Exit Laughing (26 page)

I never worked with him again, didn’t know his name, never saw him again until Aza introduced us in Los Angeles. I was startled. You sit beside a host of printers over the years, in shops around the country, with and without white shirts and ties, with and without aprons, and a chance, one-time meeting becomes indelible; also, he’s now your father-in-law. Even more startling was that he remembered me. He recalled seeing my name on the sign-in board and had decided he wouldn’t speak if I sat next to him. With a last name like McKenzie, I was probably an anti-Semite.

After Pop got his union card in Rochester, he moved on down to New York City, to the Lower East Side, and then with Rose and Aza into The Coops in the Bronx. The complex had been built by the United Workers’ Cooperative Colony to house secular Jews, mostly Communists, who had fled the czar’s Cossacks in Russia and, later, Stalin’s purge—Communists but anti-Stalinists. The conditions for survival, especially on the Lower East Side, were far worse than the shtetls of Poland and Russia, thus the formation of workers’
cooperatives that bought property and built living quarters, activity centers, and shuls for immigrants, including Yiddish-speaking camps like Kinderland, in the Berkshires, where Aza spent many summers.

So we’re back in Minneapolis, where Aza got the call one week from the day her mother died, telling her that Pop was dead. I drove her to the airport, and she was on a plane to Los Angeles by midafternoon, sobbing, shaken. She had had time to prepare for Rose’s death, as her mother had been failing for a while, and had been in the hospital for several days. But Pop’s sudden heart-attack death seemed almost unkind, inconsiderate, selfish. And Aza had to do it alone: there were no understudies at the Guthrie Theatre. There were no friends to meet her, to hold her, to put her up. Her stepmother didn’t invite her to stay (she wasn’t called “Mean One” for nothing).

Mean One was still angry at Pop for dying on her, in the shower where the water ran out onto the floor. Also, her son from her first marriage was staying with her, and she had always been mad at Aza for having somehow dissed him. Aza had called him a lazy mama’s boy, which was the truth, not a diss. Also, the old woman was in failing health herself.

Most of the arrangements for Pop’s burial were handled by Workmen’s Circle. Plots had been bought years before in the Workmen’s section, where Pop would be buried next to his brother. This was Sholom Memorial Park, part of, but below, Glen Haven Memorial Park. That was the rub.

There were three recruited drivers (grandchildren of Pop’s
friends) and nine mourners. Pop’s widow, Mean One, had fallen quite ill and was unable to attend. That left Aza, once again alone, to take charge. They gathered in the parking lot of a small mortuary in the Wilshire District. Pop, a devout atheist, wanted nothing to do with synagogues, none of that opiate for him. The mourners divided themselves up, climbed into the cars that constituted the processional, and headed out to the San Fernando Valley, to Sholom Memorial Park, faithfully following the hearse.

After a few cautionary stops and starts, they crossed into the Valley, but it became noticeable to Aza and her young driver that perhaps the hearse driver might be in a little over his head: whenever he came to a stoplight, he’d consult a map. Somewhere along the route—which led past several cemeteries, but none called Sholom—a traffic cop in the middle of an intersection pointed to a yellow sign that read “Accident Ahead” and motioned for them to turn left. Away they went, now in real trouble.

Rather than follow the road, the hearse driver turned into a series of cul-de-sacs. The first one led to a neighborhood under construction, and the little roundabout was filled with stacked lumber, plywood, and cement bags. The street wasn’t even paved. They managed to bump their way out, the hearse followed by three cars, mostly filled with elderly mourners with bladder issues.

The next circle was inhabited—bicycles, wagons, bats, balls, gloves everywhere—the street deserted. Aza saw a curtain drawn back briefly, then dropped, just like in a Western. The young driver said to Aza, “What is it with this guy and
cul-de-sacs?” The ancient mourners in the backseat had now nodded off.

The next side trip was inhabited by actual people. As the driver got out to talk to a woman watering the lawn, a rubber baseball hit the side of the hearse. The driver ducked just in time. While he was asking for directions, kids on their bikes snaked in and out between the vehicles, staring into the hearse’s window at the casket. An adorable little girl sitting on the curb near Aza’s window smiled at her and said, “Would you like to play dolls with me?” displaying her array. Aza said she almost got out of the car. The conversation with the watering lady was not fruitful.

