Mishegas E-Book

Harley Dresner

• Herausgeber: WriteLife Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Senseless behavior—that’s mishegas. According to Harley Dresner, it means life with overbearing, obstreperous, melodramatic parents and a pugilistic, caffeine-addicted, octogenarian uncle. Blend Jerry Seinfeld’s and Raymond Barone’s parents together. The result is the Vesuvian mess that Dresner calls his family.

Social graces are callously thrown to the Las Vegas desert wind when Gerry and Uncle Bernard offend everyone from hotel receptionists to street hookers in chapters like “Even Leona Helmsley Would Have Apologized” and “Henry Ford Would Have Had a Stroke.” Along the way, flashbacks to Dresner’s past provide decades of head-banging material as he goes “Wasting Away in Geriatricville.” Restaurant etiquette ends up with food scraps in the dumpster when blind patrons are unabashedly insulted. Doctoring for sport becomes a new American pastime through obsessions with colonoscopies and wars waged against mucous and phlegm.

Dresner’s unmistakable, take-no-prisoners sarcasm and wit shine through this dysfunctional Cruise to Nowhere. His memoir is a fresh, laugh-out-loud study of life-long relationships that proves one can embrace familial roots while maintaining perspective—and sanity.

Readers will revel in the uncomfortable, squirming circumstances in which a family routinely embroils a child. Anyone who wouldn’t dream of running away from the family they would love to escape understands Mishegas.

Leseprobe

Mishegas: A Concrete Tale of Family Quicksand

© 2017 Harley Dresner

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except for inclusion in a review or as permitted under Sections 107 and 108 of the United States Copyright Act, without either prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center.

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

This story is told from the author’s experience and perspective.

Published in the United States by WriteLife Publishing

(An imprint of Boutique of Quality Books Publishing Company)

www.writelife.com

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-60808-174-5 (p)

978-1-60808-175-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932065

Book design by Robin Krauss, www.bookformatters.com

Cover design by Marla Thompson, www.edgeofwater.com

First editor: Pearlie Tan

Second editor: Michelle Booth

For Daphne and Zachary, who share my gene pool.

For Elyse, who shares my heart.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 LET’S ROLL THE DICE

CHAPTER 2 ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL WOULD HAVE HAD A CORONARY

CHAPTER 3 WASTING AWAY IN GERIATRICVILLE

CHAPTER 4 HOUDINI, HOFFA, AND . . . UNCLE BERN

CHAPTER 5 OF COURSE THERE’S SUCH A THING AS A FREE LUNCH

CHAPTER 6 EVEN LEONA HELMSLEY WOULD HAVE APOLOGIZED

CHAPTER 7 MUCOUS AND PHLEGM

CHAPTER 8 CHINESE CHEMICAL WARFARE: MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE VERSUS CALCIUM

CHAPTER 9 DOCTORING FOR SPORT

CHAPTER 10 SUNRISE IN LAS VEGAS

CHAPTER 11 THANKSGIVING OR THANKSRECEIVING?

CHAPTER 12 THE GOOCH AND THE MOOCH

CHAPTER 13 HENRY FORD WOULD HAVE HAD A STROKE

CHAPTER 14 DINNER AND A SHOW AT RAO’S AND O

CHAPTER 15 EVEN A BLIND SQUIRREL FINDS A NUT . . . SOMETIMES

CHAPTER 16 THE FASHIONISTA

CHAPTER 18 SUNSET IN LAS VEGAS

CHAPTER 17 ACCOUNTING 401— HIGH FINANCE

CHAPTER 19 THE CRUISE TO NOWHERE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX CAREER STATISTICS

PROLOGUE

mish·e·gas (n.) Insanity, madness, or craziness. Senseless activity or behavior.

Origin: Yiddish (mishegoss), from (meshuge), “crazy.”

Let there be no confusion, here at the outset. Harboring a few quirks does not constitute mishegas. One of my fellow physicians chugs forty-eight ounces of Diet Mountain Dew most mornings for breakfast. A good friend wears his wife’s socks and she doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or can’t be bothered to expend what little energy she has left at the end of the day to break him of the habit. I have another pal who pulls an all-nighter once a year to carve a couple of pumpkins for his daughters before Halloween. To be sure, these are all examples of personal eccentricities, but they fall far short of qualifying for the mishegas standard set forth by my family.

Strictly speaking, mishegas has both serious and playful meanings. On the serious side, mishegas equates with insanity. It’s madness, plain and simple. On the opposite end of the spectrum, it refers to clowning around and acting like a moron, whether intentionally or not. In between these extremes, there are wacky fixations, irrational beliefs, and absurd idiosyncrasies all embroiled within this single, powerful word. In common vernacular, mishegas is almost universally used in a lighthearted way to describe a state of affairs so ludicrous that it defies explanation.

