Today I hit “publish” on Slow Business, the collection of poems written during my father’s illness. 

You can find and purchase a copy here.

I hope you grab one.

Or 12.

(Pro tip: they’re great stocking stuffers – or, give one copy to someone every night of Hanukkah.)

Here’s the copy I wrote to describe the book: 

What is the gift inside this slow business of death?

In poems both big-hearted and furious, Joey Rubin stands in witness to the harsh realities of his father’s dying and asks questions no one wants to ask in language that refuses to hide – even from itself.

Tracing the experience from the initial diagnosis to last breath, these verses navigate the interlocking and non-linear nature of grief: from disbelief to reverence, from seething rage to deepening awe.

This is a collection of poems for those seeking solace in their understanding of mortality; for those grappling with the complexities of paternal love and its inevitable loss; and for those moved by a fractured story – one that makes only as much sense as the human experience itself.

“These poems are not for the faint of heart; they’re for the robust heart. The heart that craves the truth of what it feels like to walk beside a man who is dying. The heart that yearns to stand beside a soul facing death, yet brimming with life.”

Bu don’t take my word for it – you’ve read many of these poems already and you can re-read them here:

1. Parking at Ralph’s

2. Snag I

3. California

4. Scraps II

5. Facebook

6. In Bed

7. Matted & Dark

8. Surrender

9. Without Knowledge of Dreams

10. Floor Plan

11. Slow Business

The book includes these poems with revisions and changes, along with 20 other poems never-before released to the world.

Plus, it’s pretty, and you can hold it in your hands without starting at a screen.

(Have I sold you yet?)

When I started this newsletter – back in August of 2020 – I thought I was writing about creativity. Turned out, I was being creative. I rode the waves of that creativity into a space I hadn’t anticipated: to writing about my father, his illness and death, and my own grief surrounding that experience.

While I expect I’ll carry that grief forever, publishing this collection written about and informed by that time is a way to close that chapter - at least creatively.

Which opens up another question: what to do with this newsletter going forward – and what, if anything, to do with the 75,000+ words I’ve published here?

Well… I don’t know the answer that question yet!

For now, I’m going to sit with it all, re-read what I’ve created, and let myself imagine what might come next.

Perhaps I’ll get back to work on that elusive novel, or reboot this newsletter in a different vein (perhaps closer to its original intent), or write another collection of poems. Perhaps I’ll do something else altogether. Something involving dinosaurs, or hats. Maybe I’ll start a brand new project I’ve yet to imagine or dream about.

Whatever it is, I will be letting you all know right here via this newsletter when it takes shape. So don’t fret, and don’t you dare unsubscribe.

I’ll be quiet for a while. And then I’ll come back as loud (and charming) as ever.

In the meantime, go grab the book of poems. And let me know when you do (email me about it at thejoymenu@gmail.com). It would mean the world to me.

Yours in creativity,

Joey

It’s my own product, my own “thing,” created to share my ordered words with you and the world. 

I’m proud of it. I have a proof copy in my hands right now. It feels complete. I’m excited for you to get a copy into your hands soon.

If you’ve lost the thread: most of the poems collected in the book were written in witness of my father’s illness and decline. The topic isn’t so much grief, as shock, and worry, and love, and connection, and the small details that make up the long walk from “this place to the other.” (He did love walking.)

It’s also, I hope, a celebration of the radical blooming of life that occurs even during the last moments of a living person’s embodied existence. 

In other words: it’s a liturgy, but not one read at his bedside – one written there; a worshipful noticing of an experience I shared with him. It just happened to be the last we shared while he was living. (And a relatively shitty one, as these things go.)

My desire is that it reads as a heartfelt devotional, and I’d be flattered – grateful, excited – if you got a copy. Or two.

I’ll send links once they’re live. And in the meantime, I’ll share the title poem.

Unlike most poems in this collection, this poem wasn’t written in real-time.

Rather, I decided one morning (I do not know why) that the collection would be called “Slow Business” and I had a few stanzas that were not coming together in any meaningful way. 

Something told me that those stanzas were the slow business. So I put that title as their title and stared menacingly at those stubborn words.

Once the stray stanzas had a title, they began to dance and shake. Some of them disappeared. For a few, each word changed so many times that eventually none of the original words were left, and they seemed to be entirely different stanzas (though, I knew, that underneath those new stanzas, the old stanzas, the old words, were hiding). 

Eventually, that long, meandering poem – a stretched-out poem with only a word or two on each line – became a fatter, shorter poem, and then an even shorter one (but a little less fat).

Then, for a while, it was a poem with no end. And it stayed that way for weeks.

In fact, it was that way for so long that I’d already had a friend design the book, lay it out, and create PDFs for the proofs (thanks Trip!) – all while this poem stayed endingless.

I thought: that’s fine. Not all poems need endings.

But, fittingly, while I was doing a final read-through for typos, the last lines climbed into my head and onto the page.

Yes: the last poem written was finished after the entire book was finished.

Yes: it’s called “Slow Business.”

Slow business – as in the process of illness, of dying, of grief. But also: the slow business of writing. And the slow business of poetry itself.

Slow business, indeed.

Since I started publishing poems here in May (with issue 76 “A last Thanksgiving at home”), I’ve been working my way through a pile of pieces written during the 17 months my father was sick – with the goal of releasing them as a book at the end of the month (more next week on how and where to order yourself a copy).

Many of these poems, as I’ve stated, were written at my father’s literal bedside, as the tumor in his head fed off his blood vessels, swelled in size, and made the normal functions of his brain impossible.

In a way, it was a slow process. For months, he was essentially himself. Moving the same, speaking the same, bringing his brand of open-hearted skepticism to everything going on in the world – his internal world, our family world, and the wider world (which mattered less and less).

Then, toward the end, it went very fast. In a matter of weeks, he went from being the robust, heavy-set, hairy man I spent my whole life looking toward and relying on, to being a limping man, then a speechless man, then an almost child-like man, and finally, nearly comatose, he died.

Revisiting and revising the poems written during that time has been a process of peeling back my own grief and realizing how much there is still left to feel. How much I may just feel forever. Until, I guess, I am the dying man myself.

My earliest memory is of my father’s absence.

We were in New York and he wasn’t there.

In reality, he’d gone ahead to California – to start a new job, and, presumably, to set up a home and a way of life for his young family.

But to my kid brain (I was not yet three), all I knew was that he was gone.

And, one morning, when my mother said we were going to see a movie (in my memory it was E.T.) and that my father was going to see it as well… I was convinced that he’d be waiting for us at the theater.

