The Council Of Dads Part 6

THIS IS WHAT B BEN Edwards wrote in my second-grade yearbook: Edwards wrote in my second-grade yearbook: Bruce, Have a happy safe summer! I might come down to the beach to see you!!!!! You are very nice and kind. Love, Ben The next year he added my nickname but cut out the love.

Tweddy Bear, I like you! Ben The year after that he was downright cool.

Have a nice time at the beach. Ben Not a single exclamation mark!

His school photos during those years show far less change. He always had the freckled cheeks, the innocent eyes, and the thin, straight hair with a gaping cowlick over his forehead. With his boy-next-door shirts and all-American style he could have stepped from the pages of a comic book. He was the Archie of our cla.s.s.

Ben's small-town values were hard earned. His father, an obstetrician and gynecologist, was raised in Claxton, Georgia, home of the infamous boxed fruitcake more loved in truck stops than in restaurants. Its population in the year we were born was 2,672. Ben's mother was from nearby Brooklet, whose population was one-fifth that. I asked Ben whether his father had ever adapted to city life after moving to Savannah.

"I think Dad is still more of a country person," he said. "His favorite pastime is working in the yard. He's not into city-ish things like Starbucks, museums, and dining spots. He'd just as soon have fried chicken at the deli. He doesn't drink. He always goes to church. Heck, he wanted to own a gas station until Granny made him go to med school."

Dr. Edwards was deeply loving as a father. "To this day," Ben said, "he puts his arm around me. I put my arm around him, and we lie in bed watching TV."

But he could also be strict. "I remember once when Joe was sixteen," Ben said, referring to his older brother. "We were in the den, Dad came home one Friday night and asked Joe to take out the trash. Joe said, 'Okay, I'll get it.' Twenty minutes later, Dad came back and asked him again. 'Dad, I told you I'll get it,' Joe said. Twenty minutes later, Dad came back again. 'Son, take out the trash now or I'm going to spank you.' Joe stood up and said, 'Dad, I'm bigger than you are. You're going to spank me?'

"Dad grabbed him by the shirt and said, 'Son, let me tell you one d.a.m.n thing. You may be taller than me, but I will always have enough in my pocket to pay somebody to spank you, so I suggest you take the trash out.' Then he turned and walked away. Joe stood there for a second, then looked at me. 'I'm going to take the trash out.'"

Unlike his father, Ben was always attracted to city pleasures. Food, wine, nightlife, the annual Vegas weekend. He followed his father into medical school, then moved with his wife to Memphis and San Diego. But he couldn't resist the extended family and sweet-tea lifestyle of the South.

"I think there's a genuine goodness that runs through people here," he said. "I'm not saying people in the North don't have it. But you sit in a bar in California, and people are nice, but not genuinely nice. You sit in a bar in Georgia, and that person will end up going out with you that night, or giving you a ride somewhere, or inviting you over the next day for a barbecue."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Things just move slower," he said. "You don't have as many people trying to...win."

"Unless it's football," I said.

"In which case you better win!" he said.

I told him that one of the most moving things about getting sick was how Savannah had rallied. Our cla.s.smates, parents, even onetime socialites who ignored me as a child, suddenly formed a scrum and tried to lift my entire family from afar.

"It's the Southern thing," Ben said. "Loyalty. Honesty. Friendship."

And these are the qualities I wanted Ben to impart to my girls. He would convey the importance of being from a place. How you carry that place with you wherever you go. How you keep coming back to it time and again no matter how long you live. "This is where your daddy came from," he would tell the girls. "This is where you come from, too."

Ben would teach them how to remember.

Our friendship started when we were five. "My earliest memory of you," Ben said, "is our holding hands, walking into kindergarten." He remembered our touch football games in the backyard and the time I defended him in fifth grade when he believed that Sharon Stubbs had a crush on him, but Charles Schwarz said she didn't and told Ben to be mean to her.

But his most vivid recollection was the most touching.

"In the fourth grade, we used to lay down on the carpet and read," he said. "One time, I was picking my nose and putting it into my mouth. Everybody was making fun of me, but you didn't break a sweat. You said, 'Ben, everybody is watching you pick your nose.' I looked up and everybody was pointing and laughing. The next two weeks, everyone made fun of me, but you didn't say a word."

"Thirty-five years later, this is what you remember!?"

"Your best friend was picking his nose and putting boogers in his mouth, and it didn't change anything with you. It comes back to loyalty."

