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So my father died today. Every day fathers die and the nebulas take scant note of yet another. Life pops in and out of existence at every moment (pun intended). POOF. This one such life was conceived one month before the Stock Market Crash and came into the Bronx smack dab during the Great Depression. It was a world, he would tell later, that seemed perfectly natural to him since he knew no other. There, in the streets of New York, he found many hours of joy and exhilaration in his youth despite the depravation. Here also, through the passions of his parents, he would learn of that the world was also a place of great economic and social injustice. My dad grew up with the giant rallies in the ‘30s: some Communist, some labor, but all intended to further the universal democratic rights of all beings on this planet.  He was a veteran of these rallies by the age of seven, marching with his father’s compatriots who would soon be off with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting alongside the Spanish freedom fighters during their grisly Civil War—it's why anyone who gazes at Picasso's Guernica can’t help be moved for all push backs at fascism and tyranny anywhere it exists. I’ll always remember the Depression tales he told. They are of course funny now. How he was entrusted with a quarter to buy his family eggs, milk and bread and the quarter fell into the sewer. His mother went with him to the local Bronx police station and had them remove the manhole cover and go down to recover it. It’s impossible sitting in the luxury of this New Depression to realize how panic-stricken and relieved he must have been. There is a whole section of his life I don’t know much about. I knew he joined the Marines at the age of 16 (yes, you could join that early then) and I suppose school at the time must not have been his thing. He must have bounced around for a number of years “finding oneself” as teenagers of more recent generations are apt to do. He eventually, must have “gotten his act together” and enrolled in college in upstate New York. Somehow he managed to get his bachelor degree in three years. He met my mother, a Brooklyn girl, away from the city and her family for the first time. I can see why my mother fell in love with my Dad. In the 1950s, the two great tumultuous issues of the time was the terrifying Right Wing clamp down on the Left or anything they perceived as Communist-inspired and the nascent Civil Rights movement that was only then beginning to find its globalized voice. My mother shared that commitment to a creating a just world and the two of them became swept up in that era and each other. My mother got a job in Miami teaching inner city children while my father worked with early civil rights organizations. In 1955, he took my mother and her parents to some Everglades backwater black church to hear the fiery, impassioned oration of 25-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver a sermon. I can’t begin to imagine what the sight of my grandparents, two white European Jews, sitting in a black church must have been, but I would give away all my entire art collection to have been there and experience that day with my future family. My parents moved back to New York and lived a boho life in Greenwich Village with their scooter and artsy/political friends. It must have been a magical time. After my mom died, I got to read a number of letters he wrote to her. Amazing love notes to this amazing woman…with prose that I’ve never been able to duplicate. Reading the New York letters made me realize my parents as people, as lovers, as young souls whose future was endless and filled with countless roads ribboning to all horizons. The deal was that if they had children, my Mom got to name the girls and he got to name the boys. And they had sons. Three. He gave me the biblical name. Joshua. Back in the day before every sensitive soap opera character was named “Josh”, it was only meant as the successor to Moses and the one who would lead the hapless Israelites (40 years in the desert! C’mon already! The Sinai ain’t that big!) into Jerusalem. To nail the point, he also saddled me with Maccabee as a middle name. I don’t know if he ever got the warrior he tried to imbue me with. There was Darrow (after Clarence) Paine (after Thomas) and Lincoln Debs (after Eugene!!!! I still CAN’T BELIEVE Linc got a security clearance let alone rise to Lt. Colonel rank in the US Army!). My Dad wanted to make sure we all had an inferiority complex to have to live up to such luminaries of distinction. Boy, what a different world it became when JFK was elected. My Dad came to Washington to do his part to originating the Civil Rights Commission. When JFK was assassinated, LBJ was determined to do something that JFK couldn’t -- If there was ever anyone who believed in the promise of the Great Society, it was my Dad. Those years in Washington were exciting and wildly impassioned times for him. My Dad followed Sargent Shriver in the newly formed Job Corps, a program that was created to assist disadvantaged youths find meaningful occupations . This would become his meaningful PREoccupation for the rest of his time in DC. He poured his heart and soul into this organization and it helped hundreds of thousands of kids over the years. I could wax forever about what my Dad did for his country, but of course, he was my Dad. He did the things many a Dad did. He taught me to ride a bike and drive a car. He took me on long hikes through the forest and rivers of my Virginia and he allowed me to have an adventurous Huck Finn childhood. He led our Passover seders that had almost no religion and all politics. My brothers and I toured the poverty-stricken hollers of white Appalachia and the projects of black, segregated DC to see an America that to our suburban eyes was shocking and inconceivable. It’s because of him I  When I got kicked out of my high school in my junior year for creating an underground newspaper, it was my Dad who got in touch with the ACLU. He stood by me the entire time and was probably even happier than I was when we finally had our day in court and won.My Dad taught me to empathize with others but despise Richard Nixon. His greatest gift was