I see the heavy grey New York concrete. The sidewalks as chalky and fat as dinosaur bones. I see the movie theater facade, the box office, the posters advertising new films. And I feel the heaviness of betrayal: the sharp sting when I realize that my father is not there.

We were reunited weeks later. But I’m essentially at that movie theater now. Only now I understand what’s going on and I can conceptualize the loss – and my own safety despite his absence.

But the sting remains. The sting is part of it now.

Today’s poem is about a different rupture, one he experienced and I seem to carry. It’s also not really a poem. But you can take your categories and shove ‘em, is what I say. (Unclear who I am talking to here…).

I don’t know if it relates to the above, framed lightly by my own reflections, or if it stands on its own. But that’s the beauty of this medium. It can be as messy as real life.

Either way, I hope you enjoy it. If you do, hit reply and tell me. I love hearing back.

Sharing these poems, and sharing the stories, reflections, essays, and photos in the 75 issues before this cycle, has been a great honor, and a deeply restorative practice for me – as a son, as a writer, as an artist, and as a man trying to live the most open, full, and generous existence he can in a complicated world.

I don’t know what the future of The Joy Menu holds, but I know there is a bright and busy future for me scribbling, editing, and sharing what I write. I hope you’ll follow along – be it here, or in the next place.

I’ll be back next week with more information on all of it. Especially the poetry collection, which I very much hope you buy (many copies of!).

But for now, thank you for reading, following, supporting. Without you, these would just be journals. Thank you for making them art.

Yours,

Joey

In their passing, we not only lose their corporeal presence – the calming heft of their physical form, the sturdy reality of their soft skin and hard bones – but we lose access to their voice, their memories, their stories.

Soon after my father got sick, I started recording things. Conversations we had. Memories he’d tell me. Videos of us sitting around.

I pulled out my phone and hit record in the car. I hit record at the dinner table. I hit record nearly anytime we spoke.

I knew it was futile: I wanted to hold on to everything – every sound, every inflection, every breath and burp and pause. But I also knew I could not defy death, and I could not hold on to that which was inside him that he’d never shared: all the answers to all the questions I’d never gotten to ask. Or never thought to ask. Or never could have asked. Decades of dreams, and doubts, and discarded deliberations.

This poem, written sometime after he’d lost access to language, rests uncomfortably in this disorienting realization. The angry heartbreak of it. Which itself seems a precursor to loss.

And no surprise: for what is fair about death? The way it comes for some people quickly, without warning, or the way it stalks others like a tiger in the bush? Or the way, like that same tiger, it plays with some to the bitter end, until the last pulses of energy are released from a weakened body and put back into the world?

Some days I experienced my father’s decline with the equanimity of a monk, and others, I clenched my jaw and ground my teeth and cursed the cruelty of his unfair fate. Some days I watched the tiger—others I was the tiger.

Here, in this poem, I am angry. His brain, crowded out by the tumor, has begun to forfeit basic functions, and I am tasked with putting him in a diaper.

Anger isn’t bad or unwelcome. It too is part of the door-to-door mess we call human life. The tiger’s victim is just as physical as the tiger; a being taken apart by the thrusting violence of an unchosen darkness. We must respect the tiger, but we can also curse it.

Much of what I remember from my father’s illness—many of the most vivid moments—are remembered because each evening, after whatever the day was like, I sat in the guest room on the pullout couch and wrote down what I’d seen, what I’d thought, what I’d felt.

Later, when he could no longer speak and my way of relating to him was to just be there with him—in a chair across the room, watching him watch the world slip away, hovering near with my notebook or novel or phone—I wrote things down while they were happening.

I believe that’s why much of the Slow Business poems are the way they are: catalogues of specific moments; images seen and emotions in-process; scenes of confusion, transition, constriction, hurt.

Like this one: a moment I came into the bedroom to find my father crossing yet another threshold in his illness and in his decline. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, and feel the humiliation, frustration, and anger.

Can you?

Repeating numbers. Places you return to. Significant objects that appear and reappear.

For some reason, with my father, one such symbol was his bed.

Where, as a little guy, I woke him with a single tap to the forehead every night so he’d pull out a futon for me to sleep the second half of the night on the ground next to him.

Where, as a teenager, I’d find him wide awake and waiting when I came home from an evening out, ready to ask from the pitch dark of his bedroom about what I did and who I saw and to ensure I was OK.

Where every morning around 4 or 4:30 am, he’d stir and then sit up, spend a few minutes staring into the darkness, and then rise to piss and shower, make tea and toast, and head out into his day.

No surprise, then, that when he got sick, much of his life centered around the bed: the one that sat upstairs in California, the one that was just a mattress on the floor in Beachwood, the plush new one in the center of the newly built addition on the farm, the enhanced hospital bed on loan from hospice that we put right beside it.

To die in bed – your own bed, or a loaner, but in your space – is a triumph. 

A shitty triumph, but a triumph nonetheless.

The site of this poem is his bed. The one in Beachwood; the mattress on the floor. It was written right around the time his use of the bed – his need for it – shifted. 

Onward,

Joey

My father received a terminal diagnosis but then there he was: still alive. This created a dissonance in terms of what I was supposed to feel. And because his cancer was in the brain, and he (at first) had very few visible symptoms, the whole thing felt like a trick, a deception, a suspended sentence.  

There was the threat of rain, but it did not rain. The clouds filled the sky, they blocked the sun, but that was it. My standby ticket was for a delayed flight. Nothing was canceled but nor was it firm. I stood around, uncertain. Waiting for shoes to drop.

I did what we often do when everything is tenuous and nothing makes sense: I sought distraction. One such outlet for that distraction was Facebook. But death followed me even there.

This poem. I disliked it at first. I disliked it for much of its existence Was it too cute? Too topical? Too judgemental? Too prosaic? Perhaps I disliked it because it’s about distraction. Or, more precisely, my inability to be adequately distracted. Or about how I went to escape and grief found me anyway. Or I disliked it because I’m wary of poetry that’s trying to say something even if that something feels necessary to say.

Maybe the whole question is less relevant now that Facebook is irrelevant. But I think it speaks to a larger issue: What are we supposed to do with our grief? How are we meant to mourn? What is our modern way of pulling close those who know us, and love us – and how do we ask them to help carry some of our hurt when we don’t want to carry it all ourselves?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s not on Facebook. But where then?

A Substack newsletter?

Either way, here’s the poem.

– Joey

I wonder if these poems, written at the bedside of death, are too dreary, too sad, too much.

I wonder: why release them? why publish them? why send them out?

I ask myself: Is it just because they’re written down? Is it just because I made them? Is it just because I don’t want to carry them alone anymore?

Who do they serve? How do they serve? Why do they exist in the world at all?

