This blog is the forum for me to share my stories and adventures. I have enjoyed opening up, sharing my passion for fitness and ultra-running, jumping freight trains, adventures on the Niger River in Mali, epic bike crashes, and even insight into who I am during critical formative times in my life. But who we become is so consciously and unconsciously driven by our upbringing, either by rebelling against it, or embracing it. Today’s post is a tribute to my father. And while it may not have a punch line or funny postscript, moment of suspense, or herculean/idiotic tale of perseverance, I can honestly say none of those other stories would have existed without him.
It is also a personal indulgence. Please forgive me it is not in keeping with the other stories I have told.
September 27th is always a day of melancholy for me. It is the night that he died forty years ago. In another post, I mentioned how he was my anchor through the tumultuous years of adolescence. More than that he taught me through his words and deeds, how to be a kind, caring person. In today's volatile climate, where the idea of what constitutes ‘manhood’ is simultaneously driving a rise in misogyny and a countervailing reinterpretation of gender companionship, the lessons he taught me about how to treat people, treat myself, and treat the world around us, have more resonance than ever.
Walter Zuckerman was born May 1st, 1932 in Brooklyn New York. His father and mother were first-generation immigrants from somewhere in the Polish/German regions of Eastern Europe. Like many, he was the beneficiary of a robust time of investment in our public school system and a Jewish culture that valued education. His father was a teacher, headmaster, and summer school director which furthered my father’s academic achievement but also introduced him to the outdoors in upstate New York every summer.
He headed to Cornell to become an engineer once he finished at Brooklyn Polytech. Knowing how things work was a lifelong fascination. When something broke around the house, he would gather me and my brother and we would take it apart to see if he could fix it. Often we might even already have bought the replacement, this wasn’t always an exercise to save money, but rather to understand how it was built, the beauty of the design, and to test reasoning ability to figure out if it could be fixed. The only true defeat I recall is when he brought a Xerox copy machine home from his office that had ceased to replicate anything but a dull grey sheen. We spent hours perfecting a slightly lighter shade of grey before calling it a day. The only machine he wouldn’t attempt to fix was his car because he needed that for emergency calls to the hospital.
I am not sure why he navigated away from engineering but after college, he returned to New York City and began medical school. Ultimately his decision to become a surgeon was rooted in this love of mechanical understanding. He loved knowing how the body worked. Ultimately he became a thoracic surgeon. His specialty was implanting pacemakers and removing lung cancer.
At some point, he moved up to Boston and eventually became the head of Thoracic Surgery at Cambridge City and Mount Auburn Hospitals. During this time, he became the first surgeon in the world to implant an ‘on-demand’ pacemaker. He was a teaching doctor for Harvard and many students passed through his operating rooms.
It was in Boston where he was introduced to mom, a pistol of a woman. She was a divorced mother of two daughters. She was also an unguided missile of energy whose target was social injustice. An educational maven from a prominent Yankee family, she survived on coffee and cigarettes while staying up all night making sure everyone had access to education. Her tactics sometimes were astray but her heart was always in the right place. She was abrasive but would stand by anyone for what was right no matter what. A true example of “Do you agree with me or don’t you understand,” she could and would dominate any conversation, and trust me, conversations lasted late into the night. And my father somehow, latched on and became the gyroscope that balanced out her energy. He truly became the rock and anchor of our family, quietly, gently, yet firmly holding it all together behind the scenes. When asked by my sisters what they should call him after he and my mother married, he responded simply “dad”, and growing up, they were always my sisters as much as my younger brother was my brother.
It is within this framework that I was born.
My mother had a 16-acre mountain house in Virginia just below the Shenandoah National Park from when she left her first husband in DC. Every summer we would spend our summers there and during the school year we would be in Brookline, Massachusetts. In Brookline, my mother and father served on the elected town meeting (broadly speaking a large city council), and where my mother also served on the school board.
And here is where the true beauty of how my father made me who I am begins.
