We think we’ll get to say goodbye, but nobody really promises you that.

Dad was by himself in the early morning dark. The last time I saw him, I had only a few moments before we had to leave, and I spent them telling him the dumbest jokes I could find online. After we left, he didn’t realize we weren’t there anymore because his eyesight had failed. My brother, Larry, hearing him still telling us goodbye, ran back into the room to give him another hug. I told myself that if I never had the chance to talk to him again, leaving him laughing was as good as it gets.

Sometimes I believe it.

When Mom passed, I hadn’t seen her in more than five years. The reasons were ours. She’s gone. Now I just carry them alone.

When she’d talk about me coming down—sometimes asking, sometimes suggesting, sometimes something harsher—I’d think, I may well see you one more time, but you might not know I’m there.

I was right.

That, too, is mine alone to carry.

When I said goodbye to River Garden, the complex where Dad and then Mom lived out their last days, it was a heavier parting than I’d realized it would be. With Mom still living there, the keeper of the photos and memories, Dad had somehow remained, too. It never occurred to me that when we cleaned out her place, we’d be breaking down both their lives and moving them out.

Her things. His.

There is no next generation. No one to pass anything to. So you sell what someone will pay for. You give away what will be loved or merely used.

Then you throw away everything else. Even that which was most beloved. What hung on the walls of the house you lived in for all your growing years—and wherever they called home in the years after that.

Thirty outside Philadelphia. Thirty more in Jacksonville.

Someone will throw it out for you if you don’t. It’s only a matter of time.

Weddings. Parties. A vintage Rawlings mitt. The terrifying clowns. My great-grandmother’s table-clamp meatgrinder, which helped make enough chopped liver to capsize a container ship. Awards and notes and appointment reminders and people you don’t recognize and dancing and costumes and poses and smiles and laughter and captures of what was once happy but now breaks your heart.

Gone.

You talk to them while you do it. You say you’re sorry through your tears, when you’re able to say anything at all.

I kept Dad’s dog tags from World War II, the Kiddush cup I was given as a baby—my Hebrew reading proficiency is rusty at best, and that’s being kind, but I still recognize my own name—and my grandfather’s shaving mug.

Our last night, I sat outside and used the Kiddush cup to toast the place and the home they were able to make in it, along with their memories. Accompanied by Larry; my wife, Renée; and a pair of Canada geese, I silently thanked the friends, neighbors, and staff members who packed the memorial service we held, along with everyone who helped and spoke. 

The woman in the “I [Heart] Hadassah” shirt who said she always thought my dad was so cute.

The Action News Jax anchorman who told the crowded room he’d received “just a few” emails from Mom over the years with her take on his broadcasts, unfurling enough taped-together pages to reach the floor, before he found himself overcome and unable to speak for a moment.

God bless Mom. She’d be so happy to know that in the end, she silenced a man who talks for a living, if only for a few long seconds.

All the ladies who showed up in the kind of bright colors Mom favored, wearing the items she’d cajoled them into buying at the gift shop. Which says something about how she raised $100,000 for the home in her time running it. And she was still ordering and merchandising when she passed at 90.

They needed the memorial service, people said. She’d left for a routine procedure and never came back, though they’d only just spoken to her a day or two before. They needed to say goodbye.

Don’t we all.

I took pictures of whatever grabbed my eye, even if it would only have meaning for me. The turtle pond we used to roll Dad out to. The table from our Dresher living room, which sat in the hallway outside Mom’s room for the last few years. Word is they’re going to use it outside the dining room to display the dishes on offer each night.

Whatever people will love or use.

As we pulled out of the parking lot for the last time, a woman passing stopped to roll down her window and tell us how much she’d appreciated the service.

And when the plane took off, and I knew I wouldn’t be back, I had to push myself up from my seat to make out the ground fading below us so I could thank the place one last time.

You mostly don’t get to say your goodbyes the way you’d hoped.

So you do the best you can.

Just like you did in all the years leading up to that.

Time it was,
And what a time it was
It was . . .
A time of innocence
A time of confidences

Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you

I’ll echo my brother, Larry, in thanking you for joining us. It means more than you know.

It seems it wasn’t all that long ago that we were here with Mom for Dad’s service. Now, nine years later, it’s time to tell her goodbye.

