Come Home. Love, Dad

By Shelly Reuben

Come Home. Love, Dad warmly introduces us to magical mirrors of every color and shape, giant balls of string, brothers wearing Davy Crockett T-shirts, and stalwart lions who guard the entrance to the Art Institute. And intersperesed throughout Shelly Reuben's recollections are the enchanting letters that Sam Reuben wrote to his daughter. Wonderful epistles imparting proverbs, reciting poetry, conveying wit, wisdom, whimsy ... and always ... always letting her know that he loved her, and that he wanted her to Come Home. Love, Dad

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 4, 2000
• ISBN: 9780966286830

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introducing Samuel Reuben

I am writing this as a tribute to benevolence. As an attempt to immortalize sweet eccentricity, masculine sobriety, and the sublime security that results from having had a home. A real home with a mother who expected us to wash and dry the dishes after dinner, a father who cleaned out the gutters and chopped down the tree in the front yard when it died from Dutch Elm disease, and a telephone closet where, tucked between a camel hair coat and a navy wool jacket, we could exchange intimacies with our best friends and write otherwise forgotten telephone numbers on the wall.

I am writing this knowing that on my desk there are plots to be invented, characterizations to be worked out, and manuscripts to be edited, but wanting, instead to take off my shoes and feel the cool sand of my childhood wiggling between my toes.

Mostly, though I am writing this because, lately, my father has been popping into my mind, unexpectedly, and insistently.

In little things, like which way to put the toilet paper on the roll (the flap goes over the top); and in big things like finding out that my Uncle Jack, my father’s older brother, has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, too.

About the toilet paper, though, I had been living in New York for many years when one day, on a visit home, my father lifted up a roll of toilet paper, flipped it around and reinserted it in place. The flap comes over the top, he told me with an unmistakable air of omnipotence, at which I nodded my commitment to integrate this new knowledge into the rest of my life.

What I particularly like about this interchange is that my father never explained to my why the flap goes over the top. And I, of course, never asked. Over the years I did remember, however, that Samuel Reuben said over the top, and I have brought this cultural mandate into the future with me. When I visit a stranger’s house and the toilet paper is improperly inserted, I take it out, flip it over, and put it back. Then I think of my father, smile, and have a brief, conspiratorial visit with my past.

Just the other day, when some members of the younger generation asked me at a lecture to pass on some important bit of wisdom, I carefully explained both about the right way to insert toilet paper and the reason why. And I have great hopes that as these young men and women proceed in their lives to become college professors, sales clerks, philosophers, or kings, they will be carefully rearranging any recalcitrant rolls of toilet paper that come their way, and that every time they do so, they will think about me, thinking about my father, and they will know I am smiling.

And they will smile, too.

Chapter 2

Love is Food. My father, Apples, and Oranges

I am in my bedroom with my sister, Selma. An imaginary center-line divides her side from mine. Her side has the chest of drawers and the door to the hall. My side has the extra window, the closet and the desk. When we aren’t fighting, we can drape the bedspread between the desk and the end of my bed and play tent.

It is late. Late in child-language.

Nine-thirty or ten o’clock.

And it is sometime between the seasons. Spring and summer, or summer and autumn. The windows are open and the night smells good. I have another sister named Linda, and two younger brothers. Mikey is the oldest and Chucky is the youngest. They are stashed away in their own rooms. There are night sounds. Footsteps on the stairs. Giggles. A radio. A refrigerator door closing. The muted sound of the next-door neighbor calling to her kids. Selma and I are discussing whether the soul is an actual physical organ or if it’s something else. She thinks that if a surgeon were good enough, he could find the soul—maybe between the heart and the rib cage—I think it’s more like music. Disembodied and untouchable, but forceful and there.

The footsteps are press-creaking towards our room.

The door opens. I look up. My father walks in. He doesn’t say anything. There is a smile on his face. One of those secret smiles that doesn’t do anything to light up his eyes or to turn up his lips, but that you know is there if you are me or my brothers or sisters or my mother.

His smile is like music.

He is wearing a pair of droopy yellow boxer shorts three sizes too big. Pulled over them is a sleeveless u-necked white ribbed T-shirt with a hole scratched in the chest. He has never had much hair on his head, and his hands have always been the hands of a very friendly, warm, loving, bear.

