by Bruce Feiler
“So let’s say we’re lucky enough to make our trip when we’re fifty,” I said. “What will we have built in the intervening thirty years?”
“First of all, we’re going to make it, Bu-ru-su,” he said, using the Japanese version of my name. “And I think the answer is, we have a deeper love for each other. Part of it is sharing experiences over time, the encyclopedia of knowing someone forever. But the most important part is just being good friends. Someone who is there when you need help, there when you have something joyous to share, there to hold up a mirror so you can understand how you’ve changed.”
“And are we going to stay in those fancy hotels?”
“Not if I have to wear long pants,” he declared. “And not if I can’t wear flip-flops.”
“What’s so important about flip-flops?”
“It’s nothing to do with footwear,” he said. “It’s back to my philosophy of self-reliance over fitting in. I want to do the right thing, and to me that means not wearing too much clothing in a tropical sweatbox.”
As soon as he said that, I suddenly flashed to that kid in curly hair and cutoffs I first met when we were teenagers—bookish, boyish, ready to outsmart you in chess, and able to turn his defiant taste in shoes into an enduring axiom of personal integrity: No matter where you are, you should always be true to yourself. No matter where you go, you should always pack your flip-flops.
.9.
THE LESSON OF THE DUNES
WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THAT I am a writer, they often ask if I learned it from my dad. “My dad never wrote anything longer than a memo,” I usually quip.
But what memos!
My father is the master of the memo pad. The Shakespeare of sticky notes. Few people I know say more with less.
From the time we were kids, we got stacks of news articles slipped under our doors (later they were faxed, then e-mailed, now texted), each with a specific coding: R&R meant read and return; a double arrow meant read and pass along to the next person. We got reams of note-paper encrypted with his paternal haiku.
Your will / Let’s discuss / When?
Cleaning the porch / Sunday morning /
Command performance.
These dispatches were invariably written in flat-line cursive with blue, red, or green felt-tip ink. And they would never be longer than ten words. On the day of a piece of bad news: How do we solve the problem? On the morning of a big transition: Don’t look back.
My dad makes Twitter seem expansive.
When he turned sixty, we gathered a number of my father’s most memorable Dad-isms and put them in a book.
If you don’t like it, don’t eat it, but don’t kick.
If it can be solved with time or money, it’s not a problem.
As long as you’re still talking, you’re still negotiating.
Some were wicked, like his comment whenever a child took a tumble: Did you hurt the floor? Some were wise, like his remark about his mother’s Alzheimer’s: It’s more difficult to bring down parents than to bring up kids.
At least three are enduring. They grew out of the pivotal moments in my upbringing and became the proverbs that most embody my father to me.
MY DAD IS ONE of those men who become better-looking the older they get. The distinguished seventy-year-old with the bald pate and silver temples who reminds people of Gene Hackman was once a skinny Eagle Scout with nerd-wavy hair and Dumbo ears. Edwin Feiler Jr. was an awkward child, and he was often overshadowed by his dashing younger brother, Stanley. When their father built a subdivision, he named the prized front street after Stanley, the rear one after my dad.
“Stanley was just more polished,” my father said. “When I was fifteen, my father took us to Hunter Army Airfield and tried to teach me how to drive. He failed. Yet Stanley, who was only twelve, picked it up. He was just easier to train. He was always popular. He had better social skills. You could take him places where I wouldn’t fit in.”
What my father had was discipline and determination. Those rabbit ears aside, he was the classic tortoise. He gritted his way into the top ten of his class at the Savannah High School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and navy ROTC. When I asked him how he became an Eagle Scout, he said, simply: “I try to complete the things I start.”
Ironically, a rare lapse in that self-control became a central moment in his life. He called it “the hour that changed my life.” “In 1956 I was commissioned into the navy and sent to training school,” he said. “My grades gave me the right to pick any assignment, and I chose to be stationed in Europe. But several weeks before graduation, I cut a cooking class and took a nap. I thought I wouldn’t get caught, and I got caught. That’s how I got assigned to the U.S.S. Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia, which is how I ended up marrying your mother.”
“So your delinquency brought us here today!”
“Absolutely. And I was not normally a very delinquent guy.”
Two years later, on the day my mother was supposed to attend her graduation from the University of Michigan, Edwin Feiler and Jane Abeshouse were married in Baltimore. Her mother serenaded them with a homespun version of “Dixie.”
They’re on their way to the land of cotton
Ed and Jane won’t be forgotten…
In Dixie-Land they’ll be so happy
Grits and juleps to keep them snappy
The next year they moved back to Savannah and settled into my great-grandmother’s old house. “When I left Savannah in 1952, I thought I would never come back,” my father said. “Savannah wasn’t much of a place. There was no air-conditioning. No television. The only people who had TV set up giant antennae to receive one or two stations from Jacksonville. There were tons of unpaved streets, even downtown. Lady Astor said Savannah was like a beautiful woman with a dirty face. She was right! Plus, it was highly and uncomfortably segregated.”
