DIED 2011
WHEN IT CAME TIME to describe her father’s achievements in his obituary, my oldest friend wrote this: He spent much of his life in New Jersey, providing for his family and relaxing at local beaches. Indeed. Her handsome, dark-eyed father was one of the most solicitous and generous people I have ever met. You must be thirsty; let me get you a glass of water. Wine? No? How about a snack? After my parents were gone and the house on Dwight Drive sold, I could show up down the street and get a hero’s welcome. Then we’d hit the beach in Asbury, and he would take the kids swimming so we lazy mamas could lounge around and read.
Most of his life he was a car dealer, selling British Leyland imports, and despite my friend’s prescient badgering about the environmental cost of automobiles, her first car was a 1972 baby-blue MGB Midget that shut her mouth. Then, the summer we were eighteen, he won a red Triumph convertible in a sales contest and arranged for us to pick it up at the factory in England. Somewhere south of Paris we rolled the car into a ditch in the process of pulling over for the cyclists of the Tour de France. It seemed just fine when it was dragged out by a tractor, but the next day as we left, weeds tangled in the undercarriage caught fire. But even then, it got us all the way down to Nice, up through the Alps, into Berlin, and back to Calais. The only time I can remember her father being angry was upon that car’s return to the United States.
When you’re eighty, a lot of things are long ago: tough decisions, hard times, regrets, all far away now. Watching him in his garden, or with our little girls in the shallow water, you could get the idea he’d been waiting all his life just for this. To be a deeply tanned, slightly stooped old Jewish man, standing at the water’s edge in turquoise trunks and a white terrycloth bucket hat. Surely if he’d been given the chance, he’d be standing there still.