I always thought the reasonable way to run this blog was in chronological order. That every letter would sequentially unfold the story of my father’s life.  As I read through the letters thus far, I already learned the most important thing about his life:  Mickey loved my mom so completely, so unequivocally, and so purely. Yes, he was a great guy. And he liked folk music and baseball. But the love for my mom, that was what sustained him. That was what gave him life.

This video post dates a lot of what I will write about later, since he’s come home from the service here. But it was really too good to wait to share.

(There is no sound. These were old films that were digitized.)

To know of a love like my mom and Mickey had, to be proximate to it, is quite something. The fact that it was only around for a short period of time is tragic, indeed.  But talking about him with family and reading his letters keeps this alive.  In my mind, it’s a permanent installation in the Museum of Perfect Things.

It’s been over a month since my last post around the anniversary of Mickey’s death. I wish I could report that I’ve been working on something big, but I haven’t. Life just got in the way.

I’ve learned that since the pandemic, everyone’s been in “survival mode.” Any expectations of excellence or predisposed notions of what should happen or supposed to be have gone out the window. We are all doing our best to simply make it through the day. For Year 2 of this pandemic, it’s not going to be as easy.

Last year, everything was new – wearing masks, social distancing, eating outside in 25 degree weather, getting on line at 7am to grocery shop in a panic. Those were unique experiences for the brain and the body. There was a slight reprieve in the Summer and Fall, where life went back to “normal.” I rode the subway to work. I picked up coffee on my way to the office. I went to the hair salon. But then Delta kicked in with a vengeance, and Omicron went “Hold my beer.” (Likely this is not an original take so credit goes to whomever coined the positioning.) Now, 72 months later, my brain is saying “AGAIN with this shit?”

I’ve had two significant revelations during this pandemic. (Again, not original but had the thoughts.)

Almost one million deaths related to COVID and nobody is blinking an eye. If you are lucky enough to have made it this far without any of your close friends, family or loved ones succumbing to this virus, then count your blessings every day. And then count them again. In May of 2020, I saved this newspaper issue.

I remember thinking “Wow, that’s an unbelievable amount of loss. We won’t let it get much higher.” I could not have been more wrong about anything else. Now at 815,000 deaths and counting, and people in the US are just <shrug emoji>.

The other thing I’ve realized is how in times like these, everyone does their own personal calculus about how much is too much risk for them. Everything is relative, conditional on how someone feels, thinks or believes and that impacts their behavior. It’s not about the collective good for the community, it’s about what is good for me. Which tracks to my earlier point on survival. I remain confounded by this part of human behavior. Maybe someone smarter can explain this to me? Does this go back to the Declaration of Independence and the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

That’s my rant. Oh, one last thing to report. Body dysmorphia and other related “I’m gaining weight oh no” struggles remain alive and continue to be going strong in Year 2. I seriously thought last year that when faced with deadly virus, my body image issues would subside. There were much bigger things to be concerned with, right? But alas, once a Weight Watcher, always a Weight Watcher.

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I both look forward to AND dread the Fall season. Not only did I have both my weddings in September, but I retrieve my tall boots from the back of the closet in August, just to get them ready to wear on the first crisp day. And yes, we do always go apple picking and then I proceed to get sick eating too many cider donuts. It’s a small price to pay.

Another reason Fall is bittersweet is because it reminds me that my birthday is around the corner, just a few short dreary months away.  And when I think about another birthday happening, I remember that for every year I get older, is another year without my father.  This is how I’ve always thought about it. I take the number of years old I am turning, then deduct one. That is always precisely how many years Mickey has been gone. Forty-seven years. Today would have been his 78^th birthday. 

I broke my routine of going through these letters chronologically – technically it is still the Summer of 1965 – so I could find a letter from around his birthday back then.  In this letter dated October 10, 1966, he’s turned 23 years old.  Twenty-three years old and he is madly in love with Arlene, and knows he wants make a home and raise a family with her.  (When I was 23, my love life was a hot mess and I had no idea what I wanted my future to look like.)  

The letter includes the usual litany of love proclamations, and he recounts how he spent his birthday at the movies.  But my favorite part of this letter is how Mickey spoke about the LA Dodgers, or in his words, the Los Angeles Benedict Arnolds!

Living so close to Yankee Stadium now, I can’t help but think how great it would be to just go to the ballpark with Mickey, have a hot dog and sit in the sun, hoping for a foul ball to come our way.  

I guess I’ll just have to settle for rooting against the Dodgers this post-season. Those lousy bums.

Happy birthday Mickey.

As some young kids do, I liked to dress up and play pretend.  My grandma would let me put on her fancy shawls and wear her special evening bags; she had a limitless supply of beaded and tiled bags in all colors.  These were the ones she would take to “an affair.”  “Meri Darling, we’re going to an affair at the such-and-such” she would say. 

