When I was about 16, we were living in New York as Dad was at the UN. He had just come home from a trip to New Zealand. Right or wrong, I was expecting some gifts — but that expectation was set by Dad. Over the years, he had set a standard of always bringing something home with him. Tea towels, sculptures, spoons, plates from China that were so large they needed a custom box.
And this time, hotel soap boxes and a tin of Band-Aids.
[laughter]
He told me he couldn’t really get me anything but grabbed a few things. I went down the long hall to my room and cast upon my bed were the soaps and again, a box of Band-Aids. Thanks, Dad. I sat down trying not to feel ungrateful. He had thought of me when stealing soap from all the hotels.
I figured I’d open one. Inside was not soap. Instead, it was a sparkly pair of purple dangly earrings wrapped carefully in Kleenex. I took a moment and counted all the boxes on my bed. 49. I realized that every box had a carefully chosen piece of jewelry lovingly wrapped in tissue. That was Dad — traveling the world and changing lives and thinking of us back home, finding little gifts that would delight, fanciful or silly, but always finding a way to connect with us while far away.
Dad had a gift of being so present when he was with you that the time apart never felt that distant. He also had a way of making things feel special: waking me up in the middle of the night — okay, it was probably 9:00 p.m., but I was little so it felt like adult late — to watch My Fair Lady with him in his workroom; wildly conducting along to his favorite concerto in the living room, hair flying in time to his enthusiastic hand movements, like a character out of a British novel.
He was full of surprises. He could throw a bowling ball and take out that one pin left on the side. I found out as a teen he had worked at a bowling alley placing pins from above before they had machines to do that job. Artfully paddling me and Mom in a canoe on a weird roadside river somewhere between BC and Oregon — we’d just come from Avi’s wedding and we were driving to my school in Oregon. Buying a house without making it past the front hall. “How many bedrooms?” my mom anxiously asked. “We have three children.” “I have no idea,” he said. “Your mom told us to buy it, so I did.” His notes to school when we were sick — the Shakespearean plague-like details became legendary. He would drive in reverse the wrong way on a one-way street while we traveled in Europe and yell out the window, “Don’t worry, we’re Canadian.” As if that explained it.
He was never embarrassed. He would enjoy every minute of being ridiculous and making us all laugh.
But his crowning pleasure was attaining Zayda status. As you can imagine, getting to tell the worst jokes and watching his grandchildren — Zev, Yoav, Zimri, and Toma — groan and fall to the floor in gales of laughter was pretty much the best thing ever for all of us.
My whole life, I kept finding out new details about Dad’s life from his friends, articles, newspapers. He clearly did so many things and had so many profound connections to so many people in all walks of life. But I will always remember him as my generous, silly, irreverent, supportive, and corduroy suit-wearing dad.
[applause]