I'm going to read you a poem about my father.
And my father's recently died this spring.
He died in about the end of June.
And we had a very strained relationship.
I mean, loving but strained.
He didn't quite understand me, I didn't quite understand him.
But one of the great things about him
was his ability to tell a really great story.
And this poem I'm about to read is about that ability for him
to tell really great stories.
I think I tell people in interviews if I get anything
from my parents, I get the idea of narrative from my father.
And I get my idea of the wonderful bright musical
language-- metaphoric language from my mother.
And I get this narrative idea from him.
I'm going to tell you--
not this poem, but I'm going to tell you
a story that he told me.
Give you an idea of how good a storyteller he was.
You ever see these ugly ceramic piggy banks?
You see sometimes at county fairs, right?
Well, my father loved that kind of stuff.
Really just loved ugly stuff like that.
The story I love to tell is one Christmas
when he bought this ugly little Santa that had
kind of gravity switch to it.
So every time you flipped it over it'd make a noise,
it would go
[VOCALIZING]
And I have this vivid memory of my father sitting
on the living room couch for the entire Christmas going
like this.
[VOCALIZING]
He thought it was the funniest thing on Earth.
Drove us nuts.
He thought it was the funniest thing.
It was cheap ugly things.
Well, he loved stuff like that.
And he was also a bit of a miser.
And because my father comes out of the generation that
went through the Depression.
And I think if you have parents who
went through that, one lesson the Depression taught
them was that no matter how much you make,
you can always lose it.
It can always go away.
The Depression taught them without a doubt.
And because of that, my father was a miser.
Just really pinched pennies.
And what he would do with the piggy banks
was that if he had spare change from his paycheck,
or he hit the numbers and he had some spare change on top
of that, or he'd do an odd job in the neighborhood,
he'd put all his small change in these piggy banks.
And then-- and then he would hoard the piggy banks,
hide them in our house, like under the stairs,
or in the basement, and the closets.
And one summer either my mother or my sister
found one of the piggy banks.
And we had a great summer, right?
Well, what we do is we'd wait for him to go off to work,
and then we can get out and we'd get the butter knife
and take in this, put it in the slot, and it just was--
it was a great summer.
And one day-- yeah, a magical kid summer, whatever you want.
I want a popsicle.
Let's get some cupcakes, (LAUGHS), so whatever you want.
It was probably what part of the reason
why I have fond memories of my childhoods,
come to think of it.
But anyway, towards the end of the summer,
my father discovers that the piggy bank gets a little light
and he puts two and two together.
And from that point on, he takes the pig--
he keeps saving coins, but he takes the piggy banks out
of our house and starts hiding it in different cousin's house.
We have a lot of cousins in Rochester,
New York where I grew up.
And this goes on.
This practice goes on for years and years and years,
and then he stops and retires.
I mean, he retires and he stops, and then
he forgets for years and years and years and years.
And one day, it occurs to him, he's
got all these coins in his piggy banks,
and he wants to know how much he's got.
So he breaks open all the piggy banks
and he puts the money into paper bags
and puts that in the back of his Buick Electra
and he drives to downtown Rochester.
Now, I want you to visualize, at this point,
what my father looks like.
He's retired, been retired for about, well, maybe 8-10 years.
He dresses shabbily.
Even when he was working, he wasn't great,
because he worked for the sewer department,
so he wasn't really that good of a dresser anyway.
And he let everything go in and often he
wears sweatshirts and pants for weeks at a time
until they shine, and he has no teeth.
He has no teeth and he's too cheap to buy dentures.
It isn't that he can't afford to buy dentures.
He's just too cheap to buy them.
Why should I spend money on dentures?
So he talks like this, you know, because he ain't got any teeth.
So you have to visualize the sight
of an old, decrepit, toothless, Black man walking onto a bank,
you know, and expecting to have business done.
So he walks up to one of the officers of the bank
and the guy looks at him, because the tellers
won't deal with coins unless you go to somebody else first.
So he goes to one of the three officers of the bank
and he looks and he looked at him and he goes,
what do you want?
My father says, I got some coins to let you count.
And I think he looks my father and sort of pats him
on the head and says, oh sorry we were too busy, and told him,
and he just shows him the door.
And undaunted, he gets back in the car
and he goes down the street or across the street or down
the block and stops in front of the second bank
and it's the same deal, the old, toothless, decrepit, Black man
walks in and wants to have business.
And he goes to the second officer of the bank
and the bank guy looks at him and says, what do you want?
My father said, I got some coins to let you count.
And the guy also looks at my father
and says, you know, about to do the same thing,
show him the door, and suddenly he stops, and he thinks.
And he says, well, how many coins have you got?
You know, my father tells me that his car is parked right
in front of the bank, like there's these glass doors
and so you can see this.
You can see the car through the glass doors
and he takes the guy by the wrist.
He walks him over, walks him to the doors,
and points to the car and he said, you see that car?
The guy goes, yeah.
Father says, you see how low it's sitting?
[LAUGHTER]
And they all hop to it and they all go.
They all run out, and they have a chain and, you know,
that they took, bring in the money,
and they put in those big machines that
go around the ground, and it's $1,200 worth of coins.
[LAUGHTER]
Is that a great story, or right?
And as well as he told me that story, and more, well,
as I told you that story is not a patch on how
well, how hysterically he told me this story, you know.
I have guys tell people, I would have given anything
to be a fly on the wall at that particular moment.
It's a great story, right?
And, you know, my father's ability to tell a great story.
This poem is not a funny poem, but it
comes from that same ability to tell me a story.
And this story comes from him telling me
about his first heart attack, which
actually would result eight or 10 years later with him dying.
That, excuse me, he died from heart disease and diabetes.
And this story he tells me, or also one of the lessons
that came out of people who came through, came from people who
had survived the Depression, was some a lot on a level,
on some level, was the idea that I can make it, I can take it.
You know, no matter what they throw at me, I can take it.
I can take it, and so, you don't complain.
So I found out about my father's heart attack months
after it happens, when I come up to visit for a holiday.
And we're sitting there and we're
having this little conversation on the level of about how
about those Mets, and then suddenly, he tells me
this story about what he had.
It's oh, by the way, I had this heart attack
and this is what happened.
I said tell me the story, and it gets more and more horrific
and I'm sitting there listening and I'm going, my God, my God,
my God.
And then he tells me this one moment when he's in the car,
my cousins have come and taken him and had put him in the car
and he's about to go off to the hospital
and he knows he's dead.
I mean, he just knows that it's over for him.
So my cousins had put him in the car and he turns around
and he's about to be driven off and he takes one last,
what he thinks is going to be one last look at his house,
and he gives me the look that he had.
[LAUGHS] And I've always been trying to put that into a poem.
So this is what the poem, and again, not as well as
he told it.
This is called "The Good Look."
"It is like my father, his legs turning to rubber,
taking what he believes to be his last look at our house.
I imagined my mother, his crazy wife,
standing at the front door, believing
it all an elaborate stunt or peeking through the living room
blinds making as small a target as possible.
He breathes, the street reels under his feet.
And now, he is like an intoxicated dancer, luck
wheezing out of his mouth, propped up by cousins leading
him to the open maw of their car door,
which becomes the line that marks the borders of the world
as he knows it, the line which, once crossed,
is forever denied.
My father stops at that portal and, though totally mistaken,
takes a hard look at his house.
Everything the words so long were ever meant to imply
is in this book.
A look that, when shown to me later,
second hand, as part of a story with a happy ending,
nevertheless raises the ante."