I would also go into my mom’s jewelry box and play with her jewelry.  I’d put on sparkly necklaces but there was only one ring that I dared to put on my finger – her wedding band to my father. It was soldered with his and because of that, the ring was pretty chunky. It was made of white gold, with thin lines running around it.  I always knew how special it was, an object that had such proximity to my dad.

When I got older, my mom trusted me to wear it. (It fit my small finger perfectly.) For almost thirty years, I took care of it. Because it was so thick, it was like wearing a brass knuckle – many times I accidentally knocked myself in the head. I never wore it to the beach. Or in the winter when I knew my hands would be cold and it might slip off.  It was one of my most valuable possessions.

Then one day, the worst thing I could have imagined happened. I lost the ring.  I can remember almost every detail of that evening. We went to dinner and a movie screening in Brooklyn, to see a film by Todd Solondz with a Q&A afterward. 

Sometime after the movie began, I felt something was off. My ring was missing. I had a full-on panic in the theater, checking in my pocket, inside my bag, in my coat, on the floor, between the seats of the theater.  I was a basket case. I made Andy leave the movie so we could go back to the restaurant and ask the staff there. I looked in the bathroom, and in the trash. But it was gone.   I remember being inconsolable. And I didn’t know how I was ever going to look my mom in the eye and tell her I lost the most precious thing she gave me.

When I did tell her, she reacted better than I was preparing for.  She accepted what happened, though I sensed her disappointment and that cut me deep, too. I still beat myself up for losing that ring.

And the movie stunk, too.

It’s been a while since I last posted.  I was afraid this would happen – that I would get preoccupied or distracted and stop writing this blog.  It’s happened before, but usually it was due to an emotional roadblock.  This time, I got distracted in the best way possible: I got a new job! (I lost my job at the end of last year and for the last six months, I’ve had lots of time to write as went about my job search.) Anyway, I’m back now. Let’s do this.  

This post isn’t for the faint of heart. In fact, if you get grossed out, stop reading now.  Still here? OK. Let’s talk about Herpes Simplex 1. Yes, I said it, herpes. Cold sores. Fever blisters. The thing that everyone wants to pretend doesn’t exist but impacts between fifty and eighty percent of U.S. adults!  (Source: Johns Hopkins University) I’m one of these people and I can tell you, it’s no picnic.  When I do get an outbreak, I feel like an outcast. Inhuman. Like a “thing” that a movie make-up artist created. (I know this is just “in my head” stuff, but I can’t help feeling this way.)

The beauty of cold sores is the journey they take you on. From that first tingle on your lip, to the blister that sits off the side of your mouth, to the scab, to the bleeding scab, back to the scab. You can always count on the process. It happens every time. The only thing that varies is the amount of time it takes to go from wanting to hide in shame to feeling you can re-enter society. Speaking of society, the only good thing to come out of this pandemic is mask-wearing, which is the best thing a cold sore sufferer could wish for. 

The reason I am writing about cold sores is because of my mom.  She gets them too, and knows exactly how I feel when I have one. Mickey even wrote about them in this letter, how he was looking forward to getting one because it meant that he’d be with my mom. I always knew that I wanted to wind up with someone who could do the exact same thing – take something that is a drag and find a way to make it not so bad.  (I did.) 

Later in the letter, Mickey wrote about making and raising a family with my mom. It’s just one of many instances that he talks about the future – one that he could never know would be cut so short.  This is what makes me the maddest. Not that I don’t have a father.  But that he only wanted one thing in his life. And he didn’t get it.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. For anyone reading this blog, you might think that this holiday is too sad for me to think about.

You would be wrong.

I’m not sad. I’m kinda grateful.

Grateful for the stepfather that brought new siblings into our lives and sang me bedtime songs in funny voices hosted by Nutsy the Squirrel and took us to the flea market for the best bagels.

Grateful for the stepfather that is the lid to my mom’s pot, who does everything he can to make her life easy, thereby making my life easy too.

As I continue to read all of these letters, it never fails to stop me cold when I read when Mickey writes “for the rest of our lives” or “forever.”  When you are young and in love, the future is an endless path that has no finish line.  Time is limitless and plentiful. 

It’s funny, though, because even when I was growing up, I was always aware that someone could be snatched away from you, just like that. Nothing was promised; terrible things happen all the time. I knew that my father died from when I was a very early age. (I remember a time being really sad in second grade about it. I knew at seven years old what I was missing in my family.) 

