 1965, when I was six years old. I figured out the year because the first entry is dated “Sat 12/18” and I looked up when Dec. 18 fell on a Saturday. That entry is a transcription of how I described the day to my Dad.

You can see from the menorah reference that Dad and I celebrated Hanukkah as well as Christmas (Mom wasn’t into holidays). But I have to say that for us Christmas was the much bigger deal. It involved Santa Claus (who was shaped suspiciously like my dad) — not to mention Jesus (skinnier), whom my father worshiped (not as a deity, but as the prototypical impoverished communist Jew — truly someone to emulate).

When I showed this booklet to my son yesterday, my wife, Sara, and I had to explain to him what a “five-and-ten” (or “five and dime”) store was. Sara asked me if I remembered them selling parakeets — I did! One thing I didn’t remember at first, though, is a “Pretzel Jetzel” — and then, OMG, it came back to me! It was supposed to make actual pretzels. You squirted out batter into a tin mold that you then put on a conveyer belt and hand-cranked into this little plastic house, which had the heating element in it. But get this: the heating element was … a regular lightbulb! There was no way to actually bake a pretzel with so little heat. Jesus himself could not have cooked a pretzel in this thing! But I kept trying. The raw batter would come out the other side as … still raw batter. Maybe it was slightly warmer than before? In any case, I’d sprinkle salt on it and make my dad eat it. And he’d say, “Mmmmm!!”

Dad probably had to hock his typewriter to buy me that Pretzel Jetzel.

The booklet also contains Dad’s notes to himself from that day. I’d been upset:

[Joshy’s] crying & my sleeping on Saturday — his joy in “staying over” Sat nite also …

Why was I crying? The answer, I think, can be found in what he writes on the next page:

… also, I was alert — & he rejoiced over that!

My best guess is that Dad, after picking me up from my mom’s and taking me to his place, had been sleepy and sluggish. This could have been for a number of reasons. Back in those days, he’d regularly pick up a medication (“my pills”) from the pharmacy on the corner. This was speed — amphetamines. I didn’t find that out till I was 20, after Dad had a terrible stroke. Outside the ICU, my stepmother, Sue, explained to me that he’d been addicted to them for years; perhaps they’d originally been prescribed for him as diet pills. After his doctor cut him off, he kept getting them from this one crooked pharmacist, who was apparently a fellow member of the Communist Party. Many years later, a therapist of mine suggested that the speed might have been Dad’s attempt to self-medicate for depression. In any case, I think he kept going on and off his pills, and when he was off them it may have been hard for him to keep up his usual exuberant pace with me. Or maybe he was just tired that day — worn down by being poor and stressed-out.

How did such a wonderful man get so down on himself? I think about that a lot. It may have had something to do with his tumultuous break with his parents — a fissure that I’m exploring in a series of posts in this Substack (here and here, so far) — that left him raging against them while perhaps also internalizing their low opinion of him.

In any case, on Sunday — based on the entry for that day — he was doing better!

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Yes, Dad bought me a toy gun — so I’d be ready to fend off the fascists!

Yesterday, reading in the booklet about the “comb & comb case” I’d given my father triggered a vague memory of once seeing those things somewhere among my old family effects. Sure enough, after some digging around, I found them!

His entry for Monday, Dec. 20 (“I will be making bookmarks that look like worms …”), appears to be a transcription of what I’d told him in a phone call from my mom’s place.

Tuesday’s entry seems to have been based on a promise that he would call me again on Wednesday.

So Dad’s calls when I was at my mom’s must have been a lifeline for me as well.

The next entry is for Christmas Eve:

And I found, on the inside of the back cover, a to-do he’d scribbled for himself:

I remember how Dad would tuck me into my little bed on the night before Christmas. He’d explain to me, for the umpteenth time, how a whole lot of thin blankets kept you warmer than just one thick blanket (all those layers of air!).

In the morning, I must have found the Pretzel Jetzel that Santa had brought me, along with my other gifts.

That’s the last dated entry in this little diary of the week before Christmas in 1965.

On a later page, Dad jotted a few notes to himself, about future plans — including, it seems, the determination to find a “part-time and/or summer” job:

The last page he wrote on was an abandoned draft of an order for a reproduction of Picasso’s famous Bouquet of Peace.

I know that he eventually did order that print, because I remember it hanging in his apartment on East 7th Street, and then later where he lived, with my stepmother Sue, on West 84th Street, and then even later in the apartment where Dad and Sue — and their three children, Jacob, Amy, and Sam — lived on West 173rd Street (by then I’d moved in with them as well). And now it hangs in Jacob’s home, where he lives with his wife and children.

There is hope in that image, yes? Even for those who suffer. Even for those who think themselves unworthy of self-care. Because they are so loved! Even when they don’t know it. Even when they don’t feel it. Even — and I so want to believe this! — long after they are gone.