The only time I ever recall discussing sports with him was when I went off to trophy day at the day camp in New York City that I attended, age six or so. I shudder to think of it from his point of view. The cancer, and the early exit it portended, must have been so depressing. Surviving his childhood, escaping Vienna in 1938, getting through high school and college and medical school, making a life, meeting my mother, having a family, by which I mean having me. Instead of wishing he could console me, I want to console him-to put my arm around his shoulder and tell him he did a good job, all things considered. I have become, in some respects, the senior figure in the relationship. I am now older than he was when he died, and, in the months and years since I outlived my father, I’m aware of a change in the way that I think about him.
To be a trim man in middle age whose main exertions involve lifting cigarettes and coffee to your well-shaped lips is, in a way, a kind of athleticism.
He smoked, he drank coffee, he combed his thick black hair into a tidy side part, and he knew how to knot a tie. He wasn’t, as far as I know, into sports or exercise of any kind. My father died, of cancer, when he was fifty-two.
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