When this “Lost Tribe of Israel” was passing the same coffee shop for at least the third time, an
alter cocker
in the backseat yelled, “I gotta go!” The driver blew his horn and turned in. All vehicles followed. The driver of the hearse headed for a phone booth in the parking lot. Inside, the old folks lined up according to the severity of squirming. The Men and Ladies signs were not in the equation: the old guys were told to squat. In the café, Danishes and crullers were wiped out, with coffee and sodas. There was a pay phone on the wall.

I was in our apartment in Minneapolis, having just returned from the airport to pick up my parents, who had come to visit from Tampa. When the phone rang and the operator told me it was Aza, I accepted the charges.

“We’re lost. I mean lost. The hearse driver hasn’t got a clue. I’ll tell you about it when I get home, if we’re ever found. The driver is waving at us. We’ve been waving at him for the last
two hours; now
he’s
waving. I’ll see you tomorrow, probably Saturday. I love you, ’bye.”

When they got outside, there was another funeral procession in the parking lot, engines running. The hearse driver had obviously flagged it down. There were a lot more than three cars with that hearse; they even had a police escort. Pop’s group piled in and followed, driving into very familiar territory, turning onto a road they had been on before, four or five miles through a canyon they recognized, to a cemetery they had been at before, Glen Haven Memorial Park. Pop’s driver had seen the sign and turned around to journey back through the canyon, on to other dead ends. There was a mortuary office right there. What a guy.

One of the motorcycle cops, hand up to stop them, got in front of the hearse, escorted them around a corner, perhaps a couple hundred feet, and turned right into Sholom Memorial Park and the Workmen’s Circle section. The hearse driver slid Pop’s casket onto an available gurney and split. Aza was sure there were many cul-de-sacs to be lost in before his day was through.

The three young drivers and the policeman put the casket onto the straps of the prepared gravesite—the service had been expected much earlier, so nobody was around. They lowered him. After a short goodbye, a lot of tears, and a few laughs about the day, Aza tossed in her handful of dirt; the gravestone and the pebbles on top would have to wait. She knelt there for a few moments and was quite certain she heard Pop say to his brother resting beside him, “Misha, have I got a story for you. Oh, boy, have I got a story.”

In life, in death, my mother was a Virgo, which means she was so many things that I am not: neat, well-organized, meticulous, good with details. She delighted in filing things in their proper places. When she got sick with cancer and faced the possibility of her own death, one of her laments was “What’s going to happen to my files?”

On her deathbed, as my brother and I sat with her, she insisted on getting out her Rolodex and going through it, telling Mark who to invite to her funeral. By the time they got to the
E
’s, he couldn’t take it any longer. “Mom,” he said, “you’re dying. You’ve got to let go.”

But letting go was not my mother’s strong point. She had the tenacity of a pit bull when she got hold of an issue, and a loud and furious bark. She yelled when she was angry, or irritated, or simply anxious. We were a yelling sort of family—yelling when we were mad and yelling when we were happy. When we were apart, she would occasionally yell by mail, typing a furious letter at 3
AM
and trudging out to the mailbox to send it.

I’m not sure if it was a tragedy or a blessing that she did not live quite long enough to get on the Internet, which would have saved her the trek to the mailbox. Long before the days
of personal computers, my mother loved to ferret out and pass on information she thought would be illuminating or persuasive. Her letters to me—the ones that weren’t tirades—were always thick with newspaper clippings, snipped from the
L.A. Times
, which she read standing up every morning, with it spread out on top of the portable dishwasher in her narrow kitchen. Sometimes I’d open an envelope and find nothing but a stack of clippings. They ranged from little items she thought would catch my interest to third-hand admonitions—for example, studies of the psychological impact on children of being born from artificial insemination, which seemed to pop up in great numbers after I mentioned to her that I was thinking of going to a sperm bank in order to conceive a child.

Actually, I wasn’t. I was trying to get her to stop nagging me. She desperately wanted a grandchild, and I, by my late thirties, desperately wanted to be a mother, but not a single mother, and I had no partner. Not that I wasn’t looking—but there are things in life you can make happen with will and determination, and others, like love, that seem determined by some other fate. Mom didn’t really want me to be a single mother either. Both of us knew how hard that fate had been for her. But that didn’t stop her nagging, scheming, and occasionally taking action. Once, when I came down to visit, I found her in the process of composing a personal ad for me to be placed in the local Jewish newspaper. Out of curiosity, I asked her what it said.