When you sit down to put a eulogy together, you’re faced with a dilemma: you know how the story ends. But where do you start?

I started at the beginning, of course. In my head, wandering back to our house in Dresher. But I didn’t go where I thought I would. Instead, I found myself in my room with an old comic from my collection.

I don’t remember what it was for certain—it might’ve been Superman—but the cover featured a hero and villain speeding toward each other, all intense lines of action and determined expressions. It posed the question in big, bold letters: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? An old paradox. And one that gave me my start.

I know what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.

Because I knew Evelyn Peck. And Evelyn Peck was both.

Mom was a force to be reckoned with and a woman who held her ground for what she believed in.

She’s easy to talk about because nearly everything she did and said was memorable. The hard part is narrowing it down. There’s just so much.

Not long after I posted about her passing on Facebook, memories and stories from friends came pouring in. Many of them involved food and Mom’s cooking. Because, of course, they did. Nobody loved a kitchen more than Evelyn, who would bury you in very good brownies if she thought you gave her the opportunity, like the marching brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

My friend Anne told me about the time she came to our house to play. Mom asked her if she wanted anything, and Anne said a jelly sandwich when she meant to say a peanut butter sandwich because she didn’t actually like jelly. But she was too embarrassed to correct herself, so she sat and pretended to enjoy every bite.

My friend Charlie stayed for a weekend. Mom was experimenting with new recipes for a Sisterhood function. She tried a pot roast marinated in coffee that was the best thing you’ve ever tasted, despite that description. But she couldn’t use it because it fell apart and wouldn’t present well, so she served it to us instead. We devoured it like a pricey filet thrown to the dogs, chowing down, asking for seconds, and praying for additional failed trials to land on our plates.

My friend Mike said Mom’s kitchen smelled like Jewish heaven and recalled her endless kindnesses, love, and smiles.

My friend John told me, “Please write down that her candor was overwhelming—and I loved her for it.”

She would’ve loved that.

Because Evelyn Greenberg Peck was a person of overwhelming candor and love. Someone she herself would’ve described as a real character. If she had an idea, you were gonna know about it. A plan? You were gonna do it. You might even have some say in the matter. But probably not.

When we were kids, she’d wake us up before sunrise, singing “Rise and Shine” at full volume. She’d always make sure we beat the morning traffic out of the Philadelphia area, and we’d head south for 10 hours until we reached Greensboro to visit my grandfather, my brother and I asleep in the rear of our old Plymouth Fury III station wagon, laid out on tartan mats patched with electrical tape, waking up somewhere near Baltimore to do battle for turf as quietly as we could so she and Dad wouldn’t catch on.

At some point, when we were little, Dad began a running joke on road trips. We’d approach a crossing, and he’d say, “Here comes the bridge that Mommy built.” Driving over it, we’d all agree, “This is the bridge that Mommy built.” I never actually understood the gag. But I didn’t need to. Mom made plans, and off we went.

To Cape Kennedy to watch Biosatellite 3, the project Dad worked on, launch into the darkness before dawn. To Myrtle Beach. Six Flags. The Auto Train to Disney World. And the time I came home from New York City for Thanksgiving, got up at some ungodly hour—it was always some ungodly hour—so we could drive back to Manhattan in a punishing downpour and visit Ellis Island as a family, then drive back to suburban Philly to continue the holiday weekend. Never mind that I could’ve just stayed in New York and met them on Ellis Island some other weekend. That was not the plan.

She once told me that when Dad proposed, she got a call from a guy who’d gone silent on her after a date some time before. Now he wanted to know if she was busy that weekend.

“I’m busy for the rest of my life,” she told him.

And anyone who knew her knows she was. 

All those plans. All those events.

The cakes she baked—made to order for the birthday boy. My brother and I were predictable, going with chocolate every year because her chocolate cake was a gift all its own, topped with baseball players on a diamond laid out in icing. Or wooden antique cars at an intersection drawn in sweetness. The Shabbat dinners she cooked—always fresh, never leftovers—to make Friday night after sundown a special occasion. The candles she lit. The prayers we recited and sang together.

For Hannukah, she’d make and decorate cookies and bring them into school to explain the holiday to the class. When we went to camp, she sewed or ironed name tags into all our clothes. Nothing was done halfway. Nothing.

