Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mien, somber and solicitous both, welcomed many of the same attendees. Robert and I
both spoke, as we did at our mother's, after the same rabbi, who had never met either of
them, said pretty much the same thing he'd said the last time. (I'll spare you yet another
of my eulogies.) We made the same drive to the graveyard in Chappaqua, where we wit-
nessed his casket slide into the mausoleum drawer next to my mother's.
It was all perfectly awful—sad and enervating. And when it was over at last I
whispered to my brother:
“Good thing we're out of parents. I can't do this again.”
He looked at me with a little bit of shock before he recognized the mordant joke, and
he smiled disapprovingly. Robert, who is four years younger than I am, is a friendly,
optimistic, responsible guy and there's not an ounce of savagery in him—no bitter-
ness—the way there is in me. It was in both my parents, too. He's lucky that way, though
one result is that Robert is missing the sense of grim humor I shared with our folks. In
the grand scheme of our DNA, it's not much, a tiny nugget of the family sensibility. But
I remember thinking, as we buried our father—well, slid him into his drawer—that he
would have understood me instantly and given my remark the appreciative smirk it was
meant to elicit.
My dad could tell a joke; well, he used to be able to, before he got really crabby and
had a hard time seeing beyond himself. When he was younger, I admired his ability; he
knew how to order the details and dole them out, emphasizing this one, casually letting
that one escape. He liked shaggy dog stories, the longer and sillier the better, stories he
could extend and embellish, building to a punch line that would make everybody groan.
There was one about a couple of Italian brothers and two horses they inherited from
their father but couldn't tell apart; I won't bother you with that one.
But the one I especially remember he told me when I was a young man and he was
maybe the age I am now. It was already an old joke then, I'm sure.
At the time I understood it, but I didn't get it the way I do now. It's about a man in
the midst of a midlife crisis. He's got what seems on the surface to be an admirable, suc-
cessful, rewarding, and happy life. He works on Wall Street and makes a lot of money,
lives in a great house, drives a nice car—a couple of nice cars. He's got friends; he plays
a good game of golf. He loves his wife, he loves his kids; everyone is well-adjusted.
But as midlife crises do, it has overtaken his sense of well-being and made him feel
that everything he has adds up to a big nothing. Driven to despair, he can't fend off the
need to strike out on a quest. So he bids his wife and family a difficult but determined
farewell and sets off on a trip around the world. He takes an ocean liner across the At-
lantic and a train across Europe; he hitchhikes through Turkey and the Middle East and
rides a camel across India. At last he finds himself at the foot of the Himalayas, where he