As so often happens with Yiddish words, mishegas means far more than the sum of its literal parts: Craziness. Nonsensical activities. Inexplicable behaviors. Experiences that make you want to repeatedly bang your forehead onto the nearest wall or the steering wheel of your car until it’s numb. When mishegas arises, a synergy inevitably follows. Two plus two equals eight when mishegas erupts onto the playing field. It’s not an event; it’s a phenomenon. mishegas goes beyond words like glitch, nosh, schmooze, and shtick that have found their ways into the English language. For when mishegas is spoken of, it implies a broader cultural bond shared in the hearts and minds of Jews across the globe. It is like a secret handshake that unlocks a core element of the Jewish soul. A secular Jew like me practicing facial plastic surgery in Minnesota has a radically different life than an orthodox Jew studying Torah in Israel. Both of us work from sunrise to sunset—but that’s where the similarities begin and end. Yet if the stars aligned and our lives randomly collided one day on the streets of Tel Aviv or Minneapolis, we could undoubtedly speak with ease of the mishegas in each of our lives. I could tell him all about the fifteenth rendition of a fifteen-minute story my mother repeated a few days ago, told under the auspices of keeping me current with the events in her life.

Every time Mom’s friend orders a cheeseburger at a restaurant, she divides it in half to guarantee leftovers for lunch the next day. Mom can’t figure out why her friend—an obviously overweight adult who has no intention of dieting—routinely refuses to finish more than one-half of a standard burger. I don’t have the answer either.

Listening to this story, the Torah reader would stumble at “cheeseburger.” There’s nothing kosher about ordering a cheeseburger in a restaurant; it clearly violates several Jewish dietary laws. To right the ship, I would just say “mishegas” and he would instantly understand me as if we were brothers who had grown up under the same roof. There are ties that span time, generations, and geography. The Holocaust is the most obvious example. mishegas is another, albeit in a logarithmically lighter tone. Those who have experienced Catholic guilt can relate.

To exhibit mishegas is to consistently display a caricature-like gross distortion of relating to the world. It is to display a state of existence on the fringes of reality, short of a diagnosable psychosis or other veritable form of mental illness. It implies a complete state of ludicrous existence, a farcical state of being on the outermost edges on the bell curve of human behavioral paradigms. If there’s true mishegas in your life, you know it. You know it because mishegas wholly envelops you, becoming an intrinsic, inescapable part of your existence. Mix together a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of ground black pepper, then try to separate them grain by grain. You can’t. If you dare to try, you’ll be insane by the time you finish. So you realize that there’s no point in even trying, just like you understand that mishegas will remain ingrained in your life.

The mishegas in my life lies with my family. I’m not referring to my beloved wife of sixteen years, Elyse. Nor am I speaking of my two fabulous children, Daphne and Zachary, currently eleven and eight years old, respectively. They, too, have their quirks, but they’re basically normal people. Elyse likes to hide bags of gummy bears in the dishwasher and randomly present me with three-year-old sales receipts excavated from the bowels of her nightstand drawer. Daphne takes the processed-cheese centers of a few dozen Ritz Bits cheese cracker sandwiches, wads them up into a single nauseating ball, and eats it independently of the crackers. Zach has the bladder capacity of a dromedary and shops for clothing now as an eight-year-old with more fervor than the likes of a Coco Chanel in her prime. Again, these behaviors are certainly odd, but they do not represent mishegas.

My mishegas specifically pertains to my relationships with my parents, Sydelle and Gerry. It also includes my dealings with Sydelle’s brother, my uncle Bern.

I was initially oblivious to the mishegas; I couldn’t see it, even through the thick, five-and-a-half-diopter lenses required to correct my myopic vision. Elyse first detected it from her vantage point as a relative outsider, that is, as a non-blood relative. She was the one who realized that something wasn’t kosher about my relationship with Sydelle and Gerry. She keyed me in on it, catching me asleep at the wheel while we were dating during medical school. There was no sudden epiphany. Howard Carter spent a couple of decades strategically exploring the Valley of the Kings before he famously stumbled upon the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. It was his life’s quest that materialized in a flash. I, on the other hand, wasn’t looking for anything at all. But with hindsight comes clarity, and upon reflection from my current vantage point tucked away in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, I’ve gradually come around to the stark realization that my interactions with my parents live and breathe mishegas.

