Because of a unique combination of circumstances in my life, I had
the good fortune to be a regular guest at the home of Dick and Sherry
during 1992-93, mostly on Shabbat. Our contact since that time has been
less frequent, but it has always been cordial and, for me at least,
immensely enjoyable. Dick and I have communicated by e-mail on numerous
occasions, on subjects ranging from Tashlikh to the stock market
(encompassing thereby both the emptying and the filling of one's pockets).
More recently, he wrote me several times to get my opinion on the wording
of a prayer that he was writing for the Brandeis graduation ceremony this
past spring. He seemed obsessed with getting it exactly right, and I was
touched that he reached out to me for help. And I saw him not quite a week
before he died, at a social gathering hosted by some mutual friends.
I was struck, I should note, by the immensely thoughtful eulogies
for Dick that came forth at the funeral service, because they matched so
well my own impressions. This was a portrait of a restlessly inquisitive
and searching mind, a man with an encyclopedic range of interests,
manifesting at times a sternly exacting intelligence, but combined with a
willingness to co-exist with what he could not accept for himself.
People, I think, can be known by the quality of their silences, and Dick's
silences were especially elegant and engaging. One always had a sense
that the wheels were turning, that whatever was going to be the next
observation to emerge from his lips, it would be said in that soft-spoken,
bemused way that headed unerringly to the heart of a matter, finding humor
and irony in the things we typically tend to overlook. He always had a
way of making you feel like you were in on the joke, that only you were
the right person for him to share an observation with, and that your
opinion was a crucial link in the chain of insight he was building.
It was that ability to make a person his intellectual kin that
enabled one to endure the terrible honesty of his opinions when they
rolled over one's own like a plough churning up the soil. Dick, for
example, did not like my translations for the Reconstructionist siddur,
especially because of the way they rendered the Tetragrammaton. But this
didn't prevent him from consulting me about how to word a prayer, and the
frankness of his disagreements somehow always felt nourishing and, in its
way, supportive. I actually was glad that someone so trustworthy was
defending the Divine Name, and this, in an odd way, gave me permission to
go on doing what I was doing. Dick's world was always large enough for
those he differed from, and most of the time he made me feel like an ally
and a valued colleague.
One is inevitably drawn to think about the various artifacts that
have seemed distinctive signatures of Dick's style, or of a style he and
Sherry articulated together: the books on their shelves (I always feel an
affinity for a library that includes James Joyce), the antique signs from
a bygone shul that adorn the walls (I'm especially fond of the one that
says: "Yarmulkes sterilized daily"); the remarkable collection of rams'
horns; the paintings; the pear brandy, with the pear inside the
narrow-necked bottle; the aquarium; and, of course, in its heyday, the
beehive in the cloth-draped glass case. It's a home that bespeaks travel,
study, reflection, whimsicalness, the easygoing presence of tradition, an
enjoyment of life, an eye for beauty, an affinity for the heterogeneous,
the odd, the incongruous, the provocative. A home that could open a
window for bees is surely a safe place to hang out--safe in its
cosmopolitan eclecticism, its eschewal of the generic, its manifestation
of the personal and idiosyncratic, its implied insistence that one's home
is a statement, a way of relating to the world. Situated as it is at the
corner created by the two arms of Ballard Street, it has always seemed a
major crossroad for people and influences from far and wide.
The death of someone dear always hits me as a dreadful silence--an
expanding lacuna that arises amid that person's presence in my life and
seems to draw everything into it like a black hole. I feel robbed of the
conversations I was going to have with Dick, of the sense of safety his
presence generated, of the things I never got to say. The last time he
and I were together, at that social event less than a week before his
death, I was making my way slowly around the assemblage of guests,
assuming I'd sooner or later come around to Dick and we'd commune a bit,
if only for a brief time. But soon, the gathering was dispersing, and
people were saying goodnight. I came face-to-face with Dick, and he was
about to say something when I was interrupted by someone else and
momentarily turned away. When I turned back, he and Sherry had
disappeared out the front door and I missed our chance to talk.
I planned to send him an e-mail note apologizing for not having
connected, but then, as such things happen, it, too, got postponed. What
WAS he going to say? Maybe it was something of no special significance--a
cordial greeting, party conversation of some sort. But its loss and
inaccessibility affect me painfully now. There is no sentence so haunting
or compelling as the inaudible one that almost got said.
The lesson here is that if you're going to say hello to a friend
sometime soon, sooner is better than later. Dick wasn't supposed to die;
he seemed impervious to death. In fact, it feels like he's still around,
observing his own death and the public grieving in its aftermath.
Perhaps he's a bit embarrassed by all the attention. He'd very possibly
find something funny, or odd, or interesting about it all. I'm not
accustomed to Dick's behaving, as it were, like someone deceased. Quiet
and unassuming as he was, his life energies seemed too prodigious to be
contained in this way.
I was dumbstruck when I beheld the assemblage of hundreds who
turned out, on barely a day's notice, for Dick's funeral. Who could have
done all that telephoning, which in fact reached far beyond the Boston
area? This was an extraordinary community, the people I have most admired
and respected throughout the bulk of my adult life, the proverbial salt of
the earth, and here they all were, inside the mammoth sanctuary of Temple
Emanuel, registering their grief. This was, in a sense, Dick's final
signature, a portrait of the waves he propagated in this world. I was
privileged to behold it, but the loss of Dick seems too high a price to
pay for its abundance.