Just ask her fellow Hadassah members. Or the people at River Garden, where she took over running the gift shop, ordering and pricing merchandise, conceiving and creating display windows, conjuring record amounts of revenue into the cash register to help the home.

Ask my brother, who was planning on staying at River Garden while Mom had her procedure. After Mom passed, he went into her apartment, opened the refrigerator while he was on the phone with me, and found all his favorite fruit and food. She’d gone shopping, knowing he was coming.

Nothing halfway.

She never skimped on opinions, certainly, which is what my friend John meant when he mentioned her candor. If she loved something or someone? You were gonna know about it. If she didn’t? You’d know that, too.

Liza Minnelli was more talented than Judy Garland. NFL players’ hair should be short enough to hide beneath their helmets. Frank Sinatra was bulletproof until his later years, when he “just didn’t have it anymore.” Sarah Vaughn was Divine. Theodore Bikel was Fiddler’s perfect Tevye. Topol…was not. And turkey should be cooked halfway, stashed in the ‘fridge overnight, and cooked the rest of the way on Thanksgiving Day so that it won’t be dry—food-safety rules be damned.

When I was a child, I knew who and what occupied the wrong side of the line based on whoever and whatever crossed or offended her—and I’m talking before I ever made it out of the single digits. It was like Richard Nixon’s enemies list, which is fitting because in the early ‘70s, our president was near the top of Mom’s roster of foes.

In fact, now that she’s left us, I feel comfortable enough to publicly name these villains for you today. They are: Nivea moisturizing lotion. Colonel Sanders. Overdone fish. Mel Brooks, especially for Blazing Saddles but not for Young Frankenstein. Women who wear their hair past a certain length by a certain age. Ethel Merman. The Acme supermarket. And Mario the barber.

To enjoy those things or people, to frequent those establishments, was a betrayal of Nature’s law. Until, that is, I was old enough to drive myself to Mario’s for a haircut, which Mom seemed OK with by then. Mario was always professionally friendly to me, and I briefly considered clearing the air about whatever had happened between them. But it mostly felt like it wasn’t, as the song from A Chorus Line says, something you’d want to discuss. (And I know that tune so well because of the love of Broadway I inherited from Mom.)

All her life, a fighter. Often for good reason. Sometimes just to fight. In a famous scene from the classic movie The Wild One, a woman asks Marlon Brando’s Johnny what he’s rebelling against. His answer: “What do you got?” Like Johnny, Mom wasn’t always choosy about her battles. But as my friend said, you had to love her for it just the same.

She was a fighter to the end. And, sadly, the end for Mom came so suddenly. So shockingly. That’s what makes this goodbye difficult. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all. I’m not really kidding when I tell you I thought she might outlive me, 30-year difference or no, just because she was a phenomenon all her own.

But now, surprising as it is, we gather to see Evelyn Peck off.

When things went wrong, they went wrong fast. The doctors laid the situation out, and we had a decision to make. Once we’d made it, Larry held his phone up to Mom so Renée and I could say goodbye, even though we’ll never know if she was able to hear us.

They shut it all down. I told her it was OK for her to go. That we’d be fine. Then we sat for a quiet minute or two, which was all we would have. And I thought: my mother is in this world with me. I still have a mother. But only for a few moments more. And then she’ll be gone. And then I won’t.

But.

Who am I to say?

I keep thinking of the movie Nomadland, and a line I often use whenever I part ways with people I like. People I care about. One of Frances McDormand’s fellow travelers tells her, “I never say a final goodbye. I always just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.’”

Maybe we’re not saying a final goodbye to Evelyn, either. Maybe we’ll find her waiting for us. Sewing in nametags like the one I found in my kippah. Icing a chocolate cake. Or sticking a broom straw into a banana cake to see if it’s done. Baking mondel bread. Or cookies. Basting a pot roast that tastes like it came from God, never mind that it doesn’t present well. Or making a jelly sandwich for someone who wanted peanut butter but refuses to let her down.

Because of all Mom’s opinions, the strongest was that you only get one life, so you should make the best of it. Do the good you’re able to. Help as many people as you can. Do it with grace. With purpose. With the understanding that the result is the reward.

And what, in the end, is a more noble belief than that? For her? For us?

So.

