EULOGY FOR MY FATHER

My father was born in 1933.

He lost the use of his legs in the summer of ’44.

And he eloped with my mother, August 24, 1957.

I’ve come to believe that’s when his life really began, his true birthdate.

I don’t want to designate any villains in the story. But being a Kriegel, I do feel obligated to note the degree of difficulty here. It’s always tougher for the Jews, but especially these two. You didn’t have to play the ponies like my uncle Moishe to know: This was long shot.

My mother’s mother asked her, “Who’ll dance at your wedding?”

And this beautiful woman said, “That’s not important. I want someone to have breakfast with.”

After the elopement, my mother’s parents sat shiva for her, meaning she was dead to them.

And here we are, a month after their 65th wedding anniversary.

And we won’t be sitting shiva today.

We’re going to have a drink.

We’re going to toast.

We’re going to celebrate 65 years of laughing and arguing and worrying and loving, and sitting down to breakfast.

We’re going to celebrate what came of this union, from then to now, to its latest and greatest expression: Finn and Holiday Kriegel.

You two are the confluence of many circumstances. But you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be you without Pop Pop and grandma.

My father was the crippled son of immigrants.

America gave our family a shot. Like it gave Blossom’s.

Like it’s giving Cherif’s family. Cherif, there are things about my grandfather that came back to us through you — his kindness, his strength, his belief in one God, and his optimism.

This was an optimistic city. New York gave my father not just a sensibility, but the oval at Van Cortlandt park, where my Uncle Leo — who decreed by fiat that they would be Dodger fans in the Bronx, of all things — would admonish my tenuous, teenage father to take a step, and then another, and another. New York gave him my father the playgrounds where he could exaggerate how far he hit a stickball, and the monkey bars from which he’d do his dips and his pullups, refashioning his body and his spirit.

New York gave him an education he otherwise wouldn’t have had, and certainly couldn’t afford.

That’s what America is supposed to be.

And that’s what New York is supposed to do.

Now the person on the receiving end of these gifts is not without debt. My father paid his back at the city’s public universities — first, City College, then the Center for Worker Education. He considered teaching an even higher calling than writing. Still, he wrote memorably about what it was to be a cripple, and a man. He wrote about Edmund Wilson. He wrote essays and novels and memoirs and criticism. He wrote about courage, of course. And while I’d like to tell you that I’ve written sentences that weren’t purloined or repurposed from his, I’m not sure that I actually have.

Still, the themes, the stuff of his work, and much of mine — valor and virtue and all of that crap — misses the point. That wasn’t his story. His, theirs, was, is, a love story.

My parents can be a huge pain in the ass — to me, my brother, and each other. But they remain — from August 24, 1957, to long after our children’s children will be in the ground — an indivisible proposition. They love. They are in love.

In the last year of his life, my father still watched baseball. And westerns. But mostly he re-read the books that were important to him:

Blood Meridian.

Camus.

The Old Testament, some of it in Hebrew.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. I’m sure that was a laugh a minute.

An anthology of 16 novellas, including Faulkner’s Old Man.

Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

The Aneid.

Some Marcus Aurelius, and Ovid’s Amores — not his best work, I’m told, but sexy, an epic love poem constructed from elegiac couplets.

And holy shit, he re-read all of Proust.

Which is about memory.

So what do I remember of my father?

Having me run routes, throwing the football from a park bench.

Wheeling mile after mile through the neighborhood — on his own, and with Cherif.

One night he decided to throw a party for the Scottish poet Robert Burns. He’s reciting “scots wa-hay wit Wallace bled” and Bruce — who’s like 3 — somehow gets drunk. He’s up on the kitchen table calling for bloody revolution with his shmeckle flying around.

My senior year of high school. My dad walks across the gym at Norman Thomas, and I brick a shot so bad that backboard is still shaking.

I still see — through the eyes of a child — a barrel-chested man navigate tiny steps in the ancient quarter of Rome. Nimble as a dressage horse.

And I saw him fall.

I remember my parents going out, looking sparkly, and that trace of Channel №5 in their wake.

My father’s metal braces, and the leather straps that bound them to his legs. The leather worn so smooth, like an old mitt you found in the back of your closet.

His hands were colossal, calloused at the heel from the crutches. But his hand around yours was warm in a way I’ve never felt.

I so coveted my father’s adulation that I wasn’t a very good brother, and yet it’s my brother, and his family, who’ve really cared for my parents as they got old. I flew in from London the day after the Queen died. When I got to Lenox Hill, the attending physician told me to start making arrangements.

And then, the next morning, he woke up.

He wanted to speak to my mom.

I like to believe he waited — not for me — but for me to have found Jenny, or at least to know that I hadn’t screwed it up. Maybe that’s a conceit. Maybe not. But that afternoon he rose from his supposed death bed not merely to consciousness, but a state of great clarity.

“In a lot of ways Jenny made a mensch out of you,” he said. “She gave you equilibrium.”

No one’s ever accused me of having equilibrium.

My brother had taped printed photos on the hospital wall: family, grandchildren, anniversaries, and one in particular of my mother. She’s 19. Around the time they met. It was for a beauty contest at Hunter College. Photographed by Bruno of Hollywood, whose office was on 57th St. My mother was extraordinary, in a way not unlike Holiday. But it still pissed my dad off to think that she didn’t win this beauty contest.

He starts in with the nurses: “You tell me how she lost that? I mean, you’re gonna tell me there was a better looking woman than her.”

I knew we were in trouble when my brother told me he’d been asking for Leo, who hasn’t been around — God bless him — in six years. And then, two Sundays ago, the Jets actually came back in the fourth quarter, and I could not rouse him. He had other things on his mind. And I think I know what they were. The week before, in terrible pain, the nerves in his hip and neck were firing without mercy. So the nurses — they were great, the whole crew of them — they propped him up with an elaborate pillow scheme, until he was sitting, directly facing Miss Bruno of Hollywood.

The nurses asked if he was ok.

Yes, he said. “I like being like this. I like looking at my wife.”

Finally. I’ve gotten to the point.

So, in lieu of donations, do as my mother once told me: “if you have a chance for love, take it.” Fight for it. Even if you fail. Even if you’re like me, and you’ve made a habit of failing. You can still get lucky. And if not? Be a better parent, a friend. Teach. Coach. Volunteer. For some reason, “mentor” is now a verb. Whatever. Do that. Leave this place with more reason for optimism.

But if you are in it, though — I’m talking to you, Holiday, and you, Nic — try to look at each other as if you just met. Like you’re 19. Be lovers. Watch movies in bed. Have breakfast together. If you’re lucky enough to have love, sanctify it, every day, like it was August 24, 1957.