Now it’s true that everyone thinks their parents have a certain constellation of oddities. At first, Elyse innocently questioned a few superficial chinks in my familial armor. Why does my mother microwave raw apples before biting into them? Why does she spend ten minutes urinating every couple of hours? How come my father startles worse than a cat hearing a sudden clap of thunder when you lightly tap his shoulder to catch his attention? Why does he stockpile ginger ale and ketchup in the basement like rare commodities disappearing from the earth in the face of an impending nuclear meltdown? Why does he speak so quickly that sometimes you’re uncertain if he’s conversing in Mandarin, English, or Swahili? Why does he always ask a third question before listening to the answer to the first two questions he has posed? And why on earth does he look forward to a colonoscopy the way a kid looks forward to unwrapping presents on Christmas morning? My wife’s questions were all reasonable. I racked my brain and searched my soul for plausible answers, yet there were none. Zero. I tried in vain to convince Elyse that she just happened to observe a few innocent quirks. After all, everyone has a few peculiarities, don’t they?

But over the years, it became plainly obvious that the spigot at the bottom of my industrial-sized urn of familial mishegas was locked in the wide-open position. Simply plugging the hole with a cork could not possibly stem the torrent. So instead of trying to keep it bottled up, I choose to embrace it and share it.

But be warned: even though many of the following scenes occur in Las Vegas, do not expect to be regaled with stories that could have been directly plucked from the screenplay of The Hangover movie trilogy. You will not find impromptu exchanges of drunken vows at the Little White Wedding Chapel in these pages. You won’t find scenes of outrageous bachelor parties, drug-infused orgies, or brawls ending with time served in subterranean casino jails. You won’t even find some of the more mundane stuff like losing next month’s rent money at the craps tables while betting on eights the hard way until the sun comes up, stiletto-clad women dancing provocatively in skin-tight sequined minidresses in the city’s most exclusive nightclubs, or good old-fashioned drinking until lying unconscious in a pool of your own drool. But have faith, faith in my personal mishegas.

This work is my attempt to own and thereby have some theoretical control over my mishegas. Over the years, this collection of my life stories has been told and retold in one form or another to dear friends and casual acquaintances alike. I never tire of telling these stories. For me they never get old. Compiling these tales has served to keep these cherished memories both vivid and timeless. Frankly, though, it has also been quite cathartic.

CHAPTER 1

LET’S ROLL THE DICE

It was 2012 and her seventieth year and eighth decade on the planet had been looming on the horizon for my mother, and it was not about to be ignored. Seventy called for a celebration, a family celebration. Translation: my father and Uncle Bern were welcome, but my physical presence as the only child within my nuclear family was essential. The customary Hallmark cards mailed from Minneapolis paired with good wishes for a happy and healthy year over the phone (typical of birthdays past) would simply not suffice. Two pink candles crammed into the middle of a chocolate cake with “Happy Birthday Sydelle!” scrawled in iced cursive would be rejected (even if Gerry ordered the cake from Flakowitz, the preferred purveyor of sweets among the Jews of South Florida). On the contrary, a destination trip was required to appropriately acknowledge this momentous occasion.

“You know, Harley, we’re not getting any younger, after all. You’re lucky—you’re only in your mid-thirties. Who knows how much longer your father and I will be physically able to travel. We might as well go somewhere while we’re still capable, thank God,” my mother said with the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. The phrase “still capable” implied impending doom. I braced myself for our bi-weekly thirty-minute phone conversation.

Her thick, genuine New York accent had not softened one iota since retiring to South Florida more than a decade ago. She clings to it because it’s part of her fundamental identity. Hell, it’s part of my fundamental identity as well. Originally thick, harsh, and instantly recognizable, my New York accent has certainly softened since Elyse and I moved to Minneapolis in 2001. Yet I subconsciously cling to it and consciously refuse to shed it entirely because it’s part of me. The green sea glass fragment your kid finds while collecting seashells along the beach originally belonged to a bottle of beer. The edges, initially sharp and jagged from the idiot that thoughtlessly tossed it into the ocean in the midst of a drunken stupor, have become smooth and tapered from the relentless force of the tides crashing into the shore. The same holds true for my accent; it’s softened with time but it remains unmistakably present.

“Right, Mom,” I replied.

“Having all the money in the world doesn’t matter if you’re not healthy enough to enjoy it.”

“Right, Mom.”

“You can’t put a price on health, Harley.”

“That’s what they taught us in medical school, Mom. That lesson came right in between the anatomy of the pancreas and a survey of the parasites indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa.”

Couching the sarcasm within a reference to my medical training allowed it to pass unnoticed. The medical degree was a foregone conclusion; my grandmother Anna allegedly declared that I would become a physician the moment she first laid eyes on me in the hospital nursery. Throughout my childhood, Uncle Bern reinforced the notion, declaring time and again that a surgeon’s status was second only to that of God.