Surgeons, and honestly professionals of most stripes, have been known for putting career ahead of family. The stereotype of the father being aloof and going to the office while simultaneously being the oracle of reason and knowledge and the stay-at-home mom of the 50s and 60s was only just being challenged. Many people knew their fathers but didn’t know their fathers. My father didn’t openly rebel against that type but quietly subverted it. He was known as the doctor who took the most time off to spend with his family. And he made sure when he was off, when we went to Virginia (and later Puerto Rico), he left his pager on the sideboard in Brookline.
In Virginia, we would work the fields together cutting down dead trees and chopping firewood. We hand-clipped weeds to keep the fields open for the cows our neighbor raised on our land. He instilled in us the equal value of hard physical work as much as rigorous academic work. But it wasn’t all serious. We would stop and eat the apples from the apple trees, he would stop and admire the hawks flying above the field. Once or twice we stopped to watch a bear cross the field. There was a small creek and an abandoned house nearby where we would race twig boats. And we failed miserably year after year flying kites from the hilltop.
We had a front yard with a border garden where we would play and eat dinner and lunch at picnic tables under huge elm trees scarred with lighting strikes (and yes, lightning does strike the same place twice, several years apart the third elm was him twice in the trunk - we all saw it from the porch twenty feet away). An enduring image of my dad was him cooking burgers or stakes on his home-built stone grill under the elm, bare-chested in khaki shorts as the frogs cracked and the cicadas chirped in the growing dusk lives forever in my memory.
But perhaps most engraved was the biology lessons we got every summer. Copperhead snakes abound in Virginia and when my mother came across this poisonous neighbor in the yard, she would decapitate it with a shovel to protect all the kids who ran barefoot all day long. That was the cue for my dad to get his scalpel and gather me, my brother, and any friends who happened to be around to start the lesson.
He would lay the snake out on the stone grille and slowly cut a line down the belly. One by one we would isolate the various organs and he would ask us what we thought they were and what they did. Often the snakes were pregnant and we would count the fetuses marveling at the different stages of development between different mothers. Once, the copperhead was close to giving birth and the babies slithered around on the stone for a moment after being freed. Very quickly my father killed them somewhat saddened that they had to go through that. But the most interesting two experiments we performed on the heart and spine.
When we isolated the heart, it was still often reflexively beating even fifteen minutes after my mother had killed the snake. My dad would always prepare a clear glass with a warm saline water solution and once we isolated the heart, he would drop it in the water. If the saline solution was prepared correctly, it would keep the heart from drying out and give it a liquid to pump. Amazingly, the heart at the bottom of the glass would keep pumping for quite some time. My fingers want to type thirty minutes but the memory of a 10-year old may be suspect.
The spine was even weirder. By the time we were done, the spine and ribs were clean and isolated, the white bones and the grey cartilage stretched out straight. And then my dad would run his index finger along the spine quickly from head to tail. The whole snake shivered and wriggled left to right. This was twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes after it had died. He explained that even though we had cleaned it, tiny muscles remained between each vertebra with stored energy. And the nerves in the spine were still conducting electricity. Thus it reacted to our stimuli by wriggling ghostlike. It was biology class and Halloween all rolled into one in the middle of August.
In the mountains of Virginia, my curiosity, my enjoyment of physical exertion, and my love of nature were born.
Back in Boston, very different lessons were being taught. My brother is the Lieutenant Governor of Vermont and is running for reelection this season. Depending on how you came across this blog it is possible you received a fundraising letter today in memory of my dad where he tells the story of the Country Club in Brookline and a medical dinner held there. What transpired was as formative for me as it was for my brother.
The hospitals in Boston where my father worked, like many companies, held annual dinners to thank their staff for their work. One year the physicians were invited to a party at the Country Club in Brookline. This is one of the oldest and most exclusive clubs in the United States and, as such, comes with all the baggage that such histories contain. And in the late 1970s, it was still not allowing membership to women, Jewish adherents, or African Americans. This did not sit well with my father.
