Page 62 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
bothered my mother, I never sensed it. He was very close to his mother, and it was the loss of his mother that was his only concern.
My father communicated very little to me concerning his youth. In fact, I don’t think of him as much of a communicator at all, at least orally. (When it came to teaching me the facts of life, Dr. Yaverbaum told me nothing; rather, he presented me with a book.) His moods, on the other hand, which ranged from very playful to very angry, were always obvious to me. (If I have not already made it clear, it seemed to me that my parents did little to hide their emotions, at least at home; the concept of being “reserved” was one that I doubt that they had ever even encountered.) What I have thus far related concerning my father’s fam- ily and his activities before he met my mother represents the sum total of my knowledge concerning his youth, with the exception of three sto- ries that he would tell many times over the years. Each might have involved something resembling an object lesson, at least indirectly.
My parents had undoubtedly imbued in me a desire to excel at school, not to be better than the rest of the students but to do the very best that I could. There was one exception to that rule. When I was in high school, my mother would constantly relate to me the accomplish- ments of the son of Aunt Rose’s friend Sylvia, one Michael Rebell, who was a year ahead of me academically and in Brooklyn Polytechnic Day School for Boys, a private school popularly referred to as Poly Prep, or just plain old Poly (pronounced as a parrot might have said it when seeking a saltine): “Michael was named an editor of Poly’s school news- paper.” “Michael is a National Merit semi-finalist.” “Michael got into Harvard.” Michael did this, Michael did that. Otherwise, meeting or beating the “competition” was never the goal, and, anyway, that single exception to the rule did not emanate from my father.
I was, with the exception of the second and third years of law school, and maybe during my senior year in college, a hardworking student to whom grades were of consequence. I’m sure that more than once I came home from school disappointed in a grade relating to a composition or an exam, a grade that was pretty good but not great. When that occurred,
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