In Mom’s mind, the letters MD after my name were a source of perpetual pride; fully spelled out, they stood for My Son the Doctor. Within Mom’s circle of friends, a child with a medical degree elevated her social status. Anyone could brag about a child who made partner in some boutique law firm or was promoted to chief executive officer of Fill-in-the-Blank Corporation. Free estate planning and company discounts were nice, but neither trumped the value of free medical advice, the patience to listen to all that ails, and unlimited prescription medication refills conferred by My Son the Doctor, who was just one quick phone call away. To the extent that these fringe benefits made Mom happy, I was happy to oblige—most of the time.

This destination holiday also encompassed the celebration of Uncle Bern’s eightieth birthday, which legitimized it even further. The fact that Uncle Bern turned eighty years old eleven months before the projected departure date of said trip was immaterial. Sydelle was turning seventy and any other milestone paled in comparison. All of her cronies would have no choice but to acknowledge the grandiosity of the occasion, once they learned that the beloved son Harley was willing to cancel a few surgeries and board a plane for the affair.

Las Vegas was designated as the chosen city. On the surface, it made perfect sense: mishegas and Las Vegas seem tailor-made for each other. Where else in the continental United States can adults travel to year-round to completely let loose and take a temporary break from reality? “What happens in Philadelphia stays in Philadelphia” just doesn’t measure up to the infamous slogan derived from the antics on the Strip.

I willfully overlooked the fact that my parents were about as comfortable in a Vegas nightclub as Hitler would have been at a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem. I tried to convince myself that a trip to Vegas was not necessarily all that absurd. Sydelle and Gerry played a mean penny slot machine together (they considered the stakes too high for them each to play side by side on separate machines). Uncle Bern still played poker routinely with his pals and taught me the basics of five-card draw and seven-card stud as a kid (in the 1980s, Texas Hold ’Em didn’t have the global prestige it currently enjoys). Bern also taught me basic blackjack strategy while describing the highlights of his semi-regular weekend jaunts to Atlantic City with his buddies.

Buried underneath a mountain of self-imposed pressure to ace every exam and homework assignment handed out after the fourth grade, I envisioned joining him on these junkets once I reached legal gambling age. I saw the bachelor’s life my uncle led. While by no means wealthy, he was single and financially independent. I saw him living his life on his own terms, coming and going as he so chose within the constraints of his job as a lithographer in Manhattan. None of my buddies had a close relative quite like Bern, a guy who made his nephew mini cups of coffee and slipped him furtive sips of beer. He was my cool Uncle Bern, revving his car’s engine while I rode shotgun, tossing a football precariously close to our neighbor’s brand-new Cadillac, and gambling his pocket change with me to demonstrate the nuances of poker. Unfortunately, the trips to Atlantic City never materialized during my twenties due to my steadily mounting medical school tuition loans and life as an otolaryngology resident, so the prospect of finally gambling alongside Uncle Bern in Vegas was enticing.

Vegas certainly offered enough to keep me entertained; Elyse and I typically spend a long weekend there every year or two. She tolerates the gambling, focusing like me on blackjack with an occasional stint at the craps tables. The dilemma for her is that she hates to lose more than she loves to win. Gambling aside, though, Vegas offers much of what we’ve both come to enjoy. A quick direct flight from Minneapolis lands us in the midst of a sea of lovely city-sized hotels replete with poolside lounging, luxury spas, world-class shopping, superlative dining, and Broadway-quality entertainment. The plethora of options adds to the allure. We don’t stay in the high rollers suite at Caesars and we don’t blow fifty grand on a shopping spree at the Chanel boutique. We don’t rent out the poolside cabanas and we don’t get daily tandem two-hour massages. We don’t wash down caviar with the finest champagne and we don’t sit in the front row waiting for Celine Dion to waltz out on stage. But we will stay in a standard room at the Venetian Hotel and purchase a few items to add to our wardrobes. We’ll go for a dip in the pool and dry off while reading a novel. In the evenings, we may see a Cirque du Soleil show or a concert. And we always eat really, really well. Elyse and I have always appreciated great food. For us, it’s not about the price or the name of the celebrity chef on the menu; a more expensive meal does not mean a more enjoyable meal. We both crave the experience of a great meal. That means starting off with a killer cocktail, eating flavor-packed yet reasonably healthy food, and enjoying the ambiance of an inviting room. So when a Vegas trip was up for discussion, no one had to worry about dragging me there kicking and screaming.

Sydelle and Gerry were also not Vegas neophytes; they’d been there a couple of times previously, though never with me. They went principally for the entertainment that abounds along the Strip. They filled their days catching the dancing water fountains at the Bellagio, the perfectly manicured floral gardens in the front lobby of the Wynn, and the gondoliers crooning in the canals of The Venetian. Nights were spent in the theatres, catching a musical or a variety show. In between, the people watching never ceased to disappoint.

