The Letter: My Father & Education

After leaving my long-time bookselling job and traveling in Europe by myself for three months, I found a job in the city at a small bookstore. I wanted to reinvent myself, find a new career, but was unable to make the jump. I was still figuring it out, I told myself.

It was early November and already the leaves had started crumpling up on the sidewalks of 24^th Street, and riding home on Bart I could see the sun setting over Mt. Tam around 5 o’clock.

The newspaper clippings started funneling in from my father around then, and that’s when I decided I finally needed to stand up to him. The articles were about individuals finding a job with a good future and good benefits, but I didn’t need to hear it.

At my previous job, where had I worked for years at a large general bookstore in Berkeley, I considered it my career, but all he could do was suggest other occupations and careers; for instance, that I go to school to become a physical therapist.

One afternoon he and my mother met me at the store and we walked up the street to have lunch.

I saw the words in his brain form, saying “get a real job,” as the juices from my taco dripped onto the plate and sounds of children ricocheted off the walls.

I loved that job, meeting with children’s book publishers and ordering the books, having a constant dialogue with co-workers and customers about history, art, travel, the world past and present. But it wasn’t an honored profession with a future, according to my father.

He was a social worker. He spent his hours steering people in a direction. He knew how to counsel couples and families, and his clients were so devoted to him, he received gifts, such as a painting, a stained glass lamp, and free meals at one couple’s café where a sandwich was named after him, “The Benjamin.”

Calls came to our house asking for him, his patients asking for help, but he wasn’t there in the afternoon and evening, as he scheduled his appointments then. So I would write down the name and number. Once, as a teenager, I counseled a suicidal woman because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t hang up.

He grew up on the idea that you create your own foundation. He enlisted at the beginning of WWII so he could pick his position, to train as an aircraft engineer. Stationed in North Carolina, he also did coursework in Texas and other places. And later, when the war ended, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College on the G.I. bill, and continued to get his B.A. He drove a cab to support himself. His landlord wanted him to marry his daughter, but my father had other ideas.

He was inspired by the settlement houses he had seen in New York, in poor urban areas, where volunteer middle-class people would live and share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The idea of helping people rise out of their disadvantaged situations had burned into him.

So he moved back to Brooklyn to live with his father and stepmother in their third floor walkup apartment, pushcart hawkers yelling their wares below on the crowded streets. He drove upstate to attend classes at Adelphi University to get his MFCC when he wasn’t driving a cab on the New York streets.

My father was the only one of his siblings to attend college. His father, Ben Zion Benjamin, or “B.B.”, came from Russia. He was a paper hanger and his children went into trades, either following their father’s work, or selling cars, or doing clerical work. My father wanted something more. In turn, when he became a father, he wanted something more for my brother and me as well. It was impossible to get around it.

That’s why I dropped out of college—because it felt like a large empty structure that had no meaning, no point. I don’t know where I derived any motivation of my own, with his force always present.

When I succeeded in music, as a young oboist, I felt like it came in spite of my parents. I got no guidance, no encouragement, heard no applause from them. I got Bs in high school without trying. I studied with the T.V. on, listened to Mozart and Beethoven with books on my lap.

The letter I sent him was serious and long, like my ever-expanding narrative poems, like the essays forming in my brain, like my dreams, never-ending stories with light and shadow, symbols, a beginning, middle, and an end. I told him the truth—that I needed to find my way—that he should trust me.

My mother called immediately. “You really hurt him—he is only trying to help.”

I didn’t hear from my father. My parents went away for Thanksgiving, celebrating without me.

My brother had already written his letter to our father years before, and since then they enjoyed a successful interchange. My brother told me they would have a conversation, each taking something positive from it. The proof was the music played sometimes in the car, a tape my brother made for him, of Jeff Beck and other rock guitar players, which our father would never listen to on his own.

They were like a sailboat with both people steering. My father even attended an EST seminar while my brother was immersed in that group, which many called a cult, as it was accused of brainwashing its victims. My father would listen as my brother divulged the inner workings of the sessions, the deeper details which inspired him.

The objective, I realized, was to not lose my brother to this group’s hungry claws, so my father extended a hand rather than possibly seeing him drown.

For me, my father was trying to steer my small boat and not let me have a hand in it. When, over the years, I was cajoled into having breakfast out at Sambos or Carrows by him, I would sit and listen in my shorts and t-shirt, the orange upholstered booths sticky under my legs. I thought, why are you counseling your own daughter? Communicating with him had never been easy, and I had been eeking out the words for years, a couple here, a few there, but they had not been heard. I was the quiet child alongside my brother’s noisy hyperactive ways, and needed to speak.

The cheese I brought to my parents house to celebrate my father’s birthday December 15th was his favorite, its veins a messy bright blue against the smooth ivory wedge. Stilton. I had told them I would come by after my shift ended.

My father and I sat calmly reconciled, somehow, enjoying the cheese together around the coffee table while my mother finished preparing dinner. It felt easy rather than awkward. There was hope.

 

When I got the call five days later, I was sitting on the couch in my one bedroom apartment with the cat on my lap.

My brother’s voice wavered. I didn’t know why was calling from a hotel room in San Luis Obispo. My parents and brother had driven to LA for a family wedding.

He explained that at the wedding, everyone was worried about our father because he was usually so talkative, but instead, he just sat off to the side looking pale. Later that day, he said, they spent four hours at the hospital in LA, but the doctors found nothing, so they decided to come home, my brother driving. They just pulled into a gas station in San Luis when our father had seized up.

“How is he?” I asked.

There was a pause. 
"What's going on?" I said.
“He’s dead.”

I had to stand up, my footing uneven as I took the cat off my lap and rose from the couch. It didn’t make sense, didn’t seem real. His doctor said he was in perfect health. How could this be true?

He said, “Mom won’t talk to me. Can you come down. I can’t drive her back alone.”

I needed a ride, so called Michael, my ex-boyfriend, always ready to help. In the meantime, I called my friend Lisa to come and sit with me.

I poured myself a glass of scotch, because I thought, that’s what you do when someone dies. Instead of knocking me out, which it should have done, it only made me feel more normal.

My life has been centered around written communication—poems, stories, and letters—the quiet, methodical structure of language. The spoken word comes less easily, but it comes, none-the-less, while teaching a class or talking with a friend. And, hopefully, it comes not too late.