Start Reading Return to Squirrel Hill: A Memoir by Howie Gordon…

1

The year is 1992. I am forty-four years old, married, with kids ages ten, eight, and six, living in Berkeley, California. When I woke up in the morning to begin another marathon Saturday of taking care of the kids, I didn’t dream I’d be sitting in the U.S. Air lounge come midnight waiting for the red-eye flight back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…but there it is…and here I am.

“It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ Mom has an operation,” Jerry, my older brother, had explained to me on the phone, “it’s a question of which kind of operation she has and when.”

Jerry’s a doctor, an ophthalmologist by trade. He’s been orchestrating our parents’ health care since he and his family moved back to Pittsburgh from Israel. Both of my parents are having trouble with their hearts. The years of cooking everything in schmaltz [chicken fat]has not been so good for their arteries. Who knew? For years, we thought that chopped liver was ambrosia, a direct gift from God to the Chosen People. Now, we find out that God has “chosen” us for clogged arteries and heart attacks. You live long enough and the world gets turned upside-down.

When I spoke with my dad, he was happy that Jerry’s youngest boy, grandson Assaf, was coming home from college for spring break. Dad said he didn’t see the need for me to come back to Pittsburgh to help out, too.

But when Dad talked to Carly today, he had changed his mind. Carly’s my wife. Daddy told her he thought it would be a big boost to the family morale if I could manage to rejoin the home team, too. So, I’m on my way, and I’m writing in my diary.

Jesus, I’m not used to actually handwriting in my diary anymore. The computer has so thoroughly taken over my writing efforts that going back to longhand feels like I’m painting buffaloes on the walls of my cave. It’s so awkward and slow. It’s like driving in a covered wagon. I managed to resist computers for well over twenty years. My conversion, however, was rapid and complete when I finally sat at my friend Dan’s side and we wrote a screenplay together. My God, the writing was like flying in a spaceship. There’s no going back now. It’s 1992. You live long enough and the world gets turned upside-down.

Needless to say, this journey to Pittsburgh is not one that I particularly relish, but it sure beats going home for the funeral. The odds are in my mom’s favor. The doctors are all saying that, and I am very quick to believe them because the alternative is too dreadfully real.

My normal Berkeley life of a long Saturday with the kids got erased early today. My wife’s a therapist. Carly has been ministering to the Berkeley bewildered for almost twenty years now. Saturday is one of her busiest days. Most people who can afford therapy have to spend their Mondays to Fridays on their jobs. To make a living in her practice, Carly had to choose between working in the evenings or on Saturdays. The family voted for Saturdays.

This Saturday, however, Carly rearranged her day. All three of our kids went over to our friends Michael and Karen’s to play with their son, Jaime. Carly and I spent the day talking and crying, washing and drying, planning and packing. We had some good- bye sex to last until we meet again. This trip is open-ended. I have a return ticket, but there’s no date on it.

And right now, the plane is about to begin boarding for the long flight back to Pittsburgh. I’m going home.

Please, God, don’t make my mommy die.

2

Our house on Lilac Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania stood just over the border on the Greenfield side between the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Greenfield.

I identified more with Squirrel Hill than Greenfield because I was born to a family of Orthodox Jews and Squirrel Hill was widely known as the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh. Greenfield was something else. It was closer to the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill than Squirrel Hill was, and was populated by a larger number of blue collar workers and people who were mostly not….of the Jewish persuasion.

As a young boy, I was a child of two worlds. I wanted to play Little League in Squirrel Hill with the other primarily Jewish kids, but I wasn’t allowed to because my part of Lilac Street fell into a different ward. If I wanted to play baseball, I had to play it in Greenfield. I did. I became a catcher for the Greenfield Cubs. We won a championship. It helped make me that child of two worlds. In Greenfield baseball, there were maybe five or six Jews out of about two to three hundred kids in the whole league. It really gave me that minority point of view.

I remember my mother teaching me to always keep the Jewish star I wore around my neck under my t-shirt. Never wear it outside my shirt where strangers could see it. This was the dilemma of the Jew in the world – whether or not to hide your Judaism. Believe it or not, there were people in the world who didn’t like Jews.

3

One time, I had a dream. I was alone…driving in my car… when all of a sudden…my dead Uncle Izzy was sitting right next to me. He had been the gentlest of men in life. The diagnosis was that he had been “mentally retarded”. Today, we would call that developmentally disabled. Izzy was fat and bald with twinkling eyes. The quality of his attention was very deer-like.

Anyway, in my dream, when I saw him sitting there, I just got scared and started screaming. Then, he got scared and he started screaming. There we were, the two of us, driving down the road screaming.

“But you’re dead! You’re dead!” I shouted at him.

“I know, I know!” he shouted back, “but you don’t have to scare me!”

4

The airplane ride isn’t Hell, but it is definitely in the same area code.

The U.S. Air flight is overbooked and five customers must be left behind in San Francisco. Across the aisle from me, a guy who must be six-foot-six scrunches his whole body into a seat designed to fit a twelve year-old comfortably. Sitting there with his girlfriend, they manage to fill up every inch of three seats with just the two of them. In fact, the flight attendent mistakenly counts them as a “three” instead of a “two.” After we are airborne, I overhear the crew chief chewing out the stewardess when they realize her mistake.

Poor U.S. Air could have sold another seat! The tall guy is smug all the way to Pittsburgh. On my side of the aisle, the three abreast section is overflowing with me and two other fully-grown men. I have the aisle seat. The man in the middle says he is a West Point senior from South Dakota and the guy in the window seat is too far away to even worry about.

The cadet and I make small talk. After about five minutes, we manage to totally exhaust our interest in each other. He goes to sleep and I fall into a magazine. The whole way to Pittsburgh, he keeps expanding his sleeping body into my area. It has the punishing effect of pushing me further out into the aisle.

There are three stewardi and two pushcarts. Every single time they go up or down the aisle all night, I get bumped by them. Trying to sleep becomes an exercise in North Korean torture technique. I am repeatedly awakened by this excruciating dance of the cramped quarters. The designers of this plane and the corporate executives of U.S. Air should all be forced to fly under these conditions. Actually, never mind all of that. They know what’s going on.

To paraphrase one of the old masters, “Forgive them, Father, they know exactly what they’re doing, they just don’t give a shit.”