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I posted this on a social media site earlier today, but various important people such as my daughter don’t have access to it there. One of my most faithful readers and frequent commenters here was, alas, the person I’m writing about, and the fact that there will be no amusing or bemusing comment from him is another dull blow in my gut:

My father died yesterday morning at the age of 86. He had been declining sharply, and my sister E. and I were flying to Tucson this week–she is there now, I’m arriving tomorrow. But both of us too late to see him one more time.

I drift in a kind of numb disbelief, punctuated by waves of sadness. I know the feelings will keep coming and I’ll cry and laugh and write and draw about them.

Dad was funny, smart, curious, with a knack for defusing conflict with a bit of self-deprecating humor. He read voraciously and delved into whatever caught his interest, so that in recent years when we talked, he’d have something to tell me about his studies in ancient Greek or the paintings of Joan Mitchell. He really found his calling when he became an English professor, since he was a natural-born scholar and also a ham who loved to have the opportunity to hold forth on the stage of the classroom. He was very politically aware and liberal–not an activist except for the occasional bout of making phone calls for his Congresswoman, but he was proud that E. and I were. He was a poet, and later in life, took up abstract painting with abandon. He loved to travel, cook, and eat (“I love food,” he used to pronounce now and then).

Some of my sweetest memories of my father are gardening with him when I was very little, baking bread and learning how to shape the loaves, studying Pirkei Avot together when I was older and we were both devotedly Jewish, reading a book he had recommended or occasionally one he hadn’t (“Are you reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp AGAIN? The whole great world of literature all around you, and you’re reading Sal Fisher at Girl Scout Camp,” he said in mock-despair). Going to Mets games, especially one memorably cold Opening Day, when they made us just about cry by going into extra innings. “Do you want to stay?” he asked, clearly at least half-hoping I’d say no, but I said “We have to!” and he seemed pleased; fortunately, Gary Carter, in his first game as a Met, saved our freezing fingers and toes and became an instant hero by hitting a walk-off homer in the tenth. Traveling: to Israel for a whole summer when I was 12, to London and Paris when I was in high school, or just to someplace like the tiny Mohegan museum in Uncasville, an hour away from home. Countless plays–he did not actually know all of Shakespeare’s plays by heart, the way I thought he did (and matter-of-factly told friends) when I was little, but he loved the Bard, he loved theater, and he and Mom went to just about everything New Haven’s Long Wharf, Yale Rep and Yale Drama School had to offer, often bringing us along and requiring that if it was Shakespeare, we read the prose summary of the plot first so we’d know what was going on. The declaiming from Shakespeare at the dinner table, followed by a pop quiz: “What’s that from?” Eyerolling child: “I don’t know. Hamlet?” “Tsk. RICHARD THE SECOND!,” he’d say, clearly affronted that he had managed to raise children who were so ignorant, and overjoyed to have the excuse to jump up, grab the play off the shelf (he had two or three editions of the complete plays), and read us the whole passage. Day trips to Boston (Faneuil Hall, then a game at Fenway) and New York City (the Metropolitan or MOMA, then dinner at Tout Va Bien).

The grand adventure we shared at the start of the Blizzard of ’78, when he walked through the driving snow to get me at school and walk me home. His fiercely comforting me when I called to tell him that my ex-husband had died by suicide: “Now don’t you DARE blame yourself!” He and Joy’s dad, Marty, at our wedding, spontaneously rising at the end of our first dance so that Dad could dance with me and Marty with Joy. Holding Munchkin on his lap to read to her, and later, delighting in the poetry she wrote. His sitting in an armchair in the living room, reading, and occasionally saying “Listen to this” and reading something aloud to whoever was around. And the sound of his voice when he answered the phone–“Amy!”–as if nothing in the world could make him happier.

I love you, Dad. I’ll miss you forever.