“I’ve gotten as far as ‘Divorced Jewish female, highly intelligent …’ ” she said.

I questioned whether
highly intelligent
was going to be a big
selling point. (I have a clear memory of cuddling on the couch with her when I must have been seven years old, asking her why I didn’t have any boyfriends. I believe we were watching the Miss America Pageant at the time. “Boys don’t like girls who are smart,” she said. “Boys like girls who are sweet.”)

I reminded her of this advice and suggested that her ad was not strategic. “And did it occur to you that you ought to at least mention the part about being a Pagan?” I asked. Since I was a well-known author of books on the Goddess movement and earth-based spirituality, since I spent my life writing and speaking about these topics, creating rituals, training priestesses of the Goddess, traveling all over the world doing workshops and lectures and Witch camps on the above topics, somehow the cold, stark “divorced Jewish female” didn’t seem to cover it.

Mom brushed the comment aside. For her, my career as author and Witch, although it had lasted by then for a good fifteen years, was never more than a phase I was going through, a slight digression on the path she was convinced would lead me ultimately to becoming a rabbi. Or failing that, a psychotherapist, like her.

Her desire for me to be a rabbi was a bit odd, because my mother was not very religious. She had rebelled against her own Orthodox parents. We didn’t keep kosher, went to synagogue only on High Holy Days, lit the Friday night candles only sporadically, and never kept Shabbos. She tended to dismiss the more observant members of the family—at least the younger ones—as hopelessly old-fashioned and to view the ultra-Orthodox as anal.

I don’t know that my mother really believed in God—of any gender. For her, the mysteries were found in the depths of the human psyche. Why do we do what we do? What unconscious impulses move us? What hidden memories shape us?

When I was small, my mother seemed like a wise oracle who knew the underlying reasons for things. It was she who suggested that the boys who teased me and made me cry might actually like me. We’d snuggle in bed, and she’d tell me about her cases, about their childhood traumas that still hampered them as adults. Each was a fascinating mystery to be probed for clues that would explain their unhappiness.

Over time, my mother developed a near-religion of her own, a deep faith in the healing power of grief. Grief, she maintained, had its own process, its own timetable that could not be hurried or ignored. Grief is our healing response to loss, and if we let ourselves fully feel it and go through all of its stages, it will bring us through rage and despair, back to acceptance and restitution. She wrote a book about it (
A Time to Grieve
, by Dr. Bertha G. Simos) and became a sought-after expert in the field.

She came to her interest in bereavement out of her own terrible grief for my father, who died when I was five and my brother Mark was only nine months old. He was only forty-five at the time, but it was his third heart attack that carried him off. So death haunted my childhood.

There was nothing funny about my father’s death. He had two older sisters who were albinos—perhaps a factor of their parents being cousins, a common practice among Eastern
European Jews of their generation. Not, as among royalty, to preserve some inheritance (they all barely scraped out a living either in America or back in the shtetls of what they always called Russia, but we now call Ukraine), but rather, I suspect, because they didn’t get out much. My mother’s parents were also cousins. When my grandmother Hannah came to this country at sixteen, she stayed with her Aunt Jennie in Duluth. Jennie’s nephew Sam liked her, and when other boys came to call, he told them she wasn’t home. So, they married, making myself and my brother as inbred as a pair of thoroughbred race horses, albeit not nearly so slim or fast on our feet.

My father’s sisters suffered from bad eyesight and poor health, and Ida, the eldest, finally succumbed and died. They lived in Minneapolis, and we lived in Mishawaka, Indiana, where my father directed an institute for disturbed young people, a new post he held for just six months. I have only a few direct memories of him: how I loved the smell of cigarette smoke that clung to his clothing and how when he’d pick me up, my mother, knowing his heart was fragile, would get anxious. He was writing a book, completed shortly before he died, and I remember wanting his attention and being told, “Not now, Daddy’s writing.” It left me with the impression that writing a book was somehow a sacred activity, valued beyond all else, something to leave after you, like a child.