And yet here they are. Here I am. And here we go.

This one, written where it seems to have been written: looking on, as the ravages of an unseen illness took apart a man I loved. The man from whom I came. A man I relied on (perhaps overly so) for all of my life. And I could hardly make sense of it (still can’t).

It is undoubtedly a universal experience to lose our creators. Some of us will do so straight on, watching. For others, it’ll happen off scene, somewhere else. For others still, so incrementally that it won’t seem to be happening at all (until it does).

Whatever it is, however it goes down: it happens.

Here is how it happened for me.

P.S. Happy Father’s Day.

Subscribe now

I’d moved away (and returned) and moved away (again) years before, as had my sister and brother. It made sense for them to live there; they had for over 30 years. But it made less sense for him to die there.

And so, on top of grieving my father, I also spent the year and a half of his illness grieving the only place I’d ever known as “home.”

I’m not the first person to say it: when we grieve we don’t just hurt for the loss of a loved one, but also for the future we’ve lost with them.

Somehow, when my father died, I also lost our past. 

This poem, full of the music my father loved, and of his wanting to share that music with my nephew, captures the moment I first felt the weight of that other loss. I felt it, not as an abstract force like nostalgia, but as a rupture as real and final as death.

California 

You made a soundtrack for Bunky

with your favorite songs

& for months he toddles up 

to your phone

presses you to cue 

Miriam Makeba, Norah Jones

Georges Moustaki, dances wild

like we once did 

small bodies in audience 

to your wide smile

/

Now, 

I hold your phone to your

working ear 

play it lightly and you 

list from side to side, 

a small dance 

though no less wild

/

(the social worker, visiting, 

says: “It speaks to his soul, not

his head”)

/

Then, 

Joni Mitchell sings: “California,

California, I’m coming home.”

& 

Woody Guthrie sings:

“I’m going to California

where we’ll sleep out 

every night.”

And I crack. 

/

We will never go 

back 

to California, will we Pops.

/

It is not 

going to be possible

unless I carry you there 

in a box.

(The business, if you haven’t guessed it, is that of dying.)

Unlike the essays published in this project – written months or even years after the incidents they describe – this poem (like most in ‘Slow Business’) was written as the events occurred.

It serves, in this way, like a sketch. An immediate, simple renderings of what I saw right in front of me. A reaction. A record.

A poem can do that; it can capture the seen and felt, without process or processing. Unlike prose, it requires neither connective tissue nor context – just some words, strung together convincingly (or not).

After the radiation and the chemotherapy, my father spent a lot of time sitting. Was he resting? Was he thinking? Was he contemplating his death? Many times I went to him and I asked. He always answered. Still, I had no idea.

Ultimately, a great part of his lived experience remained impenetrable to me. As did much of his dying.

In this poem, I sketch out one of those moments using the metaphor of a snag to make sense of what I saw right in front of me but could not understand. A man both living and dying, like a standing tree teeming with life – which is also dead.

Snag I

My father sits in the yard 

under the trees he planted

when we first moved in.

Twenty years later, they are twenty 

feet tall, with yellow, hand-shaped leaves

that cover the ground 

and stick to your bare feet

as you crunch your way 

to sit on the wooden rocking 

bench at his side.

His expression is stern, 

even with sunglasses on. His fingers 

don’t rest, won’t 

stop moving, little twitches

though he’s shaded 

from the amenable sun. 

You ask

What are you thinking about 

Poppa? knowing the answer 

will be nothing. Nothing.

His tumor is a root

system pared back.

His mood blows

in the breeze, swinging

back and forth, held

on frail branches

between sky 

and ground. But falling,

falling. 

Dad: while it is your mortality

held like a flower

made brittle 

between the pages 

of a book, it’s your mind 

which is suddenly

a thing –

a hollow trunk

standing alone

in a living, thriving forest.

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing poems from a collection (tentatively entitled “Slow Business”) which I plan to publish in August. Here, I’ll provide short introductions. I’ll let you know more about the collection as it comes together. For now, know that the poems relate to the regularly scheduled programming, but come from their own creative cycle. Enjoy! - JR

In 2016, I went home for Thanksgiving. 

That had been the tradition. As my grandparents had aged and travel had become more complicated for them, we’d moved from congregating in the Bay, where a large network of my mother’s side had settled, to gathering at our house in Irvine. After they passed, people came, though not from as far, and not as many. Yet every year we came together, filled the house with our voices, and waited for the home cooked turkey and her fixings to arrive on the kitchen table, the fulcrum around which this annual reunion turned.

In 2016, I went home and it was busy and bustling and tense. As it had always been. 

My father had recently (abruptly) retired, and he had both turned his attention fully to making art (the living room had been converted into his studio), and (always restless, always hungry) was already talking about the next job, the next enterprise, the next project he could pitch. My mother had begun to talk about moving to Ohio – where my sister and her family lived. It was just a hazy urge, nothing concrete, nothing near a “plan:” maybe we’ll build a house, maybe we’ll buy a farm, but wouldn’t it be nice to be near the grandkids as they grow…

I was teaching and came to stay for the week. Driving in, I had the thought: how many more Thanksgivings will we spend like this, a family together in our family home. I did the math: maybe two or three. Maybe five if we were lucky and Ohio failed to lure them away. There was sadness to that. But it was a tentative, measured sadness. It wasn’t yet a deep-throated grief.

Two months later, my father received his diagnosis. Seven months later the house was sold and my parents were in Ohio. Two years later, he was dead. There would be no more Thanksgiving celebrations at home in Irvine. There would be no more Thanksgivings as a complete family. 

Sometimes we experience a knowing without actually knowing. Sometimes foreshadowing – which only makes sense later in the book – appears as intuition in our bones.

This was one such time.

Parking at Ralph’s

Perhaps the exact moment

the tumor birthed itself 

in the soft tissue of your brain

we were trying to park in the crowded

Ralph’s parking lot 

on Thanksgiving Day, pushed 

from the house by a stressed auntie 

requesting twine to string the bird, 

circling, circling, and then 

kissing with our passenger mirror 

that other mirror.  

Your expression fixed 

when the owner of the car 

lunged forward to diminish us: 

just go, you said, just go 

like some whimpering dog

microseconds before the earth

quakes. (I had asked my journal

the night before: “When does a child

become caretaker to a parent?”). 

Pops, is that why you let me drive?

Because you never let me drive.

Not even home from the DMV

the day I passed the driver’s test.

Onward,

Joey

In Paris, I travel to the apartment he stayed in and sit in the cafe across the street and read while staring up at the window behind which he may have sat when he started writing.

