My father’s recitations

They were a key to understanding him

Ed Reich

Friends,

I’m going to depart today from our normal political economic fare and talk about my father, Ed Reich, whom I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Ed owned a women’s clothing shop. It would be more accurate to say he owned a series of women’s clothing shops over the course of his working life. He kept closing ones that lost money and opening new ones in different cities with the hope they’d do better. At any given time, he was running one or two, and just getting by.

In the summer of 1954, Hurricane Carol swept through Torrington, Connecticut, where his most recent store was located. The hill behind turned into a mudslide that washed through the store, taking everything with it.

He was literally washed up.

My father was a practical man, not prone to personal reflection or philosophy. The closest he came to introspection was to recite two poems. One was a portion of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

**

His other favorite recitation was from Macbeth.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

**

He recited these two pieces frequently. They seemed to give him comfort. He didn’t recite them in a morose or morbid way. In fact, he often smiled while reciting them, occasionally laughing at the end.

When his store was washed away in Hurricane Carol, he recited them more often.

The year he turned 40 — the same year his store was washed away — I became desperately afraid he would die. It wasn’t that I feared the sudden financial loss would give him a heart attack or cause any other illness. He was in good health. He was athletic and strong.

I was worried about his age. His repeated recitations of these poems about the temporariness of life made me particularly sensitive to the passage of time.

I had heard that 40 marked the start of something called “middle age.” To my eight-year-old self, that seemed to border on being old — as if my father had reached the top of a mountain and was now about to slide down the other side, to the “inevitable hour.”

I began to record our lives in my head as if I were making a scrapbook that I’d return to in the future — a kind of internal home movie that I’d be able to watch whenever I wanted to recall these years.

My father did not die soon after he turned 40. In fact, he lived almost 62 more years, until two weeks before his 102nd birthday. He was lucid right up to the end.

A week before he died, I lay next to him on his bed with my arms around him. He was staring at the ceiling.

“I love you, Dad,” I said.

He looked surprised.

“Does that surprise you?” I asked.

“No,” he said softly. “It’s just that we were never a very demonstrative family.”

His remark made no sense. My life had been filled with his affection.

Then I remembered something he told me years before. He said that when he was a boy, his father — my grandfather, Alexander Reich — was not demonstrative with his love for little Ed. Quite the opposite. Alexander Reich had told Ed he’d never amount to anything.

It seemed such a cruel thing to say to a little boy. The grandfather I knew was sweet and gentle. He laughed easily. When I came to visit him, he hugged me close. But apparently Alexander Reich hadn’t always been that way. He had come from a family of Austrian Jews who were stiff and formal. Whatever love they felt for each other, they kept buried.

I came to understand that my father’s recitations of parts of Gray’s “Elegy” and Macbeth were ways of dealing with his sense of failure. It was okay that he never amounted to much — that his stores repeatedly failed — because even people who obtain glory, wealth, and power inevitably end up the same way everyone else ends ends up. All paths lead to the grave. Life is nothing more than a shadow play where actors briefly strut and fret but then disappear regardless of their achievements.

Although he never said it, I suspected that his runt of a son confirmed his sense of failure. Little Bobby, the shortest kid in Lewisboro Elementary School, was probably an embarrassment to a man whose father told him he’d never amount to anything. I suppose that’s one reason I worked so hard to achieve something in my own life — not just to compensate for my shortness, but to give my father a vicarious sense of success.

To me, Ed Reich wasn’t a failure. He was a wonderful man, full of integrity and deeply held views about decency and fairness. He hated bullies.

When I felt small and vulnerable, which was most of the time, he was a mountain of strength. He kicked out of our house the old men who wanted us to leave town because we were Jewish. He worked very hard, six days a week. He called bullies like Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn “sons of BITCHES” so loudly it shocked me every time.

I admired and loved him so much that I couldn’t bear the idea that his life — as his frequent recitations predicted — would someday end. So, starting around the age of eight, I made a mental movie of our times together that I could replay after he passed.

I still replay them, even to this day.

I did with you, just now.