I gave myself a week in the country to sort through the boxes and organize the accumulated stuff of my life. Elizabeth and the kids were in the city, so I had the run of the house and room to spread things out. It would be one of those big, messy projects that I both loved and hated to do. I would need to make piles of what to keep in the country, what to keep in the city and what to throw away. I would need to make decisions I dreaded and create a lot more chaos before I saw even a semblance of order.
It would be a considerable undertaking but not without its own pleasures. So I poured myself a glass of wine and raised it in a toast to the project ahead. Because I wanted anything I did to help me become a better father to my kids, I queued up one of my son Noah's favorite songs, the Beatles' "Eight Days a Week." Then I went to work.
After opening the first few boxes, I realized how impatient I must have been when I packed them: files of notes and essays from college shared the same box as a giant map of Central America and my bronzed baby shoes. My letter jacket from high school covered memorabilia I had collected at the 1992 Republican and Democratic Conventions.
One box contained my report cards since kindergarten, carefully stapled by my mother into two piles, the good and the bad. There was a list of friends and later girlfriends at ages 7, 11, 19, and 26, and eulogies I had written for family pets, my maternal grandmother and a friend who died of cancer.
In another box there were more than a thousand letters from my father, one per week since college, featuring his distinctive use of brackets, quotation marks and red type for emphasis. My roommates and I had spent hours trying to decode my father's letters for secret messages. We never found any. But we did find plenty of Knute Rockne-type advice and coaching. My father's letters repelled but also compelled me, and so I kept them all. There was also a collection of my old baseball caps in the box, along with an Indonesian shadow puppet I had purchased in Bali.
The boxes were full of strange and wonderful juxtapositions, but what struck me most was how the different objects reflected parts of myself I had suppressed or forgotten. The machete I used when I harvested bananas on a kibbutz in Israel reminded me of the thirst I once had for adventure. A barely decipherable dream journal brought back a year when I was so poor and scared for my future that I couldn't sleep at night but got by with a little help from my friends.
There was a box containing the notebooks and memorabilia that my grandfather gave me two weeks before he died. He spent the last two decades of his life creating businesses that gave jobs and dignity to the survivors of the Holocaust. He was my biggest hero at a time when I still believed in them.
That same box contained a copy of my high-school yearbook. Flipping through it, I experienced dozens of where-is-he-now, why-didn't-I-keep-up-with-him feelings of curiosity and regret. I noticed, for example, that the photo of my childhood bully was directly across from mine, reinforcing my sense that he had been born to torment me. There was also a photo of my favorite teacher, a young Episcopal priest who inspired me to think and write and believe in my obligation to do good in the world. I had fallen out of touch with him, just as I had with my soul mate in high school, a boy who had opened my eyes to the possibility of experiencing God and who later became a monk.
Life goes fast. Click. You are 15. Click, click. You are 55. Click, click. You are gone. And so are the people who loved and nurtured you. In one box there was a doctor's report confirming that my mother's mother, my beloved Nana Bertie, could no longer live on her own. When I was six, she taught me how to play Fish. When I was eight, she accused me of cheating. When I was twelve, fifteen, seventeen and twenty-one, she came to my graduations and told everyone how proud she was of me, even though I cheated at Fish.
I found a photo of one of the few times in 25 years that my brothers and I gathered in the same place at the same time with our wives and children. One of those times was at my wedding, when Elizabeth was six months pregnant with our twins. Why didn't we get together more often? Busy working, the family disease.
How quickly it all goes: There were photos of me with and without a beard in various stages of baldness over 30 years; a jar that contained the ashes of our poodle Buster; a letter from a friend in London who had been waiting for me to travel to Paris with him to visit the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors; photos of Joyce and me at my high school prom. She was my first love and we were still friends 15 years later when she was killed in an automobile accident as she was driving home from her wedding shower. She was buried two days later, on the same afternoon that she was supposed to get married. Joyce and I had always said that we'd be friends until we were 80. That dreary September day she died was one of the saddest of my life.
I poured myself a second glass of wine and looked quickly through another box. Tucked into a folder of postage stamps from around the world, I found a torn copy of the prayer I said each night until I was 10 years old. I still knew the words by heart: "Before in sleep I close my eyes, to thee O God my thoughts arise; I thank thee for thy blessings all that come to us thy children small; O keep me safe throughout the night, so I shall see the morning light." Nearly 50 years had passed since I had first said that prayer, yet in so many ways I still felt like the child who had said it.
I did not fall asleep easily that blustery night.
Exerpted from Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year Of Trying To Do The Right Things by Lee Kravitz. Copyright 2010 by Lee Kravitz. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.
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