Here’s to Evelyn Greenberg Peck. An outsized presence and a true force. She always did her best. And her best was something to behold.

Godspeed, Mom. Safe travels.

We’ll be OK.

We love you.

And we’ll see you down the road.

You know the one.

It goes over the bridge that Mommy built.

In some versions of the story, John Henry didn’t die at the end.

Like the one my brother just told me.

My dad’s retirement was ironic in a good way. After layoff trauma from the days of space-program cutbacks and even longer years of getting up with the sun to carpool to Lakehurst, NJ, from suburban Philadelphia every day, he and my mom settled into a house near the beach in Jacksonville, FL. He bid his working routine goodbye.

Or so he thought. It turned out that naval contractors sought out guys like him because he’d been trained the old-fashioned way, unlike the kids coming out of school who relied on software to do everything. When they asked him to do contract work for them, he gave them a number so high he was sure they’d balk, and then he wouldnt have to work again.

They accepted.

So there he was, the white-haired guy with the pocket protector, heading into an office of wise-ass upstarts who kidded the old man about his ancient ways.

He begged to differ.

We don’t have all the details, but apparently somebody came up with a challenge that pitted the young guys with their scientific calculators against Dad and his slide rule.

And he handed them their asses.

I only wish he were still around to tell us himself. Either way? Respect the elders, kids. They still haven’t shown you all their tricks.

Image credit: Carrie Berry

A little TMI for you.

After my dad’s eyesight went, and he’d fallen getting out of bed in the middle of the night a couple of times, the home staff decided to put him on the memory-care ward because that was where they could better look after him. It meant he was surrounded by people in various states of decline who generated moments of humor and pathos in—well, not equal measure, but with enough differentiation that there were a few lighter moments to be found if you looked for them hard enough.

During our visits, Mr. Feldman used to wander in now and again. A resident who was in pretty good physical shape, comparatively speaking, he was still mobile and steady on his feet. His trademark uniform was a shirt-and-boxers combo, and he inhabited a mental space that was half addled and half spoiling for a fight. Whatever you said to him, no matter how pleasant, he’d usually respond with an ornery, “Yeah?” while looking you up and down as if trying to figure out if he could take you. Then he’d stick around until he’d gotten his fill of glaring at everyone and make his exit.

Now, the boxers. I figured that given his score on the cantankerous scale, the people caring for him had probably long since given up on trying to get him to wear pants. And he was otherwise harmless enough. Well, except for that time someone in a wheelchair disappeared, causing a minor panic, and it turned out he’d come upon them in the hall and wheeled them to another part of the wing before wandering off and leaving them there.

But he and Dad are both gone now, and I digress.

On my day off, I rode to Staples in a steady rain because we needed Sodastream carbonator refills, and the break in the weather I’d been waiting for wasn’t going to come. So I just got wet.

Returning home, I, being a paragon of pragmatism, traded my soaked biking shoes and socks for Tevas, hung my shorts up over the shower, and left the performance-fabric shirt and underwear on to dry while being worn. I mean, hey—nobody else around, right?

I banged away at the computer for a bit, then looked down at my rainwater-damp wicking boxer-briefs and started to laugh. For a second, I wanted someone there to talk to, just so I could scowl at them suspiciously and respond to whatever they had to say with, “Yeah?”

I am Mr. Feldman.

As are we all, ultimately.

Years from now, when you look back at what you’ve done in your career, what will you value the most? The friendships, accomplishments, and growth, of course. But sometimes it’s the little things that carry the most weight.

Such as the time, back in my trade-journalist days, when I was walking off the show floor at the big home-video convention and happened upon one of my creative heroes. He was sitting by himself in a small, out-of-the-way booth at the edge of things—just him and a stack of comics to sign next to a taped-up piece of paper with marker scrawl on it that said: “Today only! Stan Lee!”

I was scandalized that nobody else was there (this was during Marvel’s lean years and way before the movies got going). I told him what a fan I was and asked him to sign a Hulk comic.

At that time, nobody foresaw the IP empire that would be built from the brilliance of the Marvel crew over the years. And if Stan Lee were alive today, he’d be in one of the biggest booths, with a crowd of people queued up to meet him.

So it’s something to keep in mind: do your best work, the work that inspires you. Because you never know what it might become a long way down the road.