I know some things: the letter tells me it was a top floor apartment, that there was a small balcony—I can see there are only so many options, so I can easily enter the imagined flat, sit with him as he writes, as he looks out the window down at me, here; I can even place him at this cafe (if it existed!) looking back up with the same eyes I am seeing.

After a week in Paris, I start to change the narrative—but only to the degree necesary.

They hitch down to Antibes, where Maurice‘s family has a boat. So I travel to Antibes (by train). He mentions church steps he sat in front of when writing a letter: I find a church (there aren’t many) and sit on its steps. There, I read what he wrote where it may have been written.

In another letter, he mentions a park overlooking the sea; I find a park overlooking the sea and I sit there. I read another letter where and how it may have been written (and I look at the sea—the same sea, of this at least I can be sure).

Later, he writes of walking by the water with a beer, sitting on the wet rocks; I head toward the water (no beer, though I consider it) and walk along the wet rocks. I wonder if his feet trod here or elsewhere; these rocks or others. The town isn’t that big, I think. I can’t be too far off.

From Antibes, they sail to Nice—I take the train and walk to the port where they likely docked. In each cafe where I stop to take a rest, drink a coffee, and eat a pastry, I wonder if he stopped there to do the same (he certainly mentions many; “coffee with me is like a religion”). 

In Nice, in Antibes, in Cannes, I walk along the seaside and watch the yachts, the carriers, the sailboats: how big was the boat they used? What did it look like? How long did they stop and at which ports? How long did they sail and how often?

He hardly mentions details; only that there was a lot of sailing, and that he did everything he could (within the constraints of politeness) to avoid having to re-embark.  

Then, after some time, the letters loose their direct alignment and I begin to read them anywhere—anywhere pretty, with a view, or a comfortable chair, or a friendly waiter, or a clear menu. Anywhere I can sit, and read, and daydream, and journal. And then sometimes even where I can’t: I tuck a letter inside my moleskin and carry it onto the train, slip one in between the pages of a book while I circumnavigate the peninsula by foot on my way to a coastal path. I have a letter with me always: at each restaurant, each market, while I walk along each beach.

It’s hard to stay present and stay open to the past. It’s hard to experience being here as a place I am in, and to remember that my father was also here all those years ago. Or, it’s not hard to remember—I always remember—but it’s hard to stay present to that memory in the moment I am in. (Is that ironic? That it’s hard to stay present to the past?)

In reality, the two experiences are disconnected at their core: he was a young man on a walkabout, and I’m a middle-aged man working remotely. He was a young man living a gap year, and I’m an older man grieving a death. He was a boy becoming a man and I am a man following a boy into cafes, onto church steps, and along the shore. He was curious, insecure, just beginning; I’m listless, unsure, and halfway done with life (or more). 

His letters pull me from the sea like a line from a fishing pole (he does go fishing, and likes it): there’s a wrenching, a pulling back, a removal from the comfortable, from home, from an unthinking way of just being. 

These surroundings only connect me to him if I let them. If I seek out the overlap. If I manufacture it with observation, purpose, planning, words.

In Paris, the street he stayed on (Rue de Rome) is filled with musical instrument shops—luthiers. It seems poetic for a man whose three children learned to play stringed instruments (viola, cello, violin), who spent thousands of dollars buying instruments for each, on weekly private lessons, for youth symphony memberships, and at rehearsals, masterclasses, academies, who drove them on weekends to LA for special lessons, and brought them all to concert halls around the world to hear the great players play and see the great repertoire performed. 

Yet in his letters, he never mentions this detail.

Perhaps the street was not the same in 1968. Or he, at 17, a self-professed artist of the material sort (painter, print-maker, drawer, etc) did not feel such a connection. 

Perhaps that’s a connection for this moment only—just for me, looking back from the present toward him in the past. 

And now for you, reader, as well.

Onward,

Joey

The handwriting is like a painting, or a fingerprint. It becomes indicative of something; tells its own story. The paper changes by country, the pen, the envelope; but the handwriting changes by mood. Some days it’s broad, others loopy, occasionally tight; in the early letters it's nearly calligraphic—later, after months of travel, it loosens up, stretches, even approaches a messiness which feels tired, short of breath. 

Like music, or poetry, you have to interpret it openly, without prescription, without narrative intent. You have to read it and let it go: let the curves and the valleys carry you toward whatever unsaid mood is being implied: hear the melody—how does it make you feel? What does it make you think? What does it say about what is being said? Beneath what is being said? In lieu of what is being said? 

What does it say about what isn’t being said? 

Does it really say anything at all? 

(No need to put that into words…)

Reading a letter is an act of time travel.

These are the letters of a 17 year-old. A boy at the cusp, a young man just starting out. 

He isn’t quite your father, but he’ll become your father. But not yet. Not here. 

Here, he’s still a boy. You won’t happen for another 17 years. He won’t become a father for another 14. He doesn’t become the man you “know” until you come of age—eight, ten, twelve years after that. He won’t step into his own knowing for who knows how long. 

So who is this? Whose words are you reading, exactly? A man you knew, but a version you didn’t. A man you’ve never known—not like this. A man who's future self, a self which even the writer doesn’t know (has yet to meet, may not understand, and can’t speak to) is the man you knew. But the writer is also him, a him he did know, later; when you were 17, heading into the world, leaving for college, he had this writer inside of him. It just never occurred to you.

Realize: the letter writer, a child-teenager-young man on the verge of adulthood, is closer in age to your own child than to you. Now, today, you are 40 and he is 17 (then 18). Yet this person—this writer, this voice, this child-teenager-man—also carries the warmth, the authority, the power of your father. Your patrimony. Your heredity. Your bloodline. Your dad.

Or is that something you’re projecting? Reading into it? Is it really there in the words? In the tone? On the paper? In the handwriting? 

He is your father, after all. 

If the project is to read, then how to navigate such secondary effects—those switchbacks of identity and reality and time? If the project is to access the past, to process it, to feel and experience it, to be alive with it in the present—then how to handle such vertigo? Is it as simple as feeling his presence carried into the present via an artifact carried from the past? To feel him, here, today, despite time and distance and death? Despite the incompleteness, the incomprehensibility of the artifact in your hands?

Perhaps this is also like music. As in: you have to let it play, let it wash over you, let it be its own expression—with or without a secondary set of descriptors to give it “meaning.”

This is how it feels to read the voice of your father at an age when you could be his father. In an era you’ve lost access to. Living a life you can’t possibly know. Sharing memories you cannot have. Navigating spaces you’ve never seen. Living a timeline you can never fully enter. 

It feels as if you are a time traveler. 