As I thought more about the proposed trip, I pictured Bern playing the role of an essential accomplice. He was to be my wingman, insulating and buffering me from the parental mishegas that was certain to rear its ugly head. But Bern was so much more than an accessory; he was the most important male role model of my childhood. I looked up to him, I emulated him, and I strove to be like him from my first memories.

I was always a good kid through and through. I was a responsible kid in elementary school, a trustworthy kid in middle school, and a kid who never got into any real trouble or needed a curfew in high school. I could watch pretty much whatever I wanted on TV for as long as I wanted to watch it. It was hard to argue with my viewing patterns when the report cards I brought home from school were flawless. I was responsible for deciding to turn the TV off when I felt like I wasn’t making sufficient progress on my homework or was having trouble concentrating.

As long as I left a note explaining my whereabouts, I was free to play sports or hang out with the guys after school. My decision to come home was mine and mine alone. I knew when dinner would be served and my weight proved that I didn’t miss a meal. My bedtime was set at the point of equilibrium between the minimum sleep needed to ace the next exam and the maximum time spent studying for it. I respected my parents for granting me these freedoms that most kids didn’t get to enjoy.

I owed my mother the trip to Las Vegas, but it was not because of the privileges I enjoyed as a child. I owed her the trip because I was her only child and I belonged there. I knew that my presence would make the trip special for her. I belonged on that trip, even though I knew parts of it were destined to be laden with mishegas.

There just couldn’t be a trip to Vegas without Uncle Bern. Celebrating Syd’s seventieth birthday on a destination trip while casting aside Bern’s eightieth birthday made no sense. Bern was a perennial presence at all of our major family events, so we naturally assumed he would come along. It was a foregone conclusion that merited no formal conversation between my parents and me. We wanted him with us in Las Vegas and needed him in Las Vegas, albeit for different reasons. Although we all wished him to have a memorable milestone birthday, in practical terms Syd and Gerry recognized that his ability to travel was rapidly dwindling as the years piled up. I needed him there for balance; Bern was the most adept at calming my father down, reigning in his rants, and keeping him in line without offending him.

Bern and I remained close throughout my adult life, never missing a Sunday morning phone call unless I happened to be out of the country or occupied by some surgical emergency. We spoke on the phone every week beginning the day I left for my freshman year at Cornell in 1993. The topics didn’t vary much, but that didn’t matter to me. I never grew bored or tired of them, as some part of me subconsciously appreciated them as a tradition that would not last forever.

We always started with a reiteration of the same talking points: my week at work and his week at the poker table. We talked about Daphne and Zachary and his bottomless supply of coffee. We rehashed the events of his Saturday evenings out with his girlfriend at the Saravan Diner and his Sunday morning frustrations competing for an empty washing machine in his apartment building’s laundry room. The progress of the New York Yankees and the New York Giants were always covered in due course, depending on the season of the year. He then inevitably worked a few anecdotes into the conversation, drawing from the lifelong influence that the US Army had on his philosophical approach to life on planet Earth. Despite the ability to complete his sentences, I laughed at the 831st rendition of any story just as hard as the thirty-first. As we prepared to hang up, Bern would always remind me to eat well, because “a Sunday without lox is like a day without sunshine.” These phone calls were an immutable fixture of my Sunday mornings.

About a thousand conversations with Bern spanning twenty years of my life unfolded in this way, before we spoke one nondescript Sunday morning about the possibility of the Vegas trip. Uncle Bern didn’t give a damn where we went to celebrate, as long as the four of us were all together. He reminded me that he came within a stone’s throw of being shipped to the front lines of the infantry during the Korean War; at the last minute, he lied his way into a position as an army medic and was deployed to Germany instead. Never forgetting his good fortune, Bern contentedly kept his feet firmly planted on US soil since the day he received his discharge papers from the army. He saw no reason to get a passport now that his sister was about to turn seventy. Vegas was a perfectly fine destination. He only had one non-negotiable pre-requisite. Coffee.

Bern was a coffee- and liquor-guzzling Jewish Yankee fan from the brawling South Bronx whose lithography career fed the bottomless pit that was his stomach. To him, life was about coffee and food. Coffee and food were the vehicles through which Bern experienced life.

Consider religion, for example. In Bern’s eyes, the significance of the Jewish religious holidays started and ended with the traditional foods and delicacies traditionally prepared for each special occasion. The holidays as an aggregate could be viewed as one huge meal consumed over the course of the year. In this scheme, the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur represented the appetizers. Rosh Hashanah meant apples and honey. Yom Kippur equated to bagels, lox, tuna salad, chicken salad, and noodle kugel. Stepping out of order, the winter holidays meant dessert. Hanukkah and Purim were synonymous with chocolate gelt and fruit-filled Hamantaschen, respectively. The entrée course remained, and Passover boldly stepped in to satisfy the role. The two seder meals held during the first two nights of Passover together lasted a good six hours or so. By the end of the second seder, Bern would have put down enough food to tide his belly over through the summertime holiday lull. He spent the summer in a state of relative satiety. By the time the High Holidays rolled around again the following September, his stomach’s equilibrium was sufficiently out of whack to start the feasting all over again.

