5th
GOT THE TIME?
Today is a perfect Los Angeles day. It is a day that is my father’s idealized Southern California. It’s warm but not hot. Blue skies. No smog. Sufficient breezes flow past my building to ripple the palm trees producing that unique sound. It is a sound I remember from childhood. In a few minutes a reporter from the Long Beach Press Telegram will arrive. She will interview me about the book. The Press Telegram is the first newspaper I read. I began to pick out words far earlier than normal. I think it was at that point my father and mother realized they had either a joy or a major problem on their hands. There was probably not much chance I was ever going to be anything but a writer, but there were other flirtations.
There is only one recent event that keeps this from being a perfect day in California. It is an enormous event. On the small table to my left burns a memorial candle, which I have placed in front of my favorite picture of my father in his late years. Also arranged on the table is a vase of flowers a neighbor and dear friend brought to me. Next to the vase on the other side is a second photograph – it is of my parents in a frame lettered with the quote: “There is only one happiness in life. To love and to be loved. —- George Sand.”
My father died suddenly, if one can say a very old person dies suddenly. But surely he died unexpectedly. He died exactly 3 months and 10 days after my mother. She had died in his arms. He died asleep, but alone. In a marriage of mutual respect and enduring love, my father had made the sacrifice never to give into his physical fragility —- he would not leave her in life, or in death.
He did however leave me alone, without any immediate family, and just before a planned and much anticipated visit with him. Yet, he is very present in this day and in the air and in much of what I am and what I hope to continue to evolve to become as a human being. My father was not famous; he held no advanced degree and his life was one marked by many hardships. What he was, however, was relentlessly optimistic. Not foolish optimism, because he had been in the WWII and knew the face of absolute evil and the annihilation of most of European Jewry. — his own people — but he never forgot so many other losses as well from Europe to Russia and into the Pacific.
The core truth about my father was this: he knew what mattered and what did not.
He knew that each day we live is a good day and that you must do the best you can do with that day. He had many expressions that were unique to him. His slightly accented speech was a mixture of his Southern roots and the sweetest tinge of Southern African American cadence as he grew up surrounded by Black people. In the heart of the land of hatred and segregation he grew up in a house filled with love and with the commitments of what would evolve later into the civil rights movement. Compassion and an open heart were the tenets of his personal faith in humanity’s ability to rise above its lower tendencies.
He never asked you “what time is it?” but always “Got the time?” As a child I thought time, therefore, was a substance that one could hold in your hands. Perhaps it wasn’t just an eccentricity of his speech. Perhaps it was a reminder that time is an element that is as essential as anything ever will be to us. And that we must cherish it, honor it and hold it unto ourselves and share it with others in each moment we are granted.
Additionally, he was mischievous and enjoyed the horses and the dice tables from time to time but they were not an addiction, only an amusement. He was funny and outrageous and laughed often. He was, however, saddened watching my fight with and against chronic disease but he refused to refer to me as his sick daughter or to give up on the notion of cure and good health for me, and others like me.
His addiction was to life and love. He loved my mother, in all times and under all circumstances. His cosmic love was for all things that were alive and for the world, and was in each breath he took — in the last many years those were hard breaths to take as he had a severe case of COPD –Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. He had stopped smoking when I was in high school (more than 40 years ago) but the damage had been done, and multiple bouts with pneumonia further weakened him.
I mean, of course, he was weakened physically, but not in any other way. His life had been filled with a pretty healthy helping of disappointments from an early age but complaining and whining were not part of the vocabulary of his existence. Lots of people ask me how I have maintained a series of reasons to live above and beyond my disease. — Or, at least attempt to do that. There are many reasons, personal and the public ones I have written about – however it all began and will continue to be inspired by one man, my father.
His life was a constant blessing to me in a life that has been somewhat short of those, but what an enormous one I was given by his existence and his beautiful courage.
Alfred Lewis Brill, Jr. — 11 December 1912 – 15 May 2009
