On November 28, 1980, the folksinging group The Weavers -- Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and their female member, Ronnie Gilbert -- had their last full concert, at Carnegie Hall in New York. Hays, who had written "If I Had a Hammer" with Seeger, was in a wheelchair, suffering from diabetes and heart disease. He spoke of the election of Ronald Reagan, 24 days earlier, something no good leftist would let go without saying something. And he told the audience, "I've had kidney stones. This, too, shall pass!" The audience roared with laughter.
Hays died 9 months later. Seeger lived until 2014, Gilbert left us the following year, and Hellerman the year after that, none of them living to see Donald Trump take the office.
My father didn't get to see Trump take the office, either. At least once a day, he would have watched Trump on the TV news, and let loose with his favorite insult: "You ninny!" Every once in a while, his inner Newark would reach the surface, and he'd blurt out, "You ass!"
My father died on June 29, 2014, 10 years ago today. He was 71. He was not one of these old guys who always talked about how the past, especially his own youth, was better. Indeed, his favorite things about his youth were the science fiction books, TV shows and movies that predicted a better future. And his favorite President, a man he shook hands with during a Newark campaign motorcade in 1960, was John F. Kennedy, the most forward-looking President of them all.
Dad always looked forward. Even in his not-that-old age, he still seemed young. He believed there was always something new to do, and that there was always something interesting to find out.
And that's a good lesson from any one person to another, especially from a father to a son.
My father used to say, "This too shall pass" all the time. And I would think, but never say out loud in front of him, "Fat lot of good that does me now." That line is one thing about him I don't miss.
It could be argued that, Yes, it does pass, so when the next thing comes along, you're stronger and can face it better. The line of Friedrich Nietzsche: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." I used to think, No, that which does not kill me only ticks me off.
But there's some wisdom in that, too. Having gotten into my mid-50s, and survived a lot of crap, including my now-replaced bad hips, I really do feel like a survivor now. I wish Dad could have seen how the pain is gone (not quite completely, but most of it), and that I could tell him that I now see what he was trying to say to me.
So when I got shoulder tendinitis in January and sprained my ankle in April, I did what had to be done about it, and now, I'm telling those injuries, "Is that all you got?" There's a lot of things I couldn't handle when I was younger that I can handle now.
The Yankees' current slump, which has included losses to the Red Sox or the Mets, still makes me angry. But not like it would have, a few years ago. From experiencing fandom, and reading about it, including Nick Hornby's memoir Fever Pitch, I understand now: There's always another game, and another season.
One day, there will be games that I do not live to see. I have taken notice of the fact that the Yankees played the Red Sox in their 1st game after I was born, and in their last game before my father died -- and lost both of them.
(It gets no freakier than that: In their 1st game after he was born, they beat the Washington Senators. In their 1st game after my mother was born, they lost to the Philadelphia Athletics. That was also the day of Jackie Robinson's debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which became Mom's team, because they were her mother's team. But her father was from The Bronx, and a Yankee Fan, and he got to me before any of them did.)
Dad would never have run for President. But I'll tell you this: With his interest in space, we would have been on Mars by now. Osama bin Laden would have been dead by Christmas 2001. Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett would not have been put on the Supreme Court. And you can be sure that there never would have been a scandal in the Veterans Administration, and he would never have called our veterans "losers" and "suckers" like Trump did.
Dad was disappointed by Bill Clinton, but still liked him. He liked Hillary Clinton. He liked Barack Obama a lot. He didn't get to see Joe Biden as President, but he seems to have liked him. I know that, presuming he were alive today, and his own cognitive function were still in place, he would have appreciated how Biden has handled things.
He would have known that there will always be a new "ninny" out there. But there will also be people who will get us through the ninniness. And he would have been ready to be one of the people who helped us through the ninniness. That, too, shall pass.
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