Bern’s caffeine addiction (and it was an addiction) began as an adolescent to compensate for the perceived mistreatment he suffered at the hands of his aunt Gertie. Apparently, my grandmother went into the hospital for a few days to give birth to my prematurely arriving mother. She left Bern in the care of responsible adults, who in this case took the forms of his aunt Gertie and uncle Julius.

Julius was severely crippled by polio at a young age, so he was of no help to Gertie in the kitchen. And it was the kitchen that proved to be Gertie’s undoing; gastronomic monotony was Bern’s official diagnosis. For three evenings, dinner consisted of nothing but a solitary matzo ball in chicken broth, a piece of rye bread, and a glass of cherry water. The big variable at dinnertime was whether the matzo ball would sink or float. As this culinary repertoire was presented on the third consecutive night, Bern stood up from the table, donned his coat, turned up the collar and walked home to an empty apartment in the South Bronx. Fiercely independent to a fault throughout his life, he willfully absconded at the age of eleven at night and in the middle of a winter storm.

As soon as he got home, he put a pot of coffee on the stove. It was the only hot beverage at his disposal, and desperate times called for desperate measures. A whole new world percolated through the filter in his mind when the first sips touched upon his lips. Tastes he didn’t know existed exploded onto his palate. Ethiopia, the top coffee producing country in Africa, forever more served a legitimate purpose as a nation in Bern’s mind. Outside his home, Bern wasn’t particular about the brand of coffee he drank, so long as it was fully caffeinated. If a cup of decaf accidentally appeared, Bern would half-jokingly accuse the server of attempted murder.

“Are you trying to poison me with that damn decaf?” Bern would yell. He’d smile through the waiter’s stammering apology before continuing. “A cup of napalm would be less toxic to my system. You think I’m afraid of a little caffeine? I was about to be shipped to the front lines of the infantry in Korea. That was something to worry about, not a few milligrams of caffeine.” He even got a little jumpy if an orange-handled pot of decaf got within three feet of his cup. At home, though, it was Maxwell House all the way.

For such a devotee of coffee, you might think it surprising that Bern preferred instant coffee at home. His choice of Maxwell House above all other coffee brands was akin to a beer connoisseur preferring Bud Light to the hundreds of unique craft beers that fill liquor store refrigerators these days. But Bern was a fairly simple man with correspondingly simple tastes. Just because a product was fancier didn’t automatically make it better. He knew what he liked, and he liked Maxwell House very, very much. Kraft Foods should only know what a devoted customer Uncle Bern remained throughout his life. If they needed an eighty-year-old spokesperson with a bad temper and two false front teeth that looked like a pair of Chiclets, Bern would have happily obliged. I don’t think he would have even charged Kraft Foods an appearance fee. He would have been happy enough just to promote his beloved Maxwell House, to give a little back to the company that had fed his caffeine cravings for so many decades.

Bern started boiling the water for his first cup of Maxwell House as soon as he rolled out of bed each morning. His last cup accompanied dessert in the evenings; in between, a new cup was served approximately every two hours. While I could not guarantee Maxwell House, I assured Bern that I could keep the coffee flowing throughout a weekend trip to Vegas.

Uncle Bern is a man who knows what he wants and when he wants it. Delayed gratification is not part of his persona. His life in New York is all about routine. Bern leaves little to chance. His local bagel shop has his everything bagel with cream cheese already wrapped in wax paper before he walks through the door every weekday morning. A fresh pot of coffee brewed especially for him finishes dripping into the urn just as Bern sidles up to the cash register. So it is especially these creatures of routine like Uncle Bern who need a little reassurance when found in unfamiliar territory. He tried his best to seem blasé, but his unease was obvious to my trained ear.

“You sure there will be a coffee pot in the Vegas hotel room, Harley?”

“Yeah, Bern. I’m sure.”

“You’re positive?”

“Quite.”

“Okay, but how can you be so sure?”

“Because every hotel room I’ve entered in the United States of America in the twenty-first century has had a coffee pot in the room. Think all the way back to 2001. Remember my wedding in Santa Fe? Did your hotel room have a coffee pot?”

“Yeah, it did, Harl.”

“Elyse didn’t need to run out to Starbucks in her wedding dress for you, did she?”

“Nope.” Bern laughed at the image of his veiled niece making a pit stop to order a large black coffee en route to our wedding ceremony.

“Santa Fe is in the desert, just like Vegas. Take some solace in the fact that you didn’t go into the throes of caffeine withdrawal during my wedding. Use past precedent to your advantage.”

