Big Questions, Short Answers

There was a question in my mind about parents and children, and how you were different between your mother and your father.

Mothers seemed to have a lot more patience. Maybe because they had us in the first place. Maybe because they spent so much more time with us.

Our mother seemed immune to puzzlement from weird observations and misplaced notions, of which we provided plenty.

One morning, my mother was combing my hair for church. The radio was on, as it always was. WNEW, which played Frank Sinatra, and like that.

The record began to skip. It went on a bit. Finally the host broke in and apologized.

"Wow, he really gave it away now, didn't he, Mom?," I said.

"He sure did," my mother said.

I am quite sure she had no idea what I was talking about, that until that minute, I thought all music on the radio was played and sung live.

After all, the guy said, "And now, here's Frank Sinatra singing 'Here's That Rainy Day'," not "And now, here's a record of Frank Sinatra," etc.

Nor did she care.

Our father, on the other hand, seemed to fret about things we said and questions we asked that made plenty of sense to us, but swerved around his comprehension, somehow.

"Hey, Dad," I said one day in the car. I was riding in the front seat with him, just the two of us out on some weekend errand.

I was contemplating the car's hood ornament, a largish, silver airplane.

"How did you get that airplane on your car?," I asked.

"They put it there," he said.

"How did they know you work at Pan Am?"

"They didn't."

"Then why did they put it there?"

"They just did."

For some reason, apparently, he did not feel like explaining to me the process by which some people got an emblem of the place they worked put onto the hood of their car, and some didn't. My next question was going to be how come Mr. Levine, our neighbor who owned a fruit company, didn't have an apple or something up there. I let it go.

I guess the car was a dangerous place for him to be with me. There was no Mother to intercept the inevitable daffy question.

One day we were driving past Holy Cross cemetery, a large fixture in the neighborhood.

I viewed, and considered with some depth, the various markers of the graves.

Even driving by, from Brooklyn Avenue, you could see some massive statues: angels, crucifixes, in heavy gray stone.

I knew there were plenty of small markers in there, too. I asked,

"Dad, how do they decide what kind of marker you get on your grave?"

"What?," he asked.

"How do they decide whether you get a big one or a small one?"

"It depends how much money you have," he said.

I reared back my head, aghast.

Money? After all that talk in church about helping the poor, and the least of my brothers, and the last shall be first, and the rich man getting to Heaven like a camel through the eye of a needle? You get the religious honor of a big monument in death depending on how much money you made in life?

I did not realize, of course, that somewhere between my straightforward question and my father's simple answer lay a big chasm.

My supposition was that the grave marker was bestowed, as a judgment - a report - of the way you lived your life.

It did not occur to me that they were items of purchase.

My father's supposition was that I had at least that much sense.

Neither of us spoke for the rest of the ride. Me, out of shock and stupefaction, my religious beliefs riddled to the core. My father, I guess, from confusion, or relief.