And treat your memories, souvenirs, and keepsakes right. You won’t believe how happy you’ll be to dig them out of a banged-up cardboard box one day in the future.

One of my favorite Vonnegut quotes is from Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

I’d add that when we go looking for the past, we find it, so we must be careful about how we look.

I was going through my boxed-up comic collection, which my brother had been storing for me, and I came upon an Avengers issue I recalled reading when I bought it, in 1976, sitting at our dining-room table. I have no idea why I remember that, but it occurred to me that way back then, I couldn’t have known I’d revisit it in 2022 in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, just shy of three decades passed since I was last in that house, and my dad gone nearly six years.

I uncrumpled some of the newspaper I balled up when packing this stuff almost 30 years ago, after my parents sold the place. There were pages from three papers in there, and this one is from the January 25, 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer.

My dad did all the puzzles in ink. This is his careful, precise engineer’s block printing. I print in all caps, too—I got that from him, I guess—but not as neatly as he did. The cryptogram answer is a George Santayana quote that I feel like he left for me to find: “Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”

I suppose so. It’s the beginning of something, anyway.

But it brings to mind another favorite quote, this one from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

No—it isn’t, is it?

Hi, Dad.

Got your message.

It’s 82 degrees outside, and we work with the windows open. It’s supposed to go back down into the 40s in a couple of days, but for now, it’s shorts weather.

And mask weather. But it was already that, no matter the temperature. Most people walking past wear everything from kerchiefs to surgical masks. Some are clearly homemade offerings, which earn extra respect from me. One guy, strolling with his wife and little girl, looks like an Old West train robber. Another looks like Bane.

We leave to get steps. In front of the building next door, somebody’s done up the sidewalk with a chalk activity walk. We’re supposed to follow a snaky line, skip, hop like a bunny, and take advantage of safe spots to avoid falling into lava.

We greatly appreciate the effort but cross through at a normal walk, as if none of it is there. We like when others get creative; we just usually refrain from participating. In that way, nothing’s really changed.

At the end of the day, a couple in the building across the street play a duet out their window, serenading two friends who stand on the sidewalk with their dog. It’s a perfectly respectable rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” I can’t see them clearly through the combo of our screen and theirs, but from the sound of it, I think the woman’s playing a ukulele. And her harmony is pretty damn good. After the friends move on, she starts into R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” but her heart isn’t in it, so she fades to a stop. Or maybe it’s just that it hits too close to home.

More people pass the window. I find myself thinking of the Gena Rowlands line from A Woman Under the Influence: “All of a sudden I miss everyone; I don’t know why.”

Only I do know why.

And I want them all to make it.

My dad would’ve turned 90 today. It’s the first birthday he’s not around to celebrate, and in the weeks leading up to this, I’ve repeatedly reminded myself to do the yearly ritual of buying his birthday and Father’s Day cards—before remembering that that’s not something I’ll do anymore.

In his eulogy, I talked about how the last time I saw him, I peppered him with terrible jokes just to get him laughing and about how if I had to live with a final moment, I can make peace with it being that one. It may not have been a real goodbye. But I’m not sure getting one of those in is anything but a matter of luck, ultimately.

The goodbye that comes back to me a lot these days happened nearly 20 years ago, in 1998. My wife, Renée,​ and I had eloped in April, and my parents wanted to have the chance to throw us something official. So later that year, we had a formal-esque brunch in suburban Philadelphia, near where I grew up.

It was a nice affair, with friends and relatives coming from quite a ways away to show up, and it ended the way many such things wrap up for guests of honor. It seems that people are suddenly heading off in all directions. And you thank as many of them as you can, but this thing that’s been anticipated for months is dissolving so fast as everyone goes back to their lives.

Back then, Dad had stumbled into a revived career of sorts with a company that had a Navy contract and was pulling engineers out of retirement because only the old guys had the necessary experience. And as our brunch was winding down, he was leaving in a rental car to catch a flight to where he needed to be.

Only I didn’t realize he was planning to do that. Either I’d been told and it hadn’t registered, or it just hadn’t come up. I thought he’d be sticking around, so I was surprised and a little weirded out to see him head down the restaurant driveway, clearly leaving for real.

“Wait—where’s Dad going?”