“There will be coffee in the room, right? I don’t need to throw a jar of Maxwell House into my suitcase? The coffee pot’s no good without a good brew, Harl.”

“Bern, we’re talking about Las Vegas. These are major hotels big enough to have their own zip codes. They’re designed and operated to satisfy your every whim and desire. If you’re willing to pay for it, I bet the concierge will fly an employee to Colombia on a private jet and have him hike up into the mountains on a burro to handpick a pound of coffee beans directly off the trees. For an extra fee, the concierge may even be able to arrange same day service.”

“Okay, okay, I get it, Harley. It’s just that I can’t afford to take any chances at my age. Remember, if I ever get hospitalized tell the nurse to shoot a cup of coffee directly into my IV line. That will be more powerful medicine than anything any doctor can prescribe.”

“I’ll have the nurse flush your line with coffee right after the morphine is pushed.”

“That’s good enough for me, Harley. Let’s go.”

So that was it. It was official. Las Vegas, Nevada was slated to host Sydelle’s and Uncle Bern’s birthday celebrations (mostly Sydelle’s seventieth with a side of Bern’s eightieth). All Bern required was a never-ending supply of coffee and pastries, a few beers, and the opportunity to grab a pair of hot dice and make a few points at the craps tables.

CHAPTER 2

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL WOULD HAVE HAD A CORONARY

The year 2012 started the same way that 2011 ended—in a whirlwind. The spring trip to Las Vegas was still months away, making it no more than a fleeting thought in my mind and a blip on my calendar’s horizon. Life as Elyse and I knew it was semi-controlled chaos. We existed by rushing through our days. Time was perpetually short. My surgical practice was steadily growing. There was a semi-regular flow of extra patients needing urgent surgeries that ended well into the evenings. Make no mistake: a waiting room chock full of pacing patients was a good problem to have. No doctor wants his or her waiting room to double as an echo chamber. I carved out just enough time to drive the kids either to or from school twice a week, exercise three times a week, and throw weeknight dinners together as I sorted the mail. It took real concentration to avoid accidentally dousing the bills in vinaigrette intended for the salad and serving dinner with a letter opener rather than a knife. After a typical week, I didn’t begin to feel even remotely relaxed until Sunday evenings rolled around.

Elyse’s dermatology practice was equally if not more robust. She was pulling out her own hair navigating between the demands of her own overflowing clinical practice and her commitment to be fully invested in the kids’ lives. She coordinated Zach and Daph’s schedules, volunteered time she didn’t have at their schools, and arranged our social calendars on the side.

Zachary was in preschool at our synagogue. He figured out how to pervert classic nursery rhymes by substituting words for disgusting biological functions, concentrated on honing his fine motor skills by coloring within the printed outlines of a medley of cartoon characters, and learned that it was never okay to bite another human. Daphne was mastering the major goals of first grade: learning how to read, keeping track of both of her mittens throughout the long winter, and remembering that it was never okay to bite another human.

I recognized early on in my career that the practice of medicine could be all consuming if I permitted it to be. There were the tangible leftovers at the remains of a twelve-hour day, regardless of how hard I worked. Partner meetings, practice-building events, charts to complete, surgical cases to dictate, patient telephone calls to return, emails to review, and urgent prescriptions to fill were but a few. These chores came with the territory. Elyse and I (and every other physician) unwittingly signed up for them when we were young and naïve, when our noble passions and idealism guided us to medical school in the hopes of curing disease, saving lives, easing suffering, and furthering the overall human condition. Some of these tasks could reasonably be postponed for a day or two. But procrastination never made them vanish. If postponed for too long, we would be quickly buried underneath an avalanche of falling medical bricks like the final moments of an unsalvageable game of Tetris.

Then there were the intangibles. These were the thoughts that stewed in the deep recesses of my mind and intermittently erupted like a geyser into conscious awareness without my permission. That last rhinoplasty went fairly well, but how could it have been better still? Would the patient ultimately be pleased with the results? In what precise sequence should I perform tomorrow’s cheek reconstruction? Would the results of the biopsy I took earlier in the week be finalized before the weekend? Can I finish tomorrow’s office appointments in time to relieve the nanny as planned? The list of questions could be endless, if allowed. Thankfully, I was always pretty good at separating my work life from my home life.

Our basic approach to parenting and to our lives in general was to divide and conquer. I’d pour Elyse a cocktail while she changed Zach’s diaper. The next evening, the roles reversed. Most of the time it worked out pretty well, provided that our paths didn’t cross and the lime wedge destined for the martini glass wasn’t placed into the Diaper Genie instead. Nonetheless, between the attention we devoted to our careers, kids, and each other, there was little free time left over. Simple luxuries like leisurely chatting up friends on the phone were relegated to fantasyland. Our phone use was radically different from that of Mom and Dad.