He—the voice, the letter writer—doesn’t know you’re here. He doesn’t know his letters exist 54 years ahead. He doesn’t even know he’ll have a child (“I must get a little–only a little–bit sorted myself before I start answering their millions of questions”), let alone three, let alone one who is reading his letters now, here: in this place he might not even have remembered had he lived long enough to be asked. 

A child sitting on some church steps that he wonders (hopes) are the same church steps that hosted his father’s ass for three hours fifty-four years before (“Now hang on a sec, I’ve got a numb bum and it’s not so nice to put a hand there and feel nothing. The steps outside this little old church at Antibes have no mercy”).

Here I am, later, sitting on a bench at the shore at Juan Les Pins, or, later still, at a tourists’ restaurant in old Antibes, or, on an earlier afternoon, in a neighborhood cafe in Paris. Carrying these letters around like a child carries a teddy bear or a Hot Wheel car. Reading.

I am the one traveling. I have gone back in time, or I’ve pulled a thread of the past into the now. I’ve wrenched a bit of a 54 year-old consciousness into the present, and the consciousness, despite the many years held on this page—trapped as ink and pressure and formed as English words—is still 17 years-old.

Yet it is still somehow, despite the passage of time and the confusions of who and what and when, my father’s consciousness. My father’s spirit. His words. 

I want to look backwards; but he can’t see beyond the page.

I want to dig into the details, to ask him for context, for explanation, for color: did you really think this? What became of that plan? What did you end up doing? Why didn’t you do that? What happened that shook those feelings loose?

But I can’t. The letters—artifact, capsule; missive, missile—have traveled. Not the man. 

The letters, and me.

Onward,

Joey

I originally hoped to trace my travels along the same path my father took and to stop and read his letters with the same timing and in as close a geography as I could. But a quick calculation showed that to be difficult. 

For one, he hitchhiked. His path was the roads of 1968, and his route was determined by who would take him where and when. His plans, often, were not so much plans as a response to what was offered. (Entire letters are taken up with curses for greedy drivers who refuse to stop, descriptions of wet fields where he slept, frustrations at having no autonomy or flexibility or, ironically, freedom to be where he wanted to be or when.)

For another, his letters are not a travelog. An entire letter describes a conversation; another catalogs every feeling felt in a day; one a haircut; two are spent responding to letters that have been lost to time. Recreating a trip which itself is not recorded is not only impossible but meaningless. 

The third reason is my own mishegas: I wanted to read the letters for the first time while recreating the trip—as close to how he’d written them as possible. I wanted to discover his voice while discovering where he’d been, not in my condo in Las Vegas or at the Cheesecake Factory having lunch. But I couldn’t ascertain the contours of the trip without first reading the letters. The very nature of my desire—to recreate, to experience the novelty of place and passage at once, where he was when he wrote—made my desire impossible.

I had to settle for this: aim for a spot in the middle, dig in, and read. Today I’m on a rickety futon inside a small Airbnb in the old, coastal town of Antibes (Latin: Antipolis). This apartment was certainly around in 1968 (the plumbing implies as much), but it’s unlikely my father did anything more than pass by on the streets below, or streets near the streets below. (In the letters, he explains—obliquely, in passing—that he stayed with his friend’s grandma, a situation he never embellishes nor ever describes).

I walk outside the flat; I turn right and venture into the vieille ville. The winding streets are shaded—yesterday, it rained—and the air is crisp but warming. There are clothes hanging off balconies, and open doors behind which vacationing Italians and Brits are having lunch before deciding to beach or to shop or to eat more (or all of the above). Most everyone I pass is either elderly or vacationing. Is this where he stayed? Is this where Maurice’s grandma lived? Is this where he ventured out to write his letters and survey the land and sea?

I turn left: I’m in the new town. The streets are broad, the buildings tall and modern; the buzz is that of a normal place at midday. Kids are leaving school for lunch, backpacks on, arms linked, change in their pockets for a coke, or snack, or bus fare home. If I cross through the shopping streets, and turn, and turn, I enter the residential area, with apartments and houses, open parking spaces and a view, on many sides, of the water in the small, blue distance. Is this where he stayed? Is this where Maurice’s grandma lived? Is this where he ventured out to write his letters and take stock of the land and sea?

Part of me still wishes I’d done it; is still angry for not at least trying to recreate and follow his entire trip, pass by pass. But where would I have gone: to each return address? To each soggy field? To each possible town, including those that aren’t mentioned, or those that are mentioned,  but vaguely, with no detail or context?

Letting go of the desire to trace his trip exactly is to accept that I’m not young, that I have (and intend to keep!) a job; that travel itself is different than it was fifty years ago. (No more hitchhiking, but also no need for grandmothers’ flats—or soggy fields).

But it also eats away at a more core belief around who I am, and how this project negates or reaffirms my identity: if I truly were a writer—if my bread and butter came from this craft—then I would drop everything and follow his lead. 

That I could, should, would wander the Scandinavian countryside trying to make sense of a bundle of 54 year-old letters. That if I had lived my life correctly, I’d have the freedom, the wherewithal, the guts, the balls, the time, to take this prompt and make it a long, powerful, all-encompassing narrative. A travelog. A memoir. A book!

The ideal project and the idea of a project—the writer I wish I was, and the writing I wish I wrote.  

But these romantic notions are just that: romantic. My father did not hand me a book deal, or a movie treatment, or a writing assignment. He handed me an envelope full of letters written by a young man, who also happened to be him. They’re messy. They’re approximate. They catalog and describe the feelings and impressions of a person on the cusp of adulthood. They were written with an audience of one: and that one was not me.

I’m lucky I get to meet this man—and read these letters—at all. 

Onward,

Joey

In June of 1968, my father is 17 years old. He’s left South Africa and completed high school at the American School near Tel Aviv. He’s booked passage to Paris with a school friend. 

From there, he will hitchhike from Paris through France, take a train into Scandinavia and then a ferry to London—time out of life to breath new air as a young man; to pause before going back to Israel, to his family, to military service; a moment to contemplate life—as an Israeli, or an African, or a European, or as something altogether else. Time to witness beautiful things, and meet unknown people, and to see himself in relation to unfamiliar worlds.

He travels with his friend and with his older brother and he writes letters which are sent to a friend in the States—letters which she saved, and sent back to him four decades later. Letters I am holding in my hands now. 

We are in his upstairs bedroom in the house at Oakdale. Next to the bed where he slept for two dozen years; where he woke every day at 4AM and stared at the wall in the dark for five minutes (hands on his knees, back slightly stooped, eyes open but unfocused, looking into the middle distance) before rising to begin each day. 