Somebody gave me an answer. Dad leaned over, smiled at us, and gave a quick wave as he passed. And then he was gone. Just like that. Just a pair of brake lights before a turn into traffic. I couldn’t help but feel like something was getting away from me, even though I didn’t know what it was. And for years afterward, every time I gave him a hug goodbye, I couldn’t shake that feeling—because at some point, it would be true.

The last time I saw him, I knew there was the very real possibility that there’d be no more partings. Yet I was surprised when that’s how it turned out to be. I guess part of me never really believed that would happen. I guess part of me still doesn’t.

Wait. Where’s Dad going?

Renée lost both her parents when she was young, and she’s often said over the years that you can’t know what it’s like until it’s happened. She was right.

All of this is probably coming off sadder than I want it to be when I thought it’d just be bittersweet. But take care with your goodbyes and your good wishes. Make them count if you can. They’re precious things.

Hello to you wherever you’ve landed, Dad. Here’s a good wish for the fifth of June. Happy Birthday, and be sure to hit ‘em with a few really awful puns for those of us back here.

Whenever I get to forgetting that life actually is better than it used to be—or is easier in many ways, at least—I remind myself that we used to live in a studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the floors were so slanted, I once opened the broiler to check on some chicken, and it all slid out onto the floor, piece by piece. I had to keep my feet hooked under my desk or I’d roll away from it and into the foot of the bed, which was just a few inches behind me because the place was so tiny.

The fuse boxes in the basement hung from their own wires, and whenever I blew a fuse and had to change it, which happened way more than I would have preferred, I had to kick the basement door in because the super kept padlocking it. The final time I did that, the old man who lived at the top of the basement stairs opened his door to yell at me.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Kicking the door in.”

“Why the hell are you kicking the door in?”

“Because they keep locking it, and I keep blowing fuses.”

“Why didn’t you ask me for the key?”

“I didn’t know you had the key.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mike.”

The old man thought about the situation for a moment. “You’re all right, Mike,” he said, and closed his door.

The only outlet in the kitchen was in the landlord halo overhead, so the ‘fridge ran off an extension cord hanging from the ceiling, next to a Punisher action figure that served as a chain pull for the light. And the water pressure was such that if two people in the building forgot to jiggle the handle and left their toilets running when they went to work, the water was dangerously hot and you couldn’t take a shower that day.

Neighbors would routinely put things down the toilet that clogged up the drain pipe leading out of the building—one time it was an undershirt—and the water would back up and take out the boiler, so we’d have no hot water or heat for a day or two and had to go a block away to the community-center gym to shower. Until the day a steam main blew in front of the gym, coating that entire block with asbestos. The gym closed for a week, and when the hot water went out, Renée and I found ourselves, buckets and towels in hand, walking up to the kind and generous Jennifer Gniady’s place to use her shower. (Thanks again, Jenn.)

Funny thing about New York. I never considered myself anything but incredibly lucky to have that apartment because it was cheap.

I’m luckier now.

I dedicated The Journeyman to my father, whose imagination, intelligence, and talent were always an inspiration to me. We buried him on Nov. 10. Here’s how we told him goodbye.

Thank you to everyone for being here and for giving my father and my family your love and attention. I hereby warn you: this may get long.

I’ll begin by pointing out how how appropriate it is that many of us flew to be here. Because while we’re giving my dad over to the earth today, I want to talk about another element that was so integral to his life and who he was. For my father was, first and foremost, of the air.

When I was a kid, I remember finding some old coloring books from Dad’s childhood in our basement. On the inside covers and across every blank space, he’d drawn complex aerial battles between vintage fighter planes. And what struck me was that when I drew planes—like every boy did—mine looked like some vague jet-type thing—something that was, at best, identifiable as a plane. Yet even though he’d drawn his as a kid, Dad’s actually looked like real Messerschmitts, Mustangs, and Spitfires. You could identify them. Planes were a thing with him. He grew up building intricate wood and paper models from kits and sent them aloft.

Dad couldn’t watch a movie without telling you what kind of airplane you were looking at. And he knew them all. We lived near an air base, growing up, and whenever we’d be outside raking leaves and hear something come tearing overhead, Dad would tell you whether it was a Phantom or a Skyhawk or some other fighter I no longer remember.

He was of the air.

