For My Father

My father was a watchmaker by trade, which means he spent his working life taking apart something that looks simple and revealing it to be extraordinarily complex. He brought the same approach to people. He was interested in how they worked. He did not make assumptions. He asked questions, listened to the answers, and treated the answer as information rather than confirmation of what he already thought. This is rarer in a person than it ought to be. He was also, and this perhaps surprised people who did not know him well, very funny. A dry, patient, surgical humour that arrived when you were least expecting it and departed before you were sure you had heard it right. He deployed it most lethally in the synagogue committee, where it served as a pressure-release valve for situations that might otherwise have become arguments. He loved Ruth with an uncomplicated wholeness that their children found extremely instructive. He said she was the only person he had ever met who was reliably right about things that mattered, and he had learned to listen accordingly. He said this in front of her often. She always pretended to be exasperated by it. She was not. He held his great-granddaughter Lila, who was six weeks old, three times before he died. He said she had very good timing. She did.