Page 74 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
recalling that one of my high school girlfriends had said that my father definitely had “bedroom eyes.”
Dad did not like to travel (neither did my mother, who was appar- ently very attached to her own toilet seat). Mom and he took only one trip of consequence in their lifetimes, to Europe with a group that included Aunt Rose’s friend Sylvia Rebell and her husband, Harry, who were the parents of Arthur Rebell, who was then friendly with my cousin Peter; Michael Rebell, who, you will recall, set the standard for aca- demic excellence around my house; and Phyllis Rebell, about whom we will hear much, much later.
In fact, he did not like new things at all. Our 1955 black and white Oldsmobile did not have electric windows; in his mind, they would only break and thereby cost more inconvenience and money than they were worth. And Dad did not like most politicians; what they said was “bullshit.” And, a very straightforward man, he didn’t like “bullshit” at all.
What he did like, what he did like the most, was being a doctor. He would always spend more time in his office with patients than my mother thought necessary. That was because he didn’t just minister to them medically. He loved to talk to them. Many sought his advice on matters that were not strictly medical. Whether they were Jewish or Catholic (there were next to no Protestants in our part of Brooklyn), he was a rabbi to them. He had no office appointments as such. People would just come in during office hours, which were scheduled in two-hour seg- ments, but he would not be finished until the last patient was cared for. He kept patients’ records on large index cards that sat in a filing cabinet in his consultation room. For years he charged only five dollars for a house call, and he found it nearly impossible to raise his rates with exist- ing patients. He was concerned that he would lose a lot of patients when he moved his office to new quarters that were a sum total of three long and three short blocks away. He didn’t; his practice swelled.
I was never more proud than when I would go on shopping errands with him and see and hear people stop him on the sidewalk with “Hi, Doc” or “How are you, Doc?” and, the very best of all: “This must be that son that I’ve heard so much about [from you], Doc.”
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