But something changed along the way. He did. “When I was living in the Northeast, I realized I didn’t like the values of the New York–New Jersey corridor,” my father said. “One night in college, I was in the Bryn Mawr train station after taking out this girl, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to live here. Savannah’s a much better place to raise children.’”
The gambit paid off. By the 1960s, Savannah was on the move, my father was finding success building houses, and my mother was pregnant. But when my brother was born in October 1961, crisis. The eight-pound, eight-ounce baby had an enormous growth protruding from the bottom of his spine, a rare defect called a myelomeningocele. “It was this big blob, sticking out of his body, that was larger than his head,” my father recalled.
My mom’s father, Bucky, a prominent urologist, was in the delivery room. “When Bucky saw it, the first thing he did was scratch the instep of the baby’s foot,” my dad said. “Andy wiggled his toes. Bucky concluded that the boy’s spinal cord was intact and said that even though only one in ten thousand people with this birth defect ever walked, Andy could be the one.” The next day a team of thirteen doctors removed the growth and closed my brother’s spine. After the surgery, Bucky assured my mother that her son would live a normal life and said he had to return to Baltimore to operate.
A month later Bucky Abeshouse had a heart attack and died.
“Since that time,” my father said, “whenever I hear that somebody had a baby, I always say, ‘Is it healthy?’ because in twenty-four hours the responsibilities of fatherhood came down on me very, very quickly.”
For two years, doctors measured my brother’s head every other month to make sure he was developing normally. After learning that he was, my parents consulted with experts at Emory University as to whether they should have more children. The doctors saw no reason not to try.
“When Dr. Bodziner came out of the delivery room on October 25, 1964,” my father said, “the first thing he said to me was that you were healthy. That was a huge relief. Because remember, only one in ten thousand with that condition ever walk, and we’d already had the one.”
WHENEVER I CONJURE UP images of my father from my childhood, he’s usually sitting down: at the head of the dinner table carving a roast; in the living room smoking a pipe; on the beach reading a novel. I have strong memories of him coming into my bedroom every night when I was in high school, pulling up a chair, and asking if I had anything to talk about. I usually brushed him off and went back to my homework, but the message was clear that he was open for counsel.
He was certainly active—played badminton, was an early jogger, took walks—but the values he conveyed were thronelike: wisdom, stability, calmness. He was, in the best sense of the word, settled.
And when I think of the wisdom he passed on from his seat of power, three pearls stand out.
The first occurred when I was thirteen. It was the night of my bar mitzvah, and my parents had invited friends over to our house. Near the end of the party, my father called me over to the bar, ordered a gin and tonic, and handed it to me. “You’re a man now,” he said. “You’re responsible for your own actions.” And if I ever had too much to drink, he said, it would be among the greatest pleasures of his life if I would call him and ask him to come pick me up.
The moment was classic Ed Feiler: trusting, indirectly emotional, constantly nudging us out of the nest. It was his way of saying, as he often did, that he was our cheerleader. His goal was to provide the shoulders on which we would climb into the sky. He wanted nothing more than to be “between the commas” in some magazine, as in “Bruce Feiler, son of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin J. Feiler, reached some milestone this week.”
I didn’t fully realize what he was trying to say until I, too, became a parent. The higher joy is not the light, it’s the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it’s handing down.
Between the commas
THE SECOND OCCURRED WHEN I was seventeen. I was co–vice president of my junior class, and our chief responsibility was to throw the prom. A month before the date, we lost our venue. A deal was swiftly done to move the prom to the Savannah Yacht Club, but it discriminated against blacks and Jews. In a fit of uncharacteristic bravado, my fellow VP, Laura, and I objected. Our car-wash and bake-sale bounty would not feed their coffers.
As soon as we complained, my parents sat us down. “It’s time you learned about Charlie Wittenstein,” they said. An attorney and veteran of discrimination battles, Charlie had three rules for such situations.
Keep your cool.
Never threaten. The other side will believe you are much more powerful than you really are.
Give them a graceful out. Even though you may prevail, let them believe you didn’t get everything you wanted.
Forever after we called them the Charlie Wittenstein Rules.
“And let me tell you,” my father said later. “They really, really work.”
That afternoon, in an attempt to provide a “graceful out,” Laura and I identified a dozen alternate venues. The school called a board meeting, and my mother went as our spokesperson. A community college was chosen as the final venue. After the meeting, our class mother approached my mom. “Congratulations, Jane,” she said, syrup in her voice. “By the way, how would you like to be chair of the decorating committee?”
Our comeuppance was getting up at 6 A.M. on prom morning to hang crepe paper fish from the rafters.
THE FINAL LESSON TOOK place when I was twenty-three. In 1988, after spending a year teaching English in Japan, I returned to Savannah. I had been writing you-can’t-believe-what-happened-to-me letters home, and now everywhere I went, people said to me, “I love your letters.” I looked at them. “Have we met?” My grandmother had been photocopying the letters and passing them around. I had an idea, “Maybe I should write a book.”
