Memories of Distant Cities

"Let's raise our glasses," she said, "and wish him a happy birthday."

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a city — a city far more grand and terrible and saturated with light and noise and the constant, electric hum of humanity moving, breathing, pushing, striving than his parents might ever have imagined possible when they had been children themselves, half a world away and decades ago. A city his own children would never be able to imagine or understand other than in the sepia tones of nostalgia and half-remembered names and fading photographs.

But this was his home. A maze of faces and languages, long flights of stairs and shops with sawdust floors. Voices singing, whispering, calling out in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, English, Polish... a riddle of tongues his nimble mind navigated carefully, quietly, as he moved from home to school, to temple and home again, a shifting sea of immigrant cultures blending and colliding and watching with fascinated wonder as Manhattan erupted to the south with bluster and energy, concrete soaring skyward in jagged towers that defied human scale.

A world in transition, as World War II and the days thereafter shifted how the city saw itself, and how it was seen by the world, and for those living deep within its labyrnthine coils a place where the past was never past - Faulkner knew it, and it was as true here as it was in the vastly different place he saw and made his own - and yet the allure, that voiceless lust for the new, the next, all that which was yet to come... it was strong, and irresistable, and in time it found purchase within him. And while those early years were years of silent deference and study, they also proved fertile ground for an insatiable curiosity of the world beyond — beyond the trappings of cultures bourne across thousands of miles of earth and sea to this city, this dream of a better world, and beyond the weight of expectations that these journeys and those who had lived them placed on his narrow shoulders.

He bore it well. Excelled as best he could at every turn. Academically. Intellectually. Countless hours - thousands, then thousands more - of study, and preparation. And that mind... that nimble, curious mind, quietly hungering for something more. And his reward: university. More than that: a full scholarship to a  university of global renown. Still here, in this city, close to the only world he had ever known, still wrapped in the pride of having achieved that which his parents had only dreamed possible and the guilt of knowing (of their knowing, of their clutching, suffocating anxiety) that he might rise above and discover a new life that they could never understand.

That tortured dichotomy - to have achieved all they ever dreamed for him, and in that success to have alienated himself from their approval - lasted decades. Through his years in college, and then in the years beyond: to medical school. Only one borough away, and yet it was as though he were treading on the surface of the moon — some impossibly distant sea of tranquility that lay beyond comprehension. The more tightly they tried to hold him, the farther his ambitions and curiosity ranged.

And finally, with his residency, he transcended. On a map there is little to separate the two cities - the distance spanned by the length of a child's finger, and little more - and yet: in all ways that mattered, it was a voyage from old world to new. A first, exhilarating taste of true freedom... to explore, to experience. To escape the gravitational pull of the only life he'd ever known, and the infinite fathoms of pressure (the burden of shared blood) that lay within, to become a man of his own making.

It's funny, to think of it. To think of him - serious and self-possessed, thick-lensed glasses and already thinning hair - unleashed into the Cambridge and Boston of the mid-60s. A stranger, both to the era passing and the era to come. An alien, finding his own way through the changing world. Always hungry to learn more. To taste. To experience.

And then he met her: a woman. No: a woman outside his faith. Midwestern. Lapsed Methodist. A teacher, with a sharp wit and sharper tongue. A language that spoke to him as none before — and he was helpless to resist.

It was a choice that was never a matter of choice. A defining moment: accepting that following his heart - for this, the first time, a life guided by intellect giving way to the subtler persuasions of laughter and the discovery of joy - would mean abandoning his past. To his parents, and the hard lives and hard choices they had known, it was an act of betrayal. To him, to act otherwise would have been to betray everything he dreamed himself capable of becoming.

(They never forgave him.)

Years blended and passed, and he became a respected physician. A father in his own right, to children who never knew of life in the city, of those long stairwells and the taste of sawdust in the air, but instead shaped their lives among broad green lawns and thick green trees, and leaves bursting into brilliant funereal shades of gold and sunset and blood. A world of snowmen and woolen hats. Sleds and seedlings and soccer fields. It was a world he visited, evenings and weekends. During the week, he kept to the city. In his suit, and his thick-lensed glasses. Applying his intellect. Engaging his curiosity. Always seeking.

Rarely connecting.

His children grew, and grew away. Time brought white to his beard, grandchildren to his life. And at some point, that restless, relentless intellect... softened. Grew quiet.

We did not recognize it, really.

That slow, softening at the edges. A great sea, once unpredictable with unseen tides and sudden storms, growing calm and stagnant beneath a steady, windless sun.

Late September drew us together. For a dinner. For a small celebration. A birthday worth noting, as a marking of decades gone by. A gathering of children and grandchildren, traveling distances of minutes or hundreds of miles, to sit at this table. To make pleasant conversation. To be present, in the way that we still could be. To take care in not noticing that this man - who, nearly a lifetime ago, when little more than a boy, had earned a perfect score on his college boards - now answered most questions with only a sad, slightly lost, "I don't know."

Dinner was served, and as we sat in a ring of wooden chairs and flickering candlelight, his wife cleared her throat and said, "Let's raise our glasses, and wish him a happy birthday."

So we did. We raised our wine glasses, and his grandchildren - two boys and two girls - raised their cups of ginger ale. And together, we sang Happy Birthday. It was a terrible rendition, off-key and out of tune, and we sang with passion and gusto, throwing inappropriate energy and exhuberance into our efforts, trusting in the glories of volume over artistry. We sang together, his wife and children and grandchildren.

And as we finished, we looked to him. He sat quietly in his chair. Looking at his plate. A half-smile on his face, as though he were remembering something funny that happened, once upon a time. He did not speak, or acknowledge the song.

We did not speak, either.

There was nothing else to say.