The bed where I lay when I was covered in hives at 15 and again at 18. The bed where I slept next to my mother on the long nights after his seizure, before his diagnosis—after we knew something was terribly wrong but before we could bring him home. 

He pulls aside the sliding mirrored door. From where he keeps his bulk stash of deodorant and dental floss and twenty backup boxes of toothpaste (the worst flavors); from where he keeps years of his (and my and my siblings’) tax forms and all of our social security cards and medical records; from where he keeps an overflowing supply of clean, white REI socks rolled neatly in balls (which, when I’m home, I can borrow, or steal); from where, at night, he lays his watch and his cash (“grab some if you need it”), and mementos he never explains (an African paperweight; some photos; a handkerchief)—from this place he pulls out a large white envelope (slick, crinkled, AirMail), which he hands to me. 

Says: “Maybe you’ll do something with these.”

What did I say? 

 “Thank you”? Or, “Of course”? Or, “Are you sure”? Or “What are these?” It doesn’t matter.

What matters is I tucked them away; aware of their power but not of what they were. Honored, confused, horrified, excited. 

(I asked my siblings, incredulous: Did you know about these? They didn’t; no one did. They’d been held in someone else’s hands for fifty years—the recipients. They were never meant to make their way back to him, let alone to us, let alone to exist five decades in the future.)

I decide: when he’s gone, I will travel the route he took; I will read the letters along the way.

I hope it’ll be in many years. (It won’t).

Onward,

Joey

Hi! 

I’m back. It’s 2023. What’s the future like? Do tell. 

I took an (unplanned) sabbatical from this project, and I missed it. So I’m going to continue publishing — but biweekly. Expect more letters about art, creativity, fatherhood, grief. But also some new themes, like travel, sailboats, and France. 

As always: the greatest gift you can give is reading. Second: sharing it with a friend (or foe). Third: telling me what resonates (just hit reply!).  

I appreciate you. I hope you’ve been well. Thank you for subscribing.

Yours,
Joey

Dear Friends,

I started writing these letters two years ago. I intended each to be a chronicle of joy—a creative joy. A self-reflective study of how I was using writing to access that joy. 

This was six months into the pandemic. Six months into my work having pivoted irrevocably toward the virtual. Six months after the aperture of what felt possible condensed around what was proximate: a bedroom, a house, a small circle of friends.

Everyone reacted to the pandemic differently, and while it’s not for me to rehash what that was like for anyone else, I can say this for myself: that closure was a liberation. It gave me a freedom to focus—with fervent simplicity and a lack of distraction—on what felt important.

A bedroom, a house, a small circle of friends. My body. My heart. The page.

The pandemic shrunk the aperture of what felt possible and replaced it with a kind of ease. Like a child growing up in the Midwest for whom “Hollywood” is such a foreign concept there’s no temptation to try to be a star, I was able to release myself from most of the existential distractions that kept me looking outward and to dig into the hidden places.

There were bodies under the floorboards and the floorboards, it turned out, were me.

Work was easy. Dating was dangerous. Sex was solo. Going out was canceled. Even the coffee shops where I’d normally be lured to set up shop (then, shop set-up, be lured further into distraction…) were closed. And in this closure something else opened up in me: grief. 

These notes were meant to be a study of how joy could infuse a process which had, up until that point in my life, been marred by feelings of failure, frustration, and stuckness. For six months I’d written with freedom, with consistency, with diligence. The letters were meant to speak to this. They were meant to be joyful themselves. Heady on the fumes of this breakthrough, I figured they could offer something akin to advice.

Instead, I wrote about my father. I wrote in mourning. I remembered. Heavy, I felt the loss. Then I expressed the loss. 

The process was joyful but the topics were not. Advice, it turned out, was not what lay beneath the floorboards.

After nine weeks, this series morphed into a study of how I came to be creative, how I came to value art—and how that unseen and unnoticed process was born of my relationship to my father. 

Despite spending my whole life with him, in awe of him, chafing at his edges, and (in the way of many sons) studying him, I found myself able to write with meaning and joy when I was writing about him, toward him, to him.

If the notes were joyful, the joy was in the process—of excavation, in evocation—not in the subject matter or style.

Yet in that joy I rediscovered art: beneath those floorboards, in the subconscious tension of trying to understand my father, to see myself and my own manhood in relation to his, lay the very tools I needed to renovate and refurbish my relationship to art-making. 

I grieved for him. I grieved for my young man’s dreams, desires, illusion.

And in writing out this grief—grief for him, and grief for myself, grief for our aborted lives in art—I renovated my relationship to art. 

Rather than pithy reflections on how to get to the heart of joyful creativity, I wrote about death and enacted my own creative rebirth. 

My father’s life, his death; my grief and grieving, mourning and imagining; the relationship I have to a patrimony of art-making and artistic appreciation and a patriarch himself whose relationship to art was fractured, inconcrete, and unarticulated—on the back of such topics, I found a way to resurrect my own life.

And after five dozen entries (or essays or newsletters or whatever we want to call them), here we are.

Shall we see what’s next?

Onward,

Joey

One morning, I had gotten in the bath (a habit picked up during an earlier protracted period of illness) and looked down to see ribbons of blood snaking up from my penis like seaweed. My father drove me to the urgent care, and then to the ER, and then to a hundred other appointments and tests and checkups and blood draws and assessments. 

(If this were a novel, we’d be foreshadowing later drives to hospitals and oncologists and radiation treatments on his behalf: me at the wheel and him riding shotgun. But we’re not).

I told my father I was practicing to be an old man. Limping to the bathroom in the middle of the night to piss. Doctors’ gloved fingers confirming the shape and texture of my prostate. Ultrasound scans of my testicles confirming they were, indeed, testicles. Cameras inserted inelegantly inside my body to take snapshots of my ventricles, entrails, and linings. So many warm vials of my blood. So many afternoons reading magazines in waiting rooms.

And at every juncture, each time I saw a doctor or a specialist or a nurse or a phlebotomist, they’d ask “And the pain?” 

But it was never really pain. Not exactly. I thought of it as intense discomfort.

One afternoon, we drove to the urologist’s office in Santa Ana. We passed the swim club where we’d had lessons years before. The taste of chlorine like a breath mint gone sour in my mouth. We passed the school where I’d gotten lost on the way to take the SATs. I’d called my father in a panic and he’d talked me through a reroute (I made it just on time). Passed the government buildings where I’d had my first paid job – compiling executive summaries for a County Supervisor while eating M&Ms from the bowl on the secretary’s desk. The tightness of the tie I wore pressing on my neck.

No – it wasn’t comfortable, but nor was it painful.

Pain would have been more acute. More imposing. Pain would have stolen my laugh.