I asked him why he thought we were friends. "It starts off with proximity," he said. "Then, as we went along, we had similar interests, but we weren't into one-upmanship. You were obviously more artistic with plays and things like that, while I was always better than you in sports. But whatever you did, I did. And whatever I did, you did. Even if we didn't want to do it."

But for all our similarities, we had one gaping difference, and after race, it was the biggest one you could have in the South at that time.

Ben was Christian. I was Jewish.

In our talk, Ben alluded to it several times. My family ate different foods because we were Jewish. We lit candles and drank wine on Friday nights because we were Jewish.

Yet this difference was the source of our most powerful bonding experience: Every December I went to his house and helped decorate their Christmas tree. I loved the ritual of it, the colored lights and angels, the feeling of being included. When Ben's mother wrote me after I got cancer, she began with a beautiful thought: "When I see Ben, I think of you. You two were a great team." It ended with a question: "Do you remember helping us decorate our Christmas tree?"

Unlike some Jews, we didn't have a Christmas tree growing up; Linda and I don't have one today. But in a small way, my experience with the Edwardses' tinsel helped prepare me for the interfaith world I would later enter. Ben believes it shaped his life in even bigger ways.

"If you asked me what I think are my good traits," Ben said, "I would say first, hanging out with people who are different from me. I'm not saying I was perfect, or when I was in college I didn't chime in when people were making fun of others, just so I could be part of the crowd. But I have always been very accepting of diversity. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, Jewish, Christian, gay, lesbian, transvest.i.te."

"Where did you learn that?"

He didn't pause. "The exposure to your family. I'm not giving you the whole credit, but I think you deserve a lot. Because your family was vastly different from mine. The principles were the same, but the underlying cultures were totally different. The Pop-Tarts versus the Milano cookies. The fun house versus the more serious, more artistic, more save-the-world house.

"You told me once I was your baseline American boy," he continued. "I went to college. I got a job. I married my high school sweetheart-" He caught himself.

"And now I'm getting divorced. I guess I am am fitting the pattern! fitting the pattern!

"But seriously," he continued. "Y'all aren't. None of your family is what I would consider Southern normalcy. But that diversity changed me and subtly became my baseline for what is American today."

Ben then shared a story I had never heard before. After high school, Ben went to the University of Georgia and joined a fraternity. In his soph.o.m.ore year, he and his fraternity brothers were talking about rushes. "I was sitting with two guys I had known for a year, and someone made the comment, 'Oh, but he's Jewish. Do we really want a bunch of them in the fraternity?' And maybe I was naive, but I had never heard anybody say something derogatory like that. 'What are you talking talking about?' I said. 'Oh, you know, they're not like us,' the guy said. And I just ripped his head open. 'How do about?' I said. 'Oh, you know, they're not like us,' the guy said. And I just ripped his head open. 'How do you you know?' I said. 'Name me your Jewish friends.' know?' I said. 'Name me your Jewish friends.'

"We voted the guy into our fraternity."

BEN'S L LOST Y YEAR BEGAN some months before mine, when his cousin Raul called him one day at work. Raul had grown up three doors down from me on Lee Boulevard, and his son, then thirteen, had an unusual growth in his leg. Ben, a bone radiologist, looked at the MRI. "Holy c.r.a.p!" he thought. "This is an osteosarcoma. It's probably the only one in my entire life I will ever see." some months before mine, when his cousin Raul called him one day at work. Raul had grown up three doors down from me on Lee Boulevard, and his son, then thirteen, had an unusual growth in his leg. Ben, a bone radiologist, looked at the MRI. "Holy c.r.a.p!" he thought. "This is an osteosarcoma. It's probably the only one in my entire life I will ever see."

"And what was the next beat in your mind?" I asked.

"He's going to die."

Over the next year, as "Little Raul" went through treatment and surgery, the community that later rallied around me rallied first around him. They catered meals. They decorated his house at Christmas. The entire seventh-grade cla.s.s of boys shaved their heads in his honor.

Then, just as Little Raul was recovering, Ben got a similar call from me.

I asked him what he thought when he heard my diagnosis. He stammered for a second. "I thought the same thing," he said. "How does such badness happen to such good people. You get tired of it. When I biopsy patients, I can tell you whether it's going to be malignant just by how nice the person is. The nicer they are, the more malignant it's going to be. The pieces-of-dirt jerks could have the nastiest-looking lesion, and it will be an infection. A sweet little lady, she'll have pancreatic cancer. It's a running joke in the CAT scan department."

"And in that call, did you have the next beat?" I asked.

"Absolutely. I thought, 's.h.i.t, my best friend's going to die.'"

