Below is the text of the eulogy I gave at my father's funeral on April 9, 2012. Rest in peace, Dad.
In January of this year, there was
much talk in the news about a new app called “If I Die,” which allows users to
save a final statement to be posted on Facebook in the event of their death.
And while as far as we know, my father did not subscribe to this service, I
find it very fitting that his last Facebook status, posted four days before he
fell ill, reads simply, “GO GIANTS.” The only thing more fitting, of course,
would be for it to have read “Let’s Go Mets,” as close to a religious mantra as
my father ever had.
My father’s love of sports, and his
fierce, abiding loyalty to the teams he followed, was apparent to anyone who
had even the most fleeting of interactions with him. One of my favorite Dad
memories of all time is of calling him one summer day many years ago. “How are
you doing, Dad?” I asked. He sighed and said, “These west coast trips are
killing me.” My husband Greg once innocently inquired what television shows my
father liked to watch. He famously replied: “I watch two series. One is called
the Mets. And one is called the Knicks.” When I was in college, my father sent
me a George Will column that begins, “It has been said that baseball is to the
United States what revolutions are to Latin America, a safety valve for letting
off steam. I think baseball is more serious than any Latin American revolution.
But then I am a serious fan.” My father had written “My sentiments exactly” at
the top of the page. And I still think that of all my professional
accomplishments in journalism, my father was proudest of the fact that when I
was 11, I got to interview Lee Mazzilli in the Mets’ dugout for the kids’
section of the newspaper.
The seriousness of my father’s passion
for the game became quite clear to me when I was 23 and went through a
particularly difficult breakup. My mother would call often and talk to me at
great length about what had happened and how I was doing and how I was feeling
and what I needed. My unsentimental father never once felt comfortable actually
discussing the specifics of the situation. Not once. Instead he called me up
and told me very matter-of-factly that he had bought me a round trip ticket to
Florida for spring training. Because in my Dad’s mental calculus, there was no
emotional crisis that watching some Mets baseball couldn’t cure.
I bring this up not as an idle or
superficial observation. I think my Dad’s love of sports, and particularly his
love of baseball, spoke deeply to who he was as a person. He always believed
that the lessons of baseball were those of life. Baseball is of course a game
of numbers and stats, which he reveled in. It’s a cerebral game, and he was
nothing if not a cerebral guy. It’s a game where smarts often trump brawn. It’s
a slow, unpretentious, even laborious game, where the quick, showy payoffs take
a back seat to the long, deliberate build.
And that’s who my Dad was.
Even the kind of baseball fan my father was was telling. He was a Mets fan
because, he liked to tell me, the Yankees were a rich man’s team. They won too
much, he always said. And that wasn’t the point. He was the kind of fan who
would sometimes watch the nationally broadcast Mets games with the volume
turned off so he could listen to the old school radio commentary rather than
the slick network suits. He liked to sit in the upper deck nosebleed seats, the
kind you used to be able to walk up and buy the day of the game, rather than
expensive box seats – just the way he preferred the low rent, basic Chinese
take out from the greasy spoon in the Old Bethpage shopping center to the
fancy, high end stuff from Woodbury Commons, and the way he cared deeply about
books and music and ideas and not at all about clothes or fancy cars or
celebrities. Substance was his middle name.
My father was a man of great
integrity. Perhaps more than anybody I know, he had a deeply ingrained sense of
rightness, an unswerving dedication to doing what he felt was the right thing,
even when it was not always easy or fun. That meant joining the Army so he
could go to college where he wanted. It meant that after his dear friend Bob
McGill died suddenly, my father made sure to look after Bob’s widow, Ann, who
was disabled. It meant forcing all his kids to learn to play musical instruments,
and in my case, logging thousands of miles and hours driving me to countless
lessons and rehearsals and concerts. It meant establishing a scholarship for
promising kids at his blighted junior high school in the Bronx, and later, one
for students at Hofstra University, where he taught. He always did those things
quietly, with no fanfare or ego. He did them simply because he felt they were
the right thing to do.
And that’s just how my Dad felt
about those sad sack Mets in the late 70s and early 80s, when I began to take
an interest. He taught his only daughter to love that terrible team, even after
we watched them lose game after game after embarrassing game. Shea Stadium was
habitually so empty we used to joke that if you tipped the ushers well enough,
they’d let you play third base, but he still taught me to believe in and
support that team no matter what, simply because they were our team and it was
the right thing to do.
And I did believe. So hard that one
October evening during my freshman year of college, I watched Jesse Orosco’s
hands go up over his head in triumph as the Mets beat the Red Sox in the World
Series. The first thing I did – or actually the third, after bursting into
tears and swigging some champagne – was to call my father. Because this was the
stuff that families were made of.
I have my own family now. A husband
with whom I am delighted my father could share his late-in-life passion for a
new sport: golf. And two little boys adored by their grandfather who are
growing up Orioles fans in their native Baltimore, but who already like to keep
tabs on the Mets, because they know they’re “Grandpa’s team.”
My father is, sadly, now gone. No
more mornings talking sports and politics with the regular crew at Town Bagel.
No more New York Times crossword puzzles in pen. Or annual trips to the Langer
Invitational Golf Tournament, or nights staying up late watching the Mets play
those West Coast series that tired him out. But I hope he will live on in the
example he set for my brothers and me, and for all of our children. He was so very proud of all of them. I can’t stop
thinking about the jacket he was wearing the day he had his stroke. Folded up
in the pocket was a picture of my 8-year-old niece Alexandra in her ice hockey
gear; he had brought it with him that day to show his old Grumman friends over
lunch.
I hope my boys share their
grandfather’s deep and abiding love for baseball, and that I can spend
countless summer days and nights watching and going to games with them just the
way my father and I did. But more importantly, I hope they share all the
qualities that fueled their grandfather’s love of baseball: his rigorous
intellect. His loyalty. His fairness and steadiness. His dedication and
persistence. His high standards and discipline. His ability to take pleasure in
the simple things. His understanding that the right path is not always the easy
one.
Thank you for all that you were,
Dad. And Let’s Go Mets.
Some have asked if there is some way to honor my Dad's memory. Donations
can be made to the scholarship fund he established at Hofstra
University, where he taught after his retirement from Grumman, to help promising students who have had to overcome
adversity.
CHECKS MAY BE MADE TO:
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
MEMO: MENDELSOHN SCHOLARSHIP
and mailed to:
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY/MENDELSOHN SCHOLARSHIP
101 HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
102C HOFSTRA HALL
HEMPSTEAD, NY 11549
Posts