Even now, it can feel like a piece of me has been taken and remains unreturned. Like a thing long held was wrenched away and my body is still calling it back. Or trying to. 

Even today, I want it back. 

I lay in bed and feel it spasm. It’s physical – a clench in the abs, a cramping of the cavity around the heart. I want the way things went to have not been the way they went; the illness to not have eaten his sentience, his body (which held that illness with unnecessary grace) to have not been so accommodating. For his skin to have not gone cold against my skin. 

I want and it hurts to want – and it hurts that the wanting is futile. 

I ask: are grief pains like growing pains? Evidence of slow changes concentrated; an unseen process felt, in a sudden lurch, all at once? Are they a coming into form, a stage of a process – a process itself which has been happening, quietly, on its own? Which only now, suddenly, makes itself known? (Don’t say “like a cancer.”)

I wake tonight from a dream and have nothing to laugh about. (So little is funny in the dead of night). In another town, another decade, another body altogether. 

Will each grief-spasm appear tomorrow as a lengthening, a growing, a new stage of healing, of life?

If so, let me be honest: I’d rather have the pain.

I fold my body like a fetus: someone robbed, held at gunpoint, left, unsure of what was taken and what remains. What hurts: the rawness of loss or the something that’s been removed?

One day, we went to a BBQ at a family friends’ house – I’m sure my father would have preferred the blood lab – and on the way home I tried my best to explain the discomfort. Like an aching, I said. Like a muscle has been stretched, and filled with liquid, and then beaten, and then drained too fast; a hose that’s bent and stomped on, so little rivulets of water squeeze out of tears along the side.

He drove. He listened. He nodded. 

Unpleasant, he said. 

Uncomfortable, I said. 

Not painful? He asked. 

I shrugged. 

Then, it was the fear that it would be like that forever. Now, that it won’t.

That I’ll run out of feelings, run out of thoughts, run out of stories, run out of things to say. 

Eventually, even this cycle of writing has to end. But then what? What then?

There’s nothing to say about there being nothing to say. There’s nothing new to say about there being nothing new to say. 

That’s uncomfortable; but is it painful? 

Onward,

Joey

A few months ago I stood on a pier in San Diego and looked into the dull eye of a seagull.

I’d taken the morning to wander from the hotel where I was staying down along the coast. It wasn’t a beach I knew, but all the Southern California beaches are, in essence, the same. So I walked alone, but also not alone – a thousand echoes of my childhood, a thousand mornings, middays, afternoons, a thousand hours on foot, on bicycle, by car, by bus, gathered inside me and like marrow moved through my limbs as I went.

It felt good to be there. The breeze was strong, and I watched people move down the pier hand-in-hand, saw surfers in the distance fall from their boards and disappear in the waves, heard the clicks and kicks of kids at play in the sand.

I’d driven in the night before from Vegas, and slept well in the bare hotel room I’d rented. In town for a baby shower, I’d forgotten the visceral feeling of being in Southern California. The beauty that you feel on your skin as much as you see with your eyes. And I’d enjoyed my walk incredibly, wanted to keep on walking, and walking, and walking.  

But the seagull. The seagull stood on the ledge of the old, wooden pier, and waited. It was if, in his stillness, he pulled me toward him. 

I’d just made my way to the end of the pier – where a sign told me that a Ruby’s restaurant, which had been there for most of my life (like the one at the end of a similar pier closer to home), was now closed for good: “Something new coming soon.” I’d smelled the sour pinch of dead fish and bait, seen a few grizzled men casting lines into the ocean, stood with my face toward the flat expanse of the Pacific horizon, and felt the heavy push of coastal air in my face, and then against my side, and now at my back. I’d nearly returned to the start of the pier when the seagull looked my way.

There were other seagulls swooping around – behind us, into the ocean. And others still making their way on foot across the pier, bent in search of scraps. But this seagull was still. So still, that I thought I might come close to him and take a photo.

I neared: his single eye, a black marble. His feathers, matted, ruffled slightly in the wind. And though I couldn’t comprehend a single thing he might be thinking, couldn’t (still can’t) think even of how to think in the unknowable language of his thoughts, I felt him. I felt his unnamable desire and his inexpressible life. And we stood there, for a time, together.

I could have been there for an hour, maybe. Though it was probably ten minutes. Yet there was a peacefulness in the position that I borrowed. Around me, people, going somewhere, stopping here, going again; beside me: the seagull. Beneath us, the neutral bustle of the waves.

For a time, the seagull and I were brothers – standing on a pier together, with no reason to fear each other, no worries about what was next, as near to home as we’d ever be.

Then, for no explicable reason, I remembered a brunch my aunt took us to in Berkeley. It wasn’t the food (who knows what I ordered; I don’t even remember the name of the restaurant), but the steadiness of seeing a person who’s built a life in a place say: this is a restaurant I like, and when people visit, I take them here. 

I remembered riding in the mini-van (we took a number of cars). I remembered the crowded parking lot. I remembered the feeling of still being one of the ‘kids,’ but not exactly young anymore. I remembered the sun: always, the sun, warm overhead. And I remembered that I’d been hungry. And then I knew (no great revelation, but I’d never known such a thing with certitude before) that the seagull was hungry, too. 

And I felt an aching sadness for whatever that was – that moment in time, that brunch among family, that hunger sated, that youth, now, like my walk, lived. All of it, like the Ruby’s restaurant at the end of the pier, sealed off. Closed for good. Finished. 

Strange, Seagull. Don’t you think?

Today I read the obituary of a man – a poet, a Yogi, a stepfather, a teacher. His books with awards and his 50 years dotted with fellowships, positions, celebrations, and travel stipends. His circle, in mourning, themselves feted and renowned. Even the article, filled with in and outbound links, held pride of place in a well-known publication. 

They say comparison is the thief of joy. Can it also be the patron of grief?

Reading, you can’t help but think of how when your father dies, you have no funeral for him. He was private; he didn’t want one. He’d just moved, his friends, few, his family, far away. 

And yet the feeling that invades with the speed of a bite, the velocity of venom: it’s envy. For this man’s public death? The literary bellyaches of his friends and colleagues and students and readers?

Or, is it this: in ten years, you’ll be as old as the poet (assuming you live that long). And how many of your dreams are represented in the romance of his obituary? How many of those dreams have you projected back onto your father?

Is it this: the life you imagined versus the one you are living.

Is it that we can live the past as a kind of death, and can spend the present in a kind of mourning. Or is it that we can choose to feel the sun on our face and still look out into the sea breeze?

All those years, it was my mother’s family that gathered around the Bay. A childhood spent driving up and down the coast – for Thanksgivings, for Spring Breaks, for Bar Mitzvahs and reunions. My childhood in the backseat; father at the wheel. I never once recognized the way such actions extended the net of home. 