"So it's twenty years from now," I said, "my daughters come to see you. They say, 'n.o.body knew our daddy longer than you.' Where would you take them?"

"That's hard," Ben said, "because every place I can think of someone else would already have thought of." He mentioned Tybee Island and our school. "In the end, I think I would take them to that nasty creek behind your house where we used to catch tadpoles."

"The ca.n.a.l!" I said. "I haven't thought about that place in years."

The Hampstead Ca.n.a.l wasn't much of a ca.n.a.l at all; it was more of a drainage ditch filled with the lowest forms of life-algae, tadpoles, adolescent boys. It wasn't six feet wide, but to us it was the Amazon. One spring we started corralling tadpoles and trying to raise them into frogs. We put them in a plastic tub in our garage. They would sprout limbs and become vaguely frog-ish before stinking up the house so badly they had to be let loose.

"So what could Eden and Tybee possibly learn from the ca.n.a.l?" I asked.

"It's where we came from," he said. "It was a s.k.a.n.ky and disgusting place. We never should have been there. Yet it's where we learned to be ourselves. It was home."

As he spoke I realized that Ben, that friend I barely knew, that friend I rarely saw, that friend who had prompted me to make that list of people I would call in an emergency only because I needed a way to name his role in my life, had hit on one of the deepest truths of all.

He was my tadpole.

He was that friend who was there at the beginning, who regardless of what had happened in between, returned at a moment of possible ending to remind me where we both started: two squiggly boys in a drainage ditch trying to cultivate arms and legs to hop off into the world.

And what I discovered in talking to Ben is what I learned time and again during my "Lost Year": As important as place is to my ident.i.ty, I hadn't fully mined the roots of my geography; as vital as people are to my life, I hadn't truly plumbed the depths of my lineage. I hadn't read my grandfather's memoirs, delved into my father's past, or quizzed my friends about the headwaters of their lives. I had been content with the half-known and the unsaid.

I had avoided the ca.n.a.l.

And only by plunging into my past did I discover all the nourishment that was floating in the water. As my girls liked to sing when they crossed the low bridge to Tybee Island, "And you'll always know your neighbor / And you'll always know your pal / If you've ever navigated on the Erie Ca.n.a.l."

Navigate the ca.n.a.l.

Tend your tadpoles.

You never know when you might need a pal.

.15.

BE A COLLECTOR

THE D DIBNER L LIBRARY OF THE History of Science and Technology is tucked in a remote corner of the ground floor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. I walk past a display of Julia Child's kitchen and an exhibition of ill.u.s.trated Bibles, enter a small antechamber, lock my bag in a cubby, and go through a gla.s.s door. History of Science and Technology is tucked in a remote corner of the ground floor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. I walk past a display of Julia Child's kitchen and an exhibition of ill.u.s.trated Bibles, enter a small antechamber, lock my bag in a cubby, and go through a gla.s.s door.

Inside is a modest reading room, with six tables and lamps. On the wall hangs a portrait of Eli Whitney, the young Yale graduate who moved to Savannah in 1783 and invented the cotton gin. I am here to examine the collection of another Yale graduate with ties to Savannah.

The librarian carries out five volumes of loose-leaf eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch onionskin paper, hand-typed in red and black ink, bound in black paperboard binders. She places the first volume on a book stand. I slip on a pair of white cotton gloves and open the cover. Inside is a one-page bio of the author.

Dr. Benjamin S. Abeshouse was born February 7th, 1901, in New Haven, Connecticut. He graduated from New Haven High School; attended Yale University, graduated 1921, then entered Yale Medical School graduating 1924.

The bio goes on to outline my grandfather's medical career, culminating in his rise to chief of urology at Baltimore's Sinai Hospital in 1945. It mentions his three children, along with 120 academic articles he wrote. It ends with this statement: "He had various hobbies, i.e., collecting antiques, miniature ivories and statues; but his pride, gathered in these volumes, was the world's largest collection of epitaphs, 9,000 in total, which he and Mrs. Abeshouse acc.u.mulated over a period of thirty years."

I was shaking. These pages were the closest I had come to the man who died three years before I was born and for whom I was named.

I was nervous. There was something ghostly about learning during a year when my most pressing fear was death that the figure who had hovered over my childhood had spent his entire adulthood collecting tombstone farewells.

And I was surprised. From the minute I turned the first page of these writings, any distance creepiness slipped away, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of recognition, even kinship.