that he taught me how to use the library. I will never ever surpass the number of books that he’s read (he has a platinum library card from every place he ever lived). I know it started in the New York Public Library and he still was checking out books as late as Friday from his Podunk, Florida branch. This year, I finally got to teach one of his favorite books, CHRIST IN CONCRETE by Pietro DiDonato, to my students. He had me read that so early in my life and he kept coming back to it. The day-to-day horrors and life celebrations of those Italian steelworkers in the NY skyscrapers was written so lushly and poetically, the words could be eaten and drank right off the page. He loved reading my student’s blurtys on the book and I’m thrilled that they now own a piece of my Dad. Thanks for taking me to so many of those marches in the ‘60s. The Poor People's Campaign of '68. Moratorium Day. Thanks for all the books and the music and the films. Thanks for teaching me those haunting Americana songs of a long bygone era and seeing Pete Seeger play live. Thank you for taking me to see KING KONG when I was eight, and fuck you for telling me it was true.     Thank you for allowing me tremendous amount of freedom to explore the world…bike ride with a friend for three separate summers a thousand miles through the back roads of the eastern states to Canada. Three days after I graduated from high school, I was going to head on my first cross country car trip. I remember being nervous telling him of this plan, but my mother told me that he was secretly happy that I showed such initiative and independence. My parents went through their own personal tumult with their marriage and when they divorced when I was 21, it was quite a blow. It was certainly the end of something. Couple that with the beginning of the Reagan years, and you can see what a complete downward spiral this was for everyone. I never knew, nor I guess wanted to delve too much into my parents lives’ and what led to the split. My Dad moved out to his own apartment in DC and I got a job teaching in Brooklyn…a job that I know made both of them proud. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I returned, along with my brothers, to our old house, and took care of her for the last year and a half of her life. It was a very emotionally grueling time. Everyone did their part and my Dad wanted us to know he was there for anything we needed…My mother confided to Katie at the time that “Stan was a better ex-husband than a husband.” Maybe. But I knew there was a time. There were those New York letters. My Dad was there with us all, in that March hospital room, when she passed.  He later married a woman in the Labor Department. Lynda. Different from my mom but boy did she fiercely love my Dad. She had the tolerance to put up with his rantings at the various outrages and slings and arrows of every political inanity that has come down the pike.The only time I ever feared for my Dad was on September 11 when we couldn’t get in touch with Lincoln. It was a nerve-wracking few hours as we waited for any news that came out of the Pentagon. I was terrified thinking what was going on in his mind during that horrific day. Later in the day, when a spokesperson came on at the Pentagon briefing room to give an update of the situation, citing the extraordinary heroism of Lincoln’s rescues, all of us were swamped with phone calls and I knew three thousand miles away my father broke in gratitude that his son was safe, but the tragedy that had befallen the whole country. He had been there before. And we all know those dark years that followed. No one followed every nuance and grim march into the oblivion closer than him. Every phone call or visit was to hear the litany of stupidity about what had happened to his country. The nadir of course was the ’04 elections when the country actually sided with the fools. Let me go immediately to the thrill and joy of ’08. Of course it was and is something so extraordinary, it is still somewhat unbelievable. I am happy beyond all words that my father got to see that election. We spoke that night and I felt the love of, for once, a fairy tale ending. My Dad, always slim and in shape his entire life prided himself on his athleticism. He played tennis for four hours a day, five days a week. Although he gave up cigarettes 25 years ago, they finally caught up with him in January. Shocked to suddenly be laid low, he was unable to believe that he wasn’t going to be able to get back on the courts. Those last months were excruciating to witness because mortality was staring him in the face and, like all of us, he had to make peace with the inevitable. My Mother had to do it. I will too. So will you. I must say that these are the rules of life that I detest the most and probably need plenty more hours talking to a shrink to figure out my revolt…but I’m not holding my breath. I last talked with him on Friday. His voice was raspy, a shadow of its formal vitality. He used his waning energy to talk about his love of his sons AND deride the feckless Congressional Democrats for not backing Obama on Gitmo. So my father died today. I sit in a cafe in Kalispell, Montana just south of Glacier National Park. Came here for a weekend to get away from it all. I have my rented Mustang convertible, soaked in mud baths and hot springs surrounded by snow-capped mountains, danced at a cowboy honky tonk and was about to go out kayaking on a completely clear river. In that conversation, he told me he was happy I showed the intiative to go. He, of course, came with me. But the spotty cell phone reception...My brother finally got through...Bad news in Florida. So I learned my father died today. But Amnesty International lives. Barack Obama is working right now in the Oval Office. Dostoevsky survives in the libraries and is still constantly pulled from the shelves and there will be always someone who will smile when reaching the final line of the book he provided for me to love: “Hurrah for Karamazov!” And the struggle, eternal and maybe never-to-be-fully won, for social justice and both human dignity and decency remains. Stanley Leibner couldn’t take that with him although he tried his damnedest.    
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