When my mom remarried my stepfather, I was still in diapers.  As I got older, I always knew he was my stepfather. My brother and I never called him Dad.  It was never even up for discussion. It was just a set of facts. We had one father who died and then we had a stepfather. Despite never being called Dad, he did love us like a dad. And because of him, my brother and I got three more siblings who have filled our lives with exponentially more love.

In my immediate family, we’ve lost SEVEN people. These weren’t all expected deaths, either.  By expected, I mean, not shocking – like someone who’s already lived a good life, where the numbness of the loss does in fact wear off. And one day you remember how to smile.  

My close friends know I’ve also interpreted these deaths to be part of a family curse. See, all of the first husbands have passed, and in the case of my mom and my grandma, the second husbands too.  I thought for sure that I would be a widow LONG before I would ever get divorced. I anticipated it. Not in a morbid “planning my husband’s demise” way.  Just that it happened so frequently in our family, that the idea of it wasn’t unfathomable. 

Mickey wrote about death in a letter here:

This blog isn’t a lament about my poor family and what we suffered. This is really about how you can make it through a horrible tragedy and come out on the other side.  Again and again and again.

I am not a mother by choice. At two points in my life, I did consider it. The first time was during my first marriage, when my (now ex) husband and I were separating and he offered that up as an apology of sorts to me after he prematurely initiated the divorce. That was a hard NO. 

Get ready to play

The second time was after I was divorced and contemplating how I would enter this next phase in my life, according to my terms.  I thought that I could be both a great single mom and have a career and live in Manhattan and go on dates and enjoy my friends.  Once I decided to start fertility treatments, it was all systems go. At my age, I was playing Beat the Clock (I was 40), Press Your Luck (nothing is guaranteed) and The Match Game (to find a suitable donor pop).  

I was lucky enough to have a wonderful support system with an inordinate amount of encouragement, including some financial assistance from a would-be grandma.

I did the shots, peed on sticks, and drank more Gatorade than an entire football team. After one round of IUI, I didn’t get pregnant. By this time, I had met an amazing guy and was realizing the new trajectory my life would take. One that was child-free.  And that was more than okay by me.

None of this is easy

So, every year, I get a little irked by those that automatically wish every woman a Happy Mother’s Day. Even my doorman, who has never seen me with a child in the two and a half years we’ve lived here, wished it to me! Has it become as ubiquitous as “Merry Christmas?”  This holiday is not easy. And to those who have lost a mother, or don’t get along with their mom, or who really want to be a mom but aren’t able to, I see you and wish you love and peace.

My mom

Since it’s Mother’s Day, and this is a blog about family, I couldn’t not talk about my mom. I can write volumes about her. A chapter for each year of my life; each event in my childhood that was punctuated by her presence. That would take forever, and we don’t have that much time. Instead, I’ll say this:  Every day that goes by, I see myself becoming my mom. I’ll catch myself making some exclamation about something. (This is usually because I’ve caused some type of mild injury doing an insignificant household chore). As the sounds are coming out of my mouth, it’s as if I am Arlene.  When I tell her these things, she laughs. She’s laughing because she knows -she’s become her mother, my grandma. This inevitability must be accepted. Even Progressive Insurance knows this.

The last thing I will say is that despite suffering a catastrophic loss when my father died, I still feel like I’ve led an extremely lucky life, because I have a mom like her. 

I wanna rock!

I’ve had an unrequited passion to be a musician for pretty much my entire life.  Looking back on my favorite bands when I was coming of age in the 1980s, it’s no surprise that I wanted to become a leather clad virtuoso strutting around on a stage in front of thousands of fans. It didn’t matter that bands I loved were all men – Def Leppard, Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Prince, Whitesnake, White Lion.

If I couldn’t date them, I wanted to be them.

Practice makes what?

When I was 15, I convinced my mom to pay for electric guitar lessons for me. I truly thought I was going to discover some latent talent that had been buried inside.  NEWSFLASH:  There was none.  As it turns out, the only way you get really good at anything is through practice. And that was something I didn’t really care for, not back then. I didn’t even care enough to practice to impress my instructor, who’s tight black jeans I still remember, though not his name.

I really did think that I could do it. I had taken piano lessons for many years.  I remember rushing home after elementary school to practice for fifteen minutes before I had to walk to Mrs. Pennett’s house down the block for my lesson.  I thought the freshness would work in my favor, kind of like a warm up. She was a great teacher, but there were no recitals to perform at. Unless I was just so bad she never included me.

In these letters Mickey asks about my mom’s playing, since she had been taking piano lessons.  He wrote that he hoped they would be able to afford a piano when they buy a house. That never happened. However, the piano I used growing up was a free gift from the bank where she had opened up an account with the money from my father’s life insurance policy. So, in a bittersweet and surreal manner, he did manage to get her that piano.