A PHOTOGRAPH DEFINED HIM PHOTOGRAPH DEFINED HIM while I was growing up. It hung outside my room and depicts him in profile, wearing a starched white tie and morning coat around a timpani chest. He seems poised for debate at Oxford. His face is round, even cherubic, with Harry Potter spectacles and thin hair, cleanly parted, waxed to his head. He hs a boy's innocence and a man's seriousness. Give him the floor, he would outargue you. Puncture him, and a flood of vulnerabilities would rush out. while I was growing up. It hung outside my room and depicts him in profile, wearing a starched white tie and morning coat around a timpani chest. He seems poised for debate at Oxford. His face is round, even cherubic, with Harry Potter spectacles and thin hair, cleanly parted, waxed to his head. He hs a boy's innocence and a man's seriousness. Give him the floor, he would outargue you. Puncture him, and a flood of vulnerabilities would rush out.

I never noticed that vulnerability when I was a child. Instead, Bucky Abeshouse was so exalted he could have been a Roman emperor. His chiseled face belonged on an ancient coin-august, heralded, untouchable. I remember asking my father once about him; his reply seemed to cut off any questions: "He was a great man."

The truth, of course, was more complicated.

Bucky Abeshouse, too, grew up without a dad. He was the youngest of nine children from parents who emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania. His father, Abraham, died when he was two months old, leaving his mother to raise her kids while running a corner grocery. Bucky was the first in his family to attend college, and went to Yale at a time when Jews were not allowed to live on campus. After medical school, he relocated to Baltimore to train with a well-known urologist.

Urology in the 1920s was a young profession, and Bucky rose quickly. He penned academic articles on everything from urinary tract sarcomas to t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e surgery to "inflammation of the bladder due to the presence of a foreign object (a pencil)." He pioneered research into renal dyes and kidney dialysis.

And he was always writing. He wrote a book of popular history discussing the genital and urinary diseases of famous men, from Isaac Newton to Woodrow Wilson. Called Troubled Waters Troubled Waters (a pun only a urologist could love), the book includes chapters on Ben Franklin's bladder stones and Napoleon's urinary tract infections. (a pun only a urologist could love), the book includes chapters on Ben Franklin's bladder stones and Napoleon's urinary tract infections.

My grandfather's expertise in male reproduction led to his having a comfort with s.e.xuality that seems, at a minimum, uncommon for his era. He collected replicas of the Manneken Pis, Manneken Pis, the famed Belgian bronze sculpture of a naked boy urinating into a fountain. Bucky even molded a similar sculpture himself and recruited my ten-year-old mother to pose with a garden hose between her legs. In one reproduction that a friend lugged home from Europe, the boy's p.e.n.i.s was fully erect. My grandmother, Carrie, placed it over the kitchen sink, using the boy's engorged phallus to store her wedding ring while she washed the dishes. the famed Belgian bronze sculpture of a naked boy urinating into a fountain. Bucky even molded a similar sculpture himself and recruited my ten-year-old mother to pose with a garden hose between her legs. In one reproduction that a friend lugged home from Europe, the boy's p.e.n.i.s was fully erect. My grandmother, Carrie, placed it over the kitchen sink, using the boy's engorged phallus to store her wedding ring while she washed the dishes.

And in a fascinating career move that my mother didn't know about for more than seventy years, my white-tie-wearing grandfather wrote the introduction to a popular s.e.x guide that was published in 1936. The Single, the Engaged, and the Married The Single, the Engaged, and the Married was so successful it was still in print twenty years later. The book says that s.e.xual relations should be more openly discussed and enjoyed, and does so by advocating the notion that as one advances from single to engaged to married, a greater amount of s.e.x will result. Maybe for you, Grandpa! was so successful it was still in print twenty years later. The book says that s.e.xual relations should be more openly discussed and enjoyed, and does so by advocating the notion that as one advances from single to engaged to married, a greater amount of s.e.x will result. Maybe for you, Grandpa!

My mother was born the year the book was published, which raises the tantalizing possibility that Bucky was writing his essay at the time she was conceived. His piece may be the closest thing to a Back to the Future Back to the Future moment of witnessing my own origins I'll ever have. It suggests that in the middle of the Great Depression, my otherwise formal grandparents were, as the rappers like to say, knockin' da boots. moment of witnessing my own origins I'll ever have. It suggests that in the middle of the Great Depression, my otherwise formal grandparents were, as the rappers like to say, knockin' da boots.

THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION of epitaphs is divided into five, carefully subdivided volumes. Book I contains the inscriptions of famous figures-pharaohs, poets, philosophers, kings. Book II gathers epitaphs based on cause of death-poisonings, railroad accidents, bee stings, burns, electrocutions, falling anchors, diarrhea, hangings. There's an entire chapter on unusual deaths. "The manner of her death was thus / She was druv over by a bus." There's another on food. "This disease you ne'er heard tell on, / I died of eating too much melon." of epitaphs is divided into five, carefully subdivided volumes. Book I contains the inscriptions of famous figures-pharaohs, poets, philosophers, kings. Book II gathers epitaphs based on cause of death-poisonings, railroad accidents, bee stings, burns, electrocutions, falling anchors, diarrhea, hangings. There's an entire chapter on unusual deaths. "The manner of her death was thus / She was druv over by a bus." There's another on food. "This disease you ne'er heard tell on, / I died of eating too much melon."

Subsequent volumes gather epitaphs of centenarians, movie stars, and drunks. His list by professions is prodigious: clockmaker, coal heaver, collier, stagecoach driver, cricketer, coroner, cremationist. And that's just the c c's! He finds dozens of epitaphs for prost.i.tutes. "Here lies the body of young Miss Charlote, / Born a virgin, dies a harlot. / For sixteen years she maintained her virginity / And that's a record for this vicinity." He even uncovers advertis.e.m.e.nts for widows.

Sacred to the Memory of Jared BatesWho died August the 6th, 1800His widow, aged 24, lives at 7 Elm Street,Has every qualification for a good wife,And yearns to be comforted.

His final epitaph purports to be the inscription of Jesus. "Therefore being satisfied with his life and faith, give him eternal happiness through grace."

It took me six hours to turn every one of the collection's 1,500 pages. I may be the only person other than Bucky (and Carrie, who typed them) who ever did.

My first impression was that the collection, while clearly a life's pa.s.sion, may also have been an obsession. Bucky Abeshouse had a great mind, an astonishing knowledge of history, and a wicked sense of humor that I wish I had heard. And boy did he have follow-through! Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not! Believe It or Not! fame acc.u.mulated 5,000 epitaphs by the time of his death; Bucky Abeshouse had 9,000. His work is meticulous, but also encyclopedic, in both the best and worst senses of the word. There's very little perspective. No effort to explain his methodology. No attempt to make sense of what he gathered. There's no forest. Only trees. fame acc.u.mulated 5,000 epitaphs by the time of his death; Bucky Abeshouse had 9,000. His work is meticulous, but also encyclopedic, in both the best and worst senses of the word. There's very little perspective. No effort to explain his methodology. No attempt to make sense of what he gathered. There's no forest. Only trees.

With no overview, the only clue to Bucky's motivation is a one-and-a-half-page manifesto that appears at the start of Book 1. Labeled "Preface on Hobbies by Dr. Benjamin S. Abeshouse," it says the public should find it inspiring and consoling that physicians seek creative outlets for their noteworthy talents beyond their profession. "These artistic manifestations should be considered as safety valves," he writes, "offering an outlet to the nervous tension of those constantly walking in the footsteps of death. A romantic expression may be just the thing to remove the embitterment."

His conclusion is that others should follow the same path. "Be a collector, make a garden, have a hobby."

My mother used virtually the same words when we were kids. We might call it the Abeshouse Absolute.

AFTER LEAVING W WASHINGTON, I drove to Arlington Cemetery in Baltimore to visit my grandfather's grave site. A beautiful stretch of gra.s.s contains row after row of unadorned graves. In the middle, an arched gray headstone is chiseled with the name abeshouse. A small footstone bears his name, along with the boilerplate BELOVED HUSBAND & FATHER BELOVED HUSBAND & FATHER. In the middle is the winged staff of Hermes, the symbol of medicine.

There is no epitaph.

After three decades of gathering every imaginable inspiration, Bucky Abeshouse chose none as his legacy. Maybe he couldn't decide. Maybe he died so suddenly he didn't have time. Or maybe, as my brother put it, he had writer's block.

Either way, as I stood there, I began reflecting on the parallel lives of Bucky Abeshouse and my paternal grandfather, Edwin Feiler Sr. In many ways, they could not have been more different. One was from the urban North; the other the rural South. One was a scholar and collected epitaphs in Latin; the other played blackjack, trapped squirrels, and fished. One was a teetotaler; the other drank moonshine.

But in crucial ways, they had deep similarities. Both were the first in their families to attend college, and each went on to earn professional degrees, in effect isolating them from their closest relatives. Both initiated decades-long literary projects that few would ever see (or hear). Both abstained from joining the types of civic and community inst.i.tutions that would later define their children-arts groups, political parties, volunteer organizations.

Both were self-made men. And both, in a crucial sense, were alone.