WHAT KIND OF JEW PULLS A TRIGGER? -- part 1

My father must have known the difference between a stool pigeon and a buzzard. He certainly knew the difference between a bob-tail and a jackass. However, he would not have known a wild duck from a canary, or a rack of antlers from a rack of lamb. Why then was I forever giving him birthday cards and father’s day cards that featured men of Anglo-Saxon character with sensible pipes clenched in their mouths and a smidgeon of grouse feather in their hatbands? If they were sitting in armchairs in their studies, there would be a brandy snifter on a side table. A fine double barrel would be displayed above the mantel. The men stared up and out yonder without blinking as they followed flights of mallards far above no doubt thinking of hunts past and hunts to come with their Eagle Scout sons whose names were followed by numbers.

Reuben Henry Foreman was not that man (and my Boy Scout career went south without ever going north). He smoked El Producto cigars, a five pack for a buck, drank a single shot of Four Roses in the morning and one again in the afternoon, put a quarter on the numbers every day, and was the only white man I ever saw read the “Baltimore Afro-American”, the city’s only Black newspaper. He didn’t do it for any particular reason other than he liked to read newspapers. If he could have read Chinese he’d have read a Chinese newspaper. One time I did see him with a book -- “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. It was upside down in his lap, and he was asleep. The men depicted on the greeting cards I gave him read “Field and Stream.” If you had asked him, Ruby would have told you his firm belief, but if you never asked him you’d never know.

Many years after his death, Jamie and I went to Baltimore so she could meet my family for the first time. My mother kept some old photographs under a glass top cut to fit her bureau. Jamie called me over, pointed out a photo of my father, and asked, “Who’s that?”

How could she not know who it was?

“My father, J. Who d’ya think?”

“You never told me he was crippled.”

“Who’s crippled?”

“Your father.”

“My father was not crippled.”

“Is this man in that snapshot not your father? Come here and look at this,” she insisted and pointed to a frayed, black & white photo of my father standing there smiling at the camera. The metal canes with arm support attachments that he used are clearly visible. They made a soft, clanking noise, pocket change, when they struck the ground. He was never without them

“Yeah, what’s crippled about him?”

“He’s got crutches! Two of them.”

“Canes!”

“OK. Canes.”

“Thank you. He got around just fine.”

“Yeah, Stephen, the man in this picture might’ve gotten around just fine, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a cripple who did it. Look at him. If the man in this picture is your father then your father was a cripple.”

The man in the picture is my father is a cripple. That man. There. Got it?

Finally, I did. Wow, did I! I was well into my thirties, but, not until that moment, did I ever think of my father as a cripple. Trying to grasp it for the first time staggered me some. I had never even heard the word “cripple” used in our house. It wasn’t avoided. It simply wasn’t, as if the word were magically deleted from every book and magazine that ever followed us home. If the word occurred within earshot outside of the house, if it registered with me at all, I would never have associated it with any image of my father.

I’m trying to find words to describe my feelings as this information made its determined way through to the bedrock of my heart. Little by little I got it. If you wanted to change a single word and only one single word in a manuscript of thousands of pages, millions of pages, you’d start on page one, program your computer, and instantly it would adjust. He would be She. Her would be Him. Past tense would become Present tense. It might become You. You’d feel the change – register a ping on the radar -- but you’d go on, and everything will be what it is.

Many years later (not to mention many years ago), I sat in the Los Angeles Public Library in downtown LA at a carrel stacked with books doing chump change research for a textbook company in Virginia and fondly remembering those by-gone days when people actually paid me real money to write things. I needed a nap. It came upon me suddenly like mustard gas. My head went down, I’m guessing with a thunk. I was gone, bodily gone, time gone, Dorothy in the poppy field gone, nothing there gone. I was deep inside that silence when the pocket change sound of my father’s canes was suddenly as real and immediate as it had ever been. My father was here, there, right next to me – Where? -- and what was happening instead was that an old woman with two metal canes was walking by. My father had never been more real to me than in the instant it took for my eyes to open. I heard him. He was there.