My father worked on NASA’s Biosatellite 3 project, and he spent many years designing aircraft-carrier launch systems for the Navy. It was because of that work that we have this amazing photo of him, my brother, and me at Cape Kennedy, standing in front of Apollo 11 a month or so before it carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon. Dad never flew anything himself, but some time ago, we bought him a glider ride at a place down in Florida. He didn’t get to take it, because every time he tried, the weather decided not to cooperate, the skies clouded over by the time he got there, and they had to cancel. But it doesn’t matter. In my mind, when he’s been in River Garden for the past four years, without his eyesight and moving further and further into a place where he saw things and people that only he could see, he’s been up there whenever he’s wanted to be, looking around and simply marveling.

Of the air.

And yet nobody was more grounded and down-to-earth, especially given how just-plain-damn smart he was. He could draw. He invented a couple of things. He was a low-key lord of the Trivial Pursuit board. When he went at a problem, it always involved a pad of graph paper, and it resulted in line after line of arcane formulas and equations using characters I’d never seen before, like Russell Crowe scribbling on a window. He never bragged. He never complained. But if he did a job, you could count on two things: it would take forever, and it would last forever.

In our house in Dresher, we had a bannister that had three supports, only two of which were screwed into studs. The middle one was just attached to the drywall, so after years of two knucklehead boys hanging on it, it gave way and punched through the wallboard. Well, Dad did this beautiful wooden support rail and attached the bannister to it, and that thing didn’t give out again. If that house ever burns down or gets carried away by a twister, you’ll see the basement, the chimney, and that bannister hanging in the air because it ain’t going anywhere.

He owned not one, but two slide rules—that I knew of; there might have been more. And he could use them. The larger one, in fact, was in a leather case, and it had a loop on it so it could hang on a belt, like a holster. That man could plug you full of hot calculations at 50 paces like a gunslinger. Have Math, Will Travel.

Yet he was grounded. As my mother said not long ago, whenever anyone wants to say something isn’t difficult, they say it’s not rocket science. “Well, your father was a rocket scientist,” she told me. “But he never wanted to talk about it because he thought it would just bore people.” When I was at the beach with him one time, I asked him if there was anything he wished he’d done or done more of in his life. And he thought for a moment, and said, “I wish I’d been more of a success.” Because he couldn’t see that he had been.

As I said: of the earth. Grounded.

Dad was drafted at the end of World War Two and never saw combat, but he helped returning G.I.s who had been in the thick of it, and they told him terrible stories of the things they’d seen and done, exposing him to the worst man was capable of. But he also worked on the space program—and saw humanity at its best. He raised a family. He enjoyed a second shot at life after nearly losing his in college, at Lehigh University, when he was thrown from a car in an accident, spent two weeks in a coma, and wasn’t expected to make it. Renée and I went to a wedding a few years ago and stayed in the Hotel Bethlehem, where my grandmother had checked in decades before, when she came to town to sit with my dad, wondering if he was going to pull through. At that point, certainly, nobody thought that so many years later, his son and daughter-in-law would be having breakfast in the same lobby she’d walked through.

But he lived. Boy, did he. Isn’t that a success?

He was funny, and he loved people who were funny. He did a very respectable Elmer Fudd. You could count on him to randomly toss out a “Fwee Bwian” or some other Monty Python quote. Or he’d do a Señor Wences routine or a bit from an old Lone Ranger radio episode. He was always game for plopping down on the couch with his sons and their friends to watch cartoons or some random Saturday-afternoon movie. It drove my mom crazy, of course, because he was supposed to be adding a third story to the house, or flipping the lawn, or building a new car. But he was there with us instead.

One Saturday, we all watched this not-very-good movie called The Bruce Lee Story, which was supposed to be a biopic about the late kung-fu legend. It starred some guy named Bruce Li who spelled his last name with an “i” instead of a double-”e,” and he looked nothing like the real thing. He was kind of out of shape, and I think he even wore glasses, and we called him Bruce Lie because there was nothing true-to-life about him. I mean, they hadn’t even tried to get a guy who even remotely resembled Bruce Lee. Anyway, in this one scene, he and some other guy are arguing about whose martial art is superior, and they fight, and Bruce Lie humiliates the other man. And the humiliated guy runs back to his home gym, where all these other guys are practicing. And he tries to get them to come beat up Bruce Lie, and they don’t care. They’re not gonna help him until one of them finally asks, “Well, what’d he do?” And the guys says, as if he’s talking about genocide, “He put down Thai boxing.” Now, at that point in the movie, I don’t think they’d even mentioned that they were Thai boxers. But for some reason, that does the trick where nothing else had. Immediately, the gym clears, and all these Thai boxers go looking for Bruce Lie. They find him, and he wipes the floor with all of them, too.