How home was not place, so much as connection; how it held you, even after you were gone. 

So is this not really about your father? Has it ever been?

Tell me, seagull.

A private death, quiet. Surrounded by those who lived with you. 

The ones who smelled your shirts and looked through your underwear drawer to find the wad of cash you kept there to pay for incidental things – school fees, or movie tickets, or gas. 

The ones you sent home with tubes of toothpaste in nasty flavors or packs of dental floss you’d bought in bulk. 

The ones who tickled your mole-covered back while you laid on your side in bed, and scratched at your caked and crusted heels, hardly human, more mollusk stuck to the wooden leg of a pier.

Seagull: your marble eye is a mirror. A crystal ball. 

It says: something new is coming.

It says: just live.

Onward,

Joey

Again, another way, my father calls.

The cello that he dropped off at a violin shop in Los Angeles has finally sold. 

The shop worker, Wesley, is asking for a forwarding address so he can send me a check for our share of the sale. He has a few addresses on file: one in California where we used to live; one in Ohio where my father and mother moved after my dad got sick; and one in New York, where he sent the money paid out to my brother, for his own instrument sold some time before in a similar sale. 

After I give him my newest address, he thanks me and says, “I guess this closes up our account with your father.” 

I flinch. I want to protest. “No, no. Don’t close it. You never know.” Though I do.

In a way, while the sale was open, while the cello remained unsold, part of my father remained alive. Far from view, over the crest of the horizon, but alive. 

His drive to LA (he did it every day for work, but this drive had a different purpose, into a different part of town), his visit to the shop (he smells the wood, the rosin, the horsehair, remembers his own love of our playing), his decision to let them restring and clean the instruments, to deduct that cost from the sale (how he loves to spend money on something worthwhile), his request that they forward whatever profit is made on to his sons (this type of generosity his deepest instinct)—all of that is him living. And the result (the sale, the call, the need for a forwarding address) are direct results of actions he made that day, when he walked into the crowded shop (hear the bells jangle as he presses the glass door open, see the violin maker look up over his glasses) in shorts and New Balance sneakers, or dressed in black jeans and his black Rockport “work” clothes.

So when the check arrives—with a dated list of all the instruments, bows, cases ever brought in on his account, each crossed off and dated with when it was finally sold—I hesitate to cash it. 

On the line labeled “Customer” I see my father’s name, and next to it, written in a different ink, lighter: the word “Deceased.” This feels overly final, fraudulent; he shouldn’t be dead to Wesley.

I wonder who told them. Did my brother call to update the account? My mother? Did I? 

Part of me thinks my father did it himself—and not just because he was aggressively gleeful about sharing his impending demise toward the end of his run. Or maybe Wesley just sensed it. It can take so long to sell a stringed instrument, such customer transitions could be routine.

Eventually, I cash the check. Generosity with money was one of the main ways my father expressed love, and he doesn’t have many opportunities to express it directly these days. And despite the feeling of openness the telephone call inspires, there is no way to call my father back. These days, all his phone calls are one-way. 

The Cello Suites

In Pablo Casals version, he opens with a lilting dance. A younger sound, despite the tinny tone from the old recording, and the static which mars each note with a slight subterranean drone, a dry yet even undercurrent beneath the near-syncopated wobble of his melody.

For Jacqueline du Pré, the opening is solemn, a slow walk by a frozen lake. The quarter notes drag and there’s a choppy yet laconic draw of the bow for each, which you can hear with distinctive motion as she changes direction. Somehow, while beautifully articulated, each note also feels stuck; a tear which does not want to be cried.

While he plays the same notes, Yo-Yo Ma’s tune is almost jaunty, contented—a middle aged man reflecting on a life well-lived. The tones which du Pré dragged flutter for him; those that lilted for Casals loft instead. They hop, each like a foot on a step descending downward, heading toward a doorbell which has just been rung.

Rostropovich, however, hurries through each line; it’s as though he doesn’t have time to waste with dances, or emotions, skill, or satisfaction. His proceeds with the gruff reliability of a march: each note the same size, the same shape, the same weight, each moving by quickly to make room for the next. 

I could go on—or I could have at one point.

How many Saturdays began with the sounds of Bach’s Cello Suites soaring through the house? My father making tea, or sitting in concentration on his chair, or wandering the house whistling the unadorned melody to himself? 

As I was a kid, I preferred Rostropovich. Perhaps because we’d seen him play once (I’ll never forget his bent end-pin, his closed eyes and blank brow). 

As a teenager, I switched to du Pré. Perhaps stirred by the tragic aspect, the fact that she’d been forced by illness to stop playing at 28, and had died at 42. 

(How many times did we join him on the couch to watch her perform “The Trout,” or the Dvorak or Elgar concertos; I see her now filling our tiny TV with a stirring vibrancy, a wild intensity, held forever in a energetic blond explosion—a youthfulness which we still then embodied ourselves.)

As a kid, I wondered how I would play Bach’s suites if I ever got good enough to learn the cycle. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you do,” my father would say. 

I never took him up on the offer, nor took it seriously—though he did buy me the sheet music at one point, and I did learn the opening bars. To have really done it justice would have required a year of study or more, even just to play them poorly, and that would have been practicing four or five hours a day. And who wants to study relentlessly only to play something poorly? 

Especially notes which hold such power; the most famous emitted by the instrument I called my own. 

I bought the cello when I was 13, with the money I was given for my Bar Mitzvah. 

For years, I pulled it behind me in its oversized hard case—like a young undertaker carrying my own coffin. I brought it every day to high school. I packed it into my dorm room at college.

Often, people seeing me with the case would say, “I love the way a cello sounds,” or, “the cello is the most beautiful instrument.” 

But ask the partisan what he loves about his flag and I guarantee it’s not the colors or the pattern—it’s more emotional: the experience of ownership and belonging.

The cello was this for me. Unlike sports which I played, the cello played me—it became my calling card, my personality, my conduit to friendships and connections, as much part of me as my mouth or name or blood.

And like my father‘s accent, I could only hear its uniqueness, its quality, its beauty, when others would point it out. 

Perhaps to interpret Bach’s suites—what Rostropovich saw as a march; du Pré played as an elegy; Ma sang as a conquest—would be to shift my relationship to that instrument from one of identity to one of artistry. 

From one of meaningfulness to one of meaning-making.

And what could I add to the sounds of the world’s greatest cellists? 

And what could I add to the sound of my father’s voice, to his fading accent, to his calls which keep coming from beyond? 

Onward to creative joy,

Joey