I was twenty-three years old. I didn’t know anyone who had written a book. I didn’t know anything about the book business. But I had a secret weapon. I had my dad. During a talk on the beach, he urged me to take the leap.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told your brother when he was trying to decide whether to move to England for a year,” he said. “Take a year. Give it a try. When you’re fifty years old, you will have spent two percent of your life trying to make your dream come true. And when you look back, I think you’ll realize it was a good two percent.”
The Two Percent Rule
Few things in my life have proven to be so 100 percent correct.
SOME MONTHS INTO MY cancer treatment, Linda and I received a rare letter from my father. It began:
Dear Bruce and Linda,
The United States Navy released me from active duty on March 29, 1959. I had the benefit of a great education and visited a lot of the world, yet I wanted to live in Savannah because it was the best place I had seen to raise a family. My energetic and loving wife agreed. We drove our new, un-air-conditioned Chevrolet (cost $2,181) from Annapolis to Savannah. I immediately went to work for Metro Developers. My first day on the job was Wednesday, April 1, 1959, and I am still here.
In fifty years I have had one job, one city and one wife.
My father went through twenty drafts of this letter, he explained, which he sent to all his children. It was inspired by a lunch at the Commerce Club in Atlanta, in which a friend asked how he was, and my father answered, “I have three children, all of whom get along well with one another, understand the value of money, and have the work ethic. Everything else is in second place.”
His friend replied, “I know everybody in this room, and no one else can make that statement.”
The letter went on to tout his Family First philosophy, which had defined my father through three recessions, four grandchildren, two hurricanes, and one osteosarcoma. “We intend to continue this philosophy,” he wrote.
Later I asked him where he would take his grandchildren to pass along this philosophy. “I would take them to the dunes of Tybee,” he said. “And I would explain that when I first started walking here forty years ago, these dunes were only pimples. Today, they are mountainous, with grass and sea oats, and pines.
“And the lesson of the dunes,” he continued, “is that you are a part of a continuum. Change occurs over a long period of time. So don’t be in a hurry. Recognize your limitations. But know that if you reach back in history and understand how you got here, you will be more prepared for the future.”
His letter to us ended:
I am not going anywhere for a while (I hope) because our work together is so enjoyable and productive. Please accept my personal thanks for being such an effective part of our team.
It was signed, in a way his father would have recognized, “With great affection, Edwin J. Feiler, Jr.” But then, in a touch of grace that showed he had learned from the missteps of the previous generation, he had crossed off the typewritten valediction, and scribbled in two words in blue felt-tip ink.
Love, Dad
.10.
CHRONICLES OF THE LOST YEAR
volume III
October 1
Dear Friends and Family,
Even as summer drifted from view, September was the most beautiful month we have seen for some time in Brooklyn, with bright skies, clear nights, and just a hint of coolness in the air. We are beginning to get whiffs of fall and the outbreak of pumpkins and spray-on cobwebs that mark the arrival of Halloween, a national holiday in kid-friendly Brooklyn Heights.
A few weeks ago my parents and in-laws arrived to help celebrate Linda’s significant birthday. (“Mommy’s turning forty!” Tybee announced to everyone who would listen.) The day corresponded with the beginning of round three of my chemotherapy. I stayed in bed all day so I could rouse enough energy to sit upright for a few hours that night in a restaurant. After the meal I crutched my way to the bathroom and asked the waiter to stick a candle in a chocolate cake for Linda. When the cake arrived with no candle, I nearly lunged at the man, who apologized and returned moments later with a solo scoop of lemon verbena sorbet with a single candle perched on top. Linda held her breath and prepared to blow, and for the first time
I can ever remember, none of us wondered what she was wishing for.
We were all wishing for the same thing.
Three months have passed since I first learned I have bone cancer, and our lives for the moment have settled into a new normal. I have been through three of the four rounds of Cisplatin and Adriamycin I am slated to get before the surgery. While each time I get knocked out for about ten days, we have all somehow managed to adjust to the discomfort, exhaustion, and dislocation. The early signs suggest these treatments may be having a positive effect. My tumor has shrunk by about one-third; some of the warning levels in my blood have returned to near normal; I have more mobility. As my otherwise circumspect oncologist reported, “You’re kicking this tumor’s butt.” And my surgeon observed, “Only green flags, no yellow or red.”
Having said that, both of my doctors have prepared me for the reality that my body will probably not bounce back quite as well from future treatments, that a host of complications still linger at every turn, and that the surgery itself will take quite a toll. But in the meantime, they are happily adding a third, more toxic drug to my regimen. This month I will begin four rounds of high-dose Methotrexate. (Query: Why do chemo drugs all have names that sound like comic book villains? Now that the evil, octo-armed Cisplatin has been felled, here comes the dastardly Methotrexate to threaten Gotham City….) Methotrexate is given in weekly doses, not triweekly, so we’re bracing for a relentless few months in advance of the surgery.
