Peter Falk. Also, a show with a large
balding man called Cannon. And “The
Rockford Files,” with James Garner. Gar-
ner was from Norman. It was known
that he was related to my elementary-
school principal, Dr. Bumgarner. He was
so beloved, a dream of a man—both the
actor and the principal. Later, when I
was older, there was a new show, “Crazy
Like a Fox,” that would come on before
the reruns. It starred a father-and-son
detective team: the dad was kooky and
couldn’t be restrained; the son was prac-
tical. Together, they could solve anything.
Sometimes I slept through the shows,
dimly registering their high-volume
presence. At other times I watched them,
but while lying down. It was essential
that I fall asleep before “The Twilight
Zone” reruns came on, because a whole
night of sleep would be ruined if I acci-
dentally saw an episode in which there
was a fourth dimension in a closet, or a
character who discovered that he could
pause time.
Until I was at least ten, my dad
helped me fall asleep every night. He
sang lullabies about boats going out to
sea and never returning. He told sto-
ries, one of which was about an ex-
tremely tiny child, small enough to fit
into a soda bottle, and one day, when
a wolf comes and eats up all the other
normal-sized siblings, the tiny sibling
is there to tell the mother what hap-
pened, so that she can cut open the
wolf ’s stomach and retrieve her chil-
dren, and they then all have the tini-
est child to thank for their survival. My
daughter is familiar with this story
through years of being indoctrinated
about the special powers of littleness.
I’m now as old as my dad was when
he was a dad, staying up, transitioning
into restfulness by watching those
shows. Why was my dreamy dad such
a fan of detective shows? The only other
shows I remember him liking were
political-argument shows, “Jeeves and
Wooster,” and, for some reason that I
have yet to unpack, “The Jewel in the
Crown.” Was it because those detec-
tives shrugged into dangerous situa-
tions coolly? Because they always said
the right thing? Ultimately, they were
men of action. They could easily have
handled a Jeep with no doors. Maybe
they were the ideal avatars for a man
devoted to the life of the mind. Not
that the shows were a consolation prize
for having “no life.” It wasn’t like that.
The life of the mind wasn’t no life—
it was life. And great battlefields were
plentiful. When my brother had a mild
conflict with his high-school calculus
teacher over a midterm grade, my dad
gave him Churchill’s speech about
fighting on the beaches and never sur-rendering. If I had the urge to step back
from a just conflict, my dad would re-
mind me that Chamberlain had a choice
between war and shame, and that he
chose shame but got war later. If you
heard my dad humming something, it
was probably the “Toreador Song,” by
Bizet, or Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
I remember a battle he assisted
me with. One day, when my brother
brought home a soccer trophy, I started
to cry. I had never won anything. (If
only I had spent my childhood crying
less and fighting more!) When the fifth-
grade track meet came around, I was
set to compete in the one event that
had only four competitors—the un-
popular distance event. The distance
was half a mile. If I could run faster
than even one of the other girls, I would
get a ribbon, which was at least atmo-
spherically related to a trophy.
Tzvi did something classic in one
way but very unlike himself in another.
He did something practical. The month
before the track meet, he took me out
to our school track several nights a
week. I ran in a button-up shirt, I now
remember, one that was white with
blue stripes. Four laps around the track
was half a mile. He timed me, and he
shouted at me.
During the race, when, on the third
lap, I passed a girl whose name I won’t
mention to protect her from the indig-
nity of it, she began to cry. To be passed
by me was much worse than just com-
ing in last. But my dad had no sympa-
thy for her. The way he saw it, I had
shown the world; I had never surren-
dered. I guess what I’m saying is that
some ways of being nice came easily
to my father, and other ways were dif-
ficult for him, even as, for someone
else, it would be a whole other set of
things that were easy, that were diffi-
cult. When he trained me for that meet,
he had done something, for me, that
for him was difficult. He had not been
forty-five minutes late.W
e rarely ate dinner together as a
family. My mom doled out to
each of us the food that we wanted, at
the hour that we wanted it. Chopped-
tomato-cucumber-red-onion salads for
my father. Plain couscous with butter
for me. An argument with my brother
“If we ever get back on the road, I think we should go electric.” about ordering takeout. I believe my