“Hello
Snag,” he said, his attention focused on threading a reel-to-reel tape, part
of the music collection I envied even if our tastes didn’t exactly overlap. “How’ve
you been?”
“Fine,” I replied.
“Looking forward to finishing high school next May.”
“Where’s
your mother?” he asked, looking around for his sister-in-law. Along with the
rest of our family, we had just arrived from Minneapolis for one of our visits.
“She and
Aunt Blanche are in the kitchen bossing each other around,” I said. He snickered.
“So, what
are your plans once you get to college?” he asked.
“Not sure,” I said. “I haven’t really thought
about it.”
He raised
his eyebrows at a concept he hadn’t been familiar with for quite some time, if
ever. “You haven’t really thought about it?”
“Um, no,
not really,” I said. Now I was looking around for my mother.
“What have
you been doing instead of thinking about it?”
“Reading?”
I suggested.
“Reading.
What have you been reading?”
Mostly old
issues of National Lampoon, but I wasn’t going to admit that. Fortunately, my
mother walked in and interrupted us.
“How are
you, Mark?” she asked.
“I’m
fine,” he said. “I was talking with Snag. He said he’s been reading.”
My mother
looked at me. “That’s what he said, did he?”
Thanks
Mom, throw me under the bus. “I have been reading,” I said. “Philosophy.”
“Philosophy,”
said Mark. “That’s an excellent way to spend your time. And what philosophers
have you been reading.”
“I like
the existentialists,” I said.
“Of course
you do,” he replied. “You’re 17 years old. Which ones?”
“Camus.
Kafka, Kierkegaard.”
I must
have come close to correctly classifying them and pronouncing their names, because he nodded.
“What do
you like about them?” he asked.
For God’s sake, I thought. Why did I open my big mouth?
“There’s
no meaning?” I guessed.
“What does
that mean?” he asked.
Why am I here? I thought. I could be home playing foosball and trying to talk to girls.
I blurted
out, “It’s like Kierkegaard said – ‘I feel as a chessman must when the opponent
says of it, “that piece cannot be moved.”’
He looked
at me, impressed, in a sad way, as though I was a dog that had somehow memorized
a Zen koan.
“What else
have you been reading?” he asked.
Relieved
to be leaving the existentialists behind, I offered, “I’ve been reading a bunch
of stuff by this woman philosopher I like.”
“Who’s
that?”
“Ayn Rand,”
I said.
He
flinched, visibly. “Who?” he asked.
“Ayn
Rand,” I repeated. “She’s got some really interesting ideas.”
“That’s
true enough,” he said. “If you can call them ‘ideas.’”
I’d just
finished Atlas Shrugged, and like
many a young man before me, was besotted. “Don’t you think she makes some good
points about people taking responsibility for themselves?”
“No.”
“But when
she talks about the fact that A is A, you have to admit that makes a lot of
sense.”
“No,” he
said. “No, I don’t. Because it doesn’t.” He glanced at my mother. “Do you
approve of this?”
“As if
that would make a difference?” she asked, reasonably enough. She and I had
already had this argument. Several times.
He turned
back to me.
“Do you
remember when I taught you to play 52 Card Pickup?”
“Yes,” I
said. Who could forget? I’d been 6 years old. He’d asked me to play, I’d said
yes, he thrown a deck of cards in the air and told me to pick them up. I cried
and he got scolded by my mother and his wife. It was a safe bet neither of
us had ever completely recovered.
“I was
trying to teach you to not be gullible,” he said.
“After all these years, that's your best excuse?” asked my mother. He ignored her.
“Now
you’re letting a crackpot play 52 Card Pickup with your moral philosophy,” he
said.
I stared
at him like a dog who had forgotten its koan.
He shook
his head in exasperation and walked out of the room. He returned a few minutes
later with his book, Generalization in
Ethics.
“Here,” he
said, handing it to me. “Read it and then we’ll have this conversation.”
In the
years since, I did read it, mostly in bits and pieces. We talked about it a few
times, but never in depth. There were always other people around or dinner was
being served or my own kids were interrupting us. I didn’t, and don’t,
understand everything he wrote or everything he thought or everything he
taught. I do understand that he made me smarter, and that he did the same for
others, and that he made the world a better place. I'll miss him.
