A Song for My Father

by Mort Ginsberg

It was many years ago. I think I was still in high school, about the ninth grade. The time is important because I marvel at the innate wisdom of youth every time I think back on it. My father was experiencing some severe business setbacks and had become manic to the point where he'd suffered what was then termed a "nervous breakdown". And I, at the tender age of only thirteen or fourteen, found myself in the unusual role of advisor and comforter to my father who, looking back on it from this age distance, should have been advising and comforting me as I was going through my early teens. I can still see my father, a kind and sensitive man all his life, seeing all that he'd worked for slipping through his oh-so-talented fingers. He was so blinded in his grief and disappointment that I believed he could no longer see the things around him that were of far more lasting value than any business could ever be. I watched the tears in his eyes, wondering that an adult could cry -- without uttering a sound. Sitting there with his head in his hands.  Mourning that people had let him down. That the hard work-and ability he'd been brought up to believe would always pay off in the good things of life had brought him a disappointment that weighed so heavily on his soul that he actually considered (he'd confessed to me many years after) ending his life. Born at the beginning of the depression as I was, I remembered one of the most popular songs of that time which contained some of the most important words I've ever heard: "You know that happiness lies right under your eyes, back in your own back yard!" And I remember that on that sad day, I cranked up our Victrola which occupied a very important place in our living room, and put the needle down on the record of that song. And I tried to get my father to sing along with me. "Happiness lies, right under your eyes, back in your own back yard." "Come on, dad, come on, sing along with me!"  And I kept repeating...."Happiness lies right under your eyes, back in your own back yard."  Over and over. And then I heard this low whisper coming from my father: "Back in your own back yard, back in your own back yard, back in your own back yard." And in a soft, laughingly out-of-tune voice, he began to sing. "You know that happiness lies right under your eyes back in your own back yard." And the singing grew louder. And a slight, almost reluctant smile began to light up my father's face. And he began to nod his head up and down as he said -- no, sang -- the words. And from his singing, his lack of harmony, I began to hear HARMONY -- his voice was in TUNE -- all the words and the melody were in HARMONY! And the words shaped into more than just a song of the depression. They began to shape themselves into UNdepression. Hope! Joy! And I watched my father's slump turn into a straightening up, not just of his posture in that chair, but a straightening up of his THINKING! Young as I was, I still remember feeling that PAIN was being lifted. Not the kind of pain I knew as a child, from a cut or scrape, but what the Germans so aptly label ANGST and WELTSCHMERZ. And on that day, my father and I created a bond that had never before existed.  We forged a connection that would last for the rest of his life. And as I sit here, writing of this experience, tears in my eyes, I still feel that unbreakable bond which, as one of my favorite prayers proclaims, "bonds one generation to the next."  Even though my dear father has passed on. And when I feel down, when I'm disappointed with someone or some thing, or business doesn't go just exactly as I'd like, I think back to that precious moment when I sat with my father and sang him a song, and he sang with me. And I feel a divine light entering my very being -- reminding me that the things that really matter, the things of true and lasting value, are of G-d. My home. My family. Their love. My very life, given' to me anew with each day that I wake up to all the good things G-d grants me. And they're all there, in the same place my father began to rediscover them on that wonderful day: back in my own back yard!

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