Syd and Gerry shared one cellular telephone in 2012. This extraordinary electronic device came fully equipped with the technology to make and receive telephone calls. It had no text messaging or photographic capabilities. Apps were items ordered in restaurants prior to the entrée course; they were not to be found on this vintage flip phone. The term “Bluetooth” referred to a dental emergency, not a method of hands-free communication. Music played on the FM band of their car radios, not their phone. This phone was turned off when not in use; the battery had to be conserved and preserved. It was powered on twice a year when Syd urgently needed to make a call. It was also powered on when Syd expected to receive a call, an event that occurred with similar frequency. Otherwise, the phone was only left on in dire circumstances, like the threat of an impending global thermonuclear war. My parents thought that leaving the phone on indiscriminately was irresponsible, if not highly negligent.

The phone took up permanent residence in the deep recesses of my mother’s purse. There were approximately thirty-seven different compartments in this purse, each secured with a zipper, latch, magnet, snap, or some other closure mechanism. Thus, even when the stars aligned sufficiently for the phone to be on during an actual incoming call, the chances of Syd answering it prior to going to voice mail were somewhere between zero and nonexistent. I found Syd’s cell phone habits shocking, considering that she used her home landline phone so often that it could be viewed as an extension of her hand.

My father, on the other hand, completely disavowed himself of all things telephonic. At least he did so at home. I can’t recall a single instance when he picked up the phone to voluntarily initiate a social call to anyone besides Uncle Bern. As a career insurance salesman, my father spent a fair amount of time at work on the phone with clients. How he managed to use the phone well enough to commandeer a paycheck ranks up there with the great mysteries of the world. Why? The man spoke so quickly, and in such a pressure-packed manner, you were lucky to understand two words in ten. He always asked you second and third questions before allowing you to answer the first. His mind raced so quickly that he often didn’t listen to a word you said.

Given this background, communicating with my father was always difficult. Once I left home for college in the mid 1990s, however, the telephone posed another barrier when Dad answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello? (Pause.) Hello?”

“Dad. Hi, Dad. It’s me.”

“Who is this?”

Even at this early point in the conversation, I recognized an all-too-familiar pattern unfolding.

“Who the hell do you think this is?”

“Oh, Harley. It’s you. Why didn’t you say so?”

“The last time I checked, I’m an only child. There’s no one else on the planet that calls you Dad. Who the hell did you think was on the other end of the line?”

“Right. You’re right, Harley.”

“No shit I’m right! Unless there’s some love child out there you’d like to divulge.”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll put your mother on the phone.”

“Good talk, Dad.”

That was about the extent of our phone conversations while I was away at college. Gerry was never one for making small talk on the phone. The arrangement worked well for me, consumed as I was with my undergraduate pre-med courses in biology and organic chemistry.

Throughout my childhood, Mom arrived home from work in the elementary school trenches of Queens, New York at about 3:45 p.m. Her daily game of Phone-A-Friend started shortly thereafter. If my mother was on the phone, she was on the phone. Her vast network of like-minded lifelong friends enabled her with an equal desire to yak away on the phone, unlimited by any time constraints.

The rotary dial landline phone we had was replaced with a newfangled push-button model (complete with mute and redial buttons) in the late 1980s. Call waiting was still a radical, cutting-edge concept in those days. No one had heard of a cell phone; the closest gadgets at the time were the walkie-talkie and the CB radio. The push-button phone was tricked out with an extra-long cord and a rubber shoulder rest that eased neck strain. These features allowed Sydelle to converse for hours at a time without exacerbating the TMJ syndrome she suffered from ever since her crooked pediatric dentist filled about eighteen cavities she never actually had. Even so, her neck gradually developed a permanent slight cant to the left (like the Leaning Tower of Pisa) from the thousands of hours cumulatively spent cradling the phone receiver between her left ear and left shoulder. The extra-long extension cord allowed her to prepare dinner as she meandered throughout the four corners of the kitchen, from the table to the appliances to the cupboards, without having to set the phone down.

In Long Island in the 1980s, I was a kid in my prime. I was in that sweet spot between the ages of ten and fifteen, only peripherally aware of the fact that there was a serious world somewhere out there. I played pickup games of football and basketball after school with the guys in the local park, did my homework, ate dinner, and then did some more homework while watching the Yankees on TV. As an only child, my friends were vitally important to me. I had a large gaggle of close pals distributed radially about the neighborhood like the spokes on the wheels of the ten-speed bike I relied upon to navigate the not-so-mean streets. We all went to the same public school, Hebrew school, and summer day camp. So I fully acknowledge the importance of Mom’s friends in her own life. To do otherwise would be hypocritical.