my dad, religion and 9/11 « Letters from Grenada

my dad, religion and 9/11

As long as I can remember, my dad has gone through “phases”. Like a kid who has just discovered baseball cards. He goes out and collects every single thing he can about baseball cards. These things he collects are both concrete (the cards themselves) and abstract (biographical details and stats and other such ephemera). And then, like a kid, he discovers something new (holy wow, PAINTBALL!), and moves on, discarding the fruits of collection like they’re rookie cards of a guy who never made it to his second season.

The first phase I was old enough to notice was the time he threw himself headfirst into Catholicism and bought a little wooden saint with peeling gold and red paint and no hands. Then one day, about a year later, he up and decided that was idolatry and threw it down the incinerator chute in his building on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. I watched this happen and I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how he could change his mind like that, so completely and so suddenly. (Today, two days shy of turning 33, I understand. I totally understand.)

The phase he happened to be going through when I was eight resulted in my being baptized a Methodist, a religion about which I still know next to nothing, because he lost interest within a year and so we never went back.

I was ten for the Whitley Strieber phase. Whitley Streiber wrote some novels — including Wolfen, which, if memory serves, was made into a movie. Then he wrote the first in a series of ostensibly autobiographical books describing his encounters with and abductions by alien visitors. The cover art was a close up of a visitor from the shoulders up. (South Park later used the same basic depiction of “Greys” as a model for the aliens that give Cartman an anal probe.)

Dad really digs this book, and encourages me read it. Then, as now, I will read anything, and I have a weakness for stupid supernatural shit like vampires and space aliens and schools for the gifted in outer space. (When ARE they making Ender’s Game into a movie, anyway?) We both read the books, and conduct many in-depth discussions about them. Mostly, I just listen. I’m ten, remember? Lo and behold, I start having nightmares. I suddenly develop an intense fear of the dark. His response? “Oh! She was totally abducted by aliens! And this proves it!”

My dad is a very post hoc ergo propter hoc kind of guy.

But here’s the really funny part. He hasn’t said anything to any of us about this in ages. Fifteen years at least. Then last year my dad and my brother are on some road trip and end up in a redneck bar somewhere to-the-far-left-of-nowhere western New York. After a few beers, Dad says to Robert, “You know your sister was abducted by aliens? Don’t you remember those nightmares she used to have?” It so totally never occurs to him that the books were perhaps the CAUSE of the nightmares. But what really gets me is that this is still something he thinks about, even after all these years.

I wish I could make up stories like that.

My father long since left the whole alien thing in the past. Not surprisingly, because none of his phases last more than a couple of years. Until the last one, that is. When I was in high school he got really interested in Kabbalah. Jewish mysticism. The magic of numbers. The “bible code”. That esoteric blah blah blah that the rabbis in the movie Pi: Faith in Chaos are going on about? Yeah. That.

He never actually converted. He’s a self-described Righteous Gentile, descended, in spirit at least, from the goyim who chose to go with Moses when he parted the Red Sea.

It’s all very amusing to me. Not because I don’t have respect for religion in general or Judaism in particular. The opposite, in fact, is true. I grew up in Rockland County, New York, which boasts one of the highest concentrations of Jews east of Israel. Palestine. Either way. The only reason I don’t have a degree in Near Eastern Studies is I would’ve had to get proficient in Arabic or Hebrew. I was already taking both French and Spanish every semester, and so a semitic language was, I decided, simply beyond the scope of my ability. So I contented myself with studying the history of Muslim Spain, the “real” story of the Christian Crusades, and reading the Torah, the Koran and a whole lot of Arabic love poetry and midrashim. (If you glean from the above that my primary interest in religion has always been academic, you’d be right.)

About five years ago I was so seriously considering conversion to Judaism that I signed up for classes. I didn’t, but that’s another story.

It was a long time before I understood why my father felt the need to find himself a rabbi and a shul. But he did. And I accepted that. Because far be it from me to belittle of anyone’s convictions, you know? Besides. The fact is that while his earlier phases, the ones I remember from my childhood, were all short-lived, this one has lasted now for about two whole decades.

He lives in a section of the Bronx that was once home to a thriving Jewish community, but is now primarily Irish and Italian. So the congregation is very small and the rabbi is quite happy to have him.

In 2001 Yom Kippur started at sundown on Thursday the 27th of September. I called him a week or so before and asked, “Daddy? Are you going to synagogue for Yom Kippur? Can I come with you? Please?”

I surprised myself with that request. I’m not religious. I’m not Jewish. But I hadn’t been to church in more than ten years, so I didn’t have one. (I never had.) In the days immediately following September 11th, I felt, for the first and only time in my life, like I needed some religion. Any religion would do, and a day of atonement felt serendipitously appropriate.

So I went to Yom Kippur services. I drove from my apartment in Nyack to his house in Throggs Neck. The highways were nearly deserted. The sky was still dirty. There was a raw ache pulsing in the air. When I got there he looked at my clothing – dark grey skirt that reached my ankles, darker grey cardigan sweater, red wine colored collared shirt and black not-leather shoes with rubber soles. He looked at me and smiled.

“You look nice, honey”, he said. “You’re dressed perfectly. How did you…”

“How did I know what to wear? Kosher Dining Hall.” (One of my roommates in college was an orthodox Jew.)

He nodded and smiled again and took my hand. We walked together to the synagogue, and when we got there I quietly took a seat in the women’s half of the pews. I don’t remember anything about the service, because I wasn’t paying attention. I did not hear a single word, because I was staring at my hands and weeping. I had needed to cry, very badly.

And so I did.

And it was awesome, in the way that only wholesale, visceral regurgitation of grief can be awesome.

Since then I’ve been in a “house of worship” only once. My stepfather’s funeral was held in a Catholic church. There was incense and stained glass and light, and a priest from West Africa with a voice that rubbed against my soul like music. I wore a bright pink shirt, because that’s what John would have wanted, and a terrible hair cut, because in my hazy, numb fog of grief I’d gone to the barber shop in the Wall Street subway station and told the guy, “Cut it. Just cut it.”

Sometimes I tease my dad. About collecting religions. Trying one on for a while, then discarding it and moving along to the next. But now that I’m older, I kind of get it. I think I understand. So my teasing is loving. I say things like, So, Dad… Golem. Do they have a bris? And he bellows at me, Are you talking about Abraham’s covenant with GOD? And then I start to giggle and he can’t help it, he finds my laughter infectious and joins me.