He is carrying a large plate.

This is a ritual.

Sometimes it happens early in the morning.

Sometimes when we’re doing our homework.

Sometimes when we have friends over.

Sometimes at night.

He walks over to my bed and sits down. He is a big man. The bed creaks and half of it slides down at a ten-degree angle. I am wearing my sister’s hand-me-down flannel pajamas, which are too warm for the night, so I only have my sheet pulled over me. My father places the cold plate on my stomach over the sheet, over the flannel, and I feel cold in my belly.

It is a cold I understand.

My father doesn’t say anything. He reaches down to the plate, picks up a pear slice and begins to eat. I reach over the plate, pick up an orange slice, and pop it into my mouth.

Highly iconoclastic, my father says.

I nod sapiently.

He picks up an apple slice and plunks it into his mouth.

I pick up a grape.

He hands me an apple.

I hand him a pear.

We look at each other and nod.

He lifts the plate off my belly and stands up.

His feet are press-creaking across the room to my sister’s bed. He sits down on the edge. It slides down at a ten-degree angle. He places the plate on her stomach. She has on a new pair of pajamas. They are pink with little bunches of purple violets. She reaches for a pear.

My father nods and reaches for an orange slice.

She reaches for an orange slice.

He says, Spit out the seeds.

She swallows them.

He shakes his head and smiles musically.

She smiles anatomically and reaches for an apple slice.

He is on safe ground here as he left the apple cores in the kitchen. If he doesn’t, she will eat them too.

Have a grape, he says.

Okay, she says.

She has a grape.

He scratches his chest and stands up.

He lifts the plate off her belly, turns and walks out of the room.

He forgets to close the door.

I push off my sheet, stand up, and go over to my sister’s side of the room. Before I close the door, I see my father walking into the boys’ room. In another second, I hear him saying, Masticate your food.

I hear my brother saying, Okay, Daddy.

I close the door.

I go to bed, safe in the knowledge that my brothers, sisters and I are loved, and that no matter what else life does to us or we do to life, we will always have that.

Chapter 3

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean

Samuel Reuben looked like a father, not like someone you would have an Oedipus complex about.

He never seemed to have had a full head of hair, but early photographs indicate that for one brief, shining moment, something light brown had once flourished there. To have called him bald, however, would have been cruelly inaccurate. That bare, often sunburned space surrounded by fringe was just there. Old men got bald. Fussbudgets got bald. Elmer Fudd got bald.

My father just didn’t have a whole lot of hair.

What there was of it, though, he cared about. A lot. When he went down to the Glencoe Beach, he put a shower cap on his head before he would plunge into the waves. A puffy, bouffant thing, the purpose of which was to keep what remained on his head from being aggravated into further recession by the thermal inadequacies of Lake Michigan, i.e., he thought cold water makes your hair fall out.

Sam and his chickadees

Other than this and the additional precaution of massaging his skull with a plastic nubby thing, he did little to refurbish what was left. As children, we never quite took the plight of his hairline seriously. One Chanukah we bought him a huge comb, which he did not find amusing but about which I laughed for days.

My father had hazel eyes, thick, light brown eyelashes that pointed straight down, and a wide, aquiline nose. In profile, he looked exactly like the Indian on the face of a nickel.

And Samuel Reuben was very tall. Of course, the older I grew, the shorter he got, but he never grew less strong. Not even when he was dying and was so frail that a child could have carried him across the room. There is a line of poetry by e.e. cummings which describes a man who could hold the heart beat of a mountain in his hands.

That was Samuel Reuben.

Strong.

Let me tell you about strong. When we were children, I remember him extending his arms and both my older sister and I hanging by our knees upside down, one from each, like a pair of monkey. And when we lived in the house where I was born at 4907 North Bernard Street in Chicago, my father used to carry me up the stairs, singing:

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

My Bonnie lies over the sea

My Bonnie lies over the ocean

Oh bring back my busted down,

Beat up old Bonnie to me.

As we approached a sharp turn in the stairwell, he would speed up as though we were going to crash into the wall. Then he would pull back at the very last instant, scaring me in that thrilling, terrifying way children love to be scared when they are little, and when they know that they are utterly and completely safe.

Safe.

That is the most important word to be able to apply to childhood. To be safe and to know that your