For the longest time after that, that line explained why anyone did anything mean to anybody else in a movie, no matter what. Why’d that guy jam a lit torch into a zombie’s face? The zombie put down Thai boxing. Why’d Chief Brody blow up the shark? Why did Luke Skywalker take out the Death Star? It put down Thai boxing. That went on for a while, and then we forgot about it and moved on. Only years afterward, I was painting the den with Dad, and we’re both concentrating on doing the trim and such. And this poor, dumb fly lands in my paint tray and is immediately covered, setting himself up for an awful death. So I scrape him out with my brush, paint him onto the newspaper we had on the floor, fold the paper and smack it to put him out of his misery. Dad stops painting and walks over to look down at the folded paper with the dead fly in it and says, somberly, “He put down Thai Boxing.”

The man knew his way around a joke.

To get a bit more metaphysical, I remember asking Dad about an Einstein quote I’d read, where Einstein, writing about a friend who’d passed away, said, “[H]e has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” In other words, his friend wasn’t truly gone.

Dad wasn’t familiar with the quote, and I’ve looked up explanations that have been written about it to try and better understand it, and finally I decided to bend it and interpret it the way I wanted to see it. And I did some admittedly strange things.

For one, I was always upset that Dad’s eyesight was gone, even though he never let us hear him get emotional about it. As he put it, in his direct way of speaking over the phone one time, “The problem is, I can’t see.” And I considered that to be unfair. He would never see anything new to him again. He would only be able to review what he’d already seen in his mind’s eye.

Yet here I was, bike commuting to and from work, six miles each way, riding along this beautiful lakefront in the summer and fall. And so I decided to do something. I never told anyone I was doing it—I never even told my dad I was doing it—but I would ride along and concentrate on the beauty I was seeing. The blue sky on the green lake. The blinding sand. Or the giant autumn moon over the black water in the dark. I’d talk to my dad about these things as I rode, and I’d pretend that he could hear me, that he was looking through my eyes, like a camera. And I pretended that maybe, sitting there and unable to see what was in front of him, he’d suddenly have a picture of what I was looking at pop into his head. Or maybe he’d dream about it that night. I never spoke to him about it, as I said, because I wanted to think that maybe it might happen, even if he didn’t know where it came from. Or maybe, if Einstein was onto something and things exist outside of a linear timeline, it’s happening now.

One of the last times I saw Dad, something happened that occurred more than once towards the end. When we were leaving, we’d give him a hug goodbye and walk out of the room, and sometimes he didn’t realize we weren’t there anymore—because, again, he’d lost his eyesight—and you’d hear him say something just as you were almost gone. This one time, I heard him say, still sitting where we’d left him, “It was so short.” And I knew he was talking about our visit, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have meant his life. And I’ll never forget hearing that.
Because it is. Life is short. Even when you leave the world at 89.

The last time I saw Dad, in April, I was trying to get him laughing, so I started Googling jokes and riddles, and reading them to him, one after the other. You know, “Hey, Dad, what’s a dentist’s favorite time of day? Tooth-hurty. Hey, Dad, this horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ ” I got him chuckling with gags so painful that I wouldn’t dream of inflicting any more of them on you nice people now. But I kept telling him, “Okay, Dad, I’ll hit you with one more.” And he said, “Must you?”

And I must. And we must. Because we should always leave laughing. I’d like to think Dad did. That somewhere he still is—maybe up in that glider, looking around at the wonder of it and just laughing in astonishment at how gorgeous it all is.

That’s what I want to leave you with. The picture of my father flying and laughing.

We love you, Dad. And we will miss you so very much.

So. Here’s to Ira Joel Peck, an original rocket man. A man who touched the sky, even if he himself never flew. A man who loved a bad joke as much as a good one. Who was a success. And who never, ever—not once, ever—put down Thai boxing.