To be clear, my father was not a practicing jew. He never went to synagogue, I never had a Bar Mitzvah. The extent of his Judaism was lighting a menorah and giving to the combined Jewish Philanthropies. However, there was no place in our society where anyone should be excluded based on religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality, or race. Although it was a non-club event and therefore not subject to the club membership rules, he organized the other doctors to protest and have the hospital management change the venue. Why would he want to celebrate at a place he otherwise would not be allowed to join? Or to put a twist on one of his oldest comic idols' famous jokes: why would he be a member of a place that wouldn’t allow him to be a member?
On top of all this, my father liked adventure. He decided at age fifty to learn scuba. Scuba has become much more accessible in the last 40 years and it was pretty out there for a 50-year-old to take lessons back in 1982. The final check-out test was an open water dive with skills tests. I have done this test in both the Caribbean and Australia and it is a little nerve-wracking. But in these places, visibility is 50 - 100 feet. You can see the instructor and the other classmates easily. In Marblehead, Massachusetts, visibility is maybe six feet in March if you are lucky. One test is to clear your mask and surface without air. The instructor sunk my father’s snorkel and mask and sent my father to get it.
Into the murk about 12 feet down my father swam. He swept his hand along the ground and found the mask. Tipping his head back, he cleared the mask and began his ascent. Suddenly he was stuck. His foot was in a lobster pot. He leaned down, now able to see with his mask, untangled his foot and started up, but was stopped again. He leaned down and discovered in freeing his first foot he caught his second. He leaned down, cleared his other foot, and headed to the surface. As he ascended, he passed the instructor, who had grown worried and was headed down to help. When he told Rick the story, Rick was amazed at how calm my father had remained during the ordeal. But to my father, this was just a puzzle to be solved and a place where panicking wasn’t an option.
I haven’t even begun to illustrate his sense of humor or his steadfastness to his friends but I have gone overlong already. But to say my father taught me to appreciate all the gifts life afforded me, to marvel at the world around me, to value my friends and love my family, to make time for the big things and the small, to appreciate hard work and relaxation would be to sell him short. And so to remember him this day, I am giving you this remembrance. But it wouldn’t be a blog without at least one traditional story:
To celebrate his birthday, my aunt's birthday, and, frankly anything else he could think of, my father threw a giant party at our home in Brookline. Partly so we could have some fun and partly to get us out of the way for prep, my father sent me and my brother to the public pool during the rec swim that afternoon. It was only three blocks away so my brother and I walked off. A few hours later we came home but somewhere along the way, I lost my bathing suit.
At the time, my sister Sarah was dating a very gregarious family friend Jimmy who was often about the house (My sister is 10 years older than me and Jimmy was a couple of years older than her). My father couldn’t believe I had lost my suit on the way home and asked Jim to help me look for it. To hear Jimmy’s side of the story:
“I took one look at all that stake and lobster Walt was about to grill and I knew I couldn’t risk not getting any, So I took Charles by the ear and out we went in the late afternoon to look the bathing suit.”
As we walked along, Jimmy was looking in every bush, under every parked car, in every yard. We made our way along Lincoln and Dana Avenues (tiny streets not befitting their loft designations by the way) until we got to Davis. At that point, Jimmy looked over and saw me staring at the sky.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the moon. It was there a minute ago but now it is gone”
“What the hell, we are supposed to be looking for your damn bathing suit, not the moon.”
“But Jimmy, the disappearance of the moon is more important than the disappearance of a bathing suit.”
And with that, Jimmy grabbed me by the arm and marched me home. He took me to my father and began to rant. Patiently my father let Jimmy rail about his wayward son, how I wasn’t helping, and generally how it had been a waste of time. And when Jimmy was all done, my father smiled. And then he said:
“But Jimmy, the disappearance of the moon is more important than the disappearance of a bathing suit.”