A Eulogy for My Dad, Harvey Rabin
How do you sum up the life of a man like Harvey Rabin succinctly? You could write a book about my pa and his myriad eccentricities. I should know. I did write a book about my dad. I got a six-figure advance for it, and it was praised by The New York Times. Then things took a turn.
My 2009 debut memoir, The Big Rewind, is about many things. It’s about the transcendent, life-affirming power of entertainment. It’s about mind-altering substances ingested and questionable romantic choices. But more than anything, it’s about the love I felt for my father when I was a boy and how the intertwined forces of movies and my old man saved me from being completely destroyed by a Dickensian childhood.
I have scars. We all do. But I survived because my dad was always there rooting for me. My dad was always there. It didn’t matter how badly I had screwed up my life. If I needed it, he had a couch for my crash on. He was a safe harbor in life’s rocky storms.
My dad is the hero of The Big Rewind because my dad was the hero of my childhood. As I write in the book, he was the entirety of my world. I didn’t have a mom. She abandoned me when I was two years old. I never knew my maternal grandparents, and my dad’s parents died when I was still very young.
My father got custody of his children, which was quite the anomaly in the late 1970s, when the presumption was that the mother was almost invariably the better parent.
I can’t even imagine how difficult it must have been to be a single dad raising two complicated young children on a modest government pension while wrestling with his own depression and professional and financial struggles.
Life never stopped throwing obstacles at him, like Donkey Kong hurling barrels at Mario, yet Dad seldom complained. Dad wasn’t mad about what he didn’t have: he appreciated what he had, no matter how modest.
Some people have everything but happiness. They’re world-beating titans of industry and arts who cannot steal a moment of happiness from an often unkind world.
Dad was the opposite. Despite possessing a world-class education, he lacked many of the things that are supposed to bring us happiness. He never had much money. He never realized his professional ambition to make a good living working for himself. He didn’t have a house. He didn’t have a career. He didn’t have a career. He didn’t have a car. His marriages ended.
Yet father remained defiantly happy through all of it. It was only in the last decade of his life, when he lost his treasured independence and lived in a nursing home, that he began to really feel the full weight of life’s disappointments and lost his effervescent enthusiasm for existence.
My father might not have had much, but for much of his alternately blessed and cursed existence, he seemed to possess the secret to happiness. That’s everything.
At the risk of getting zen, the cornerstone of my dad’s homemade philosophy can be reduced to two words: be happy. Don’t wait until you’re successful to be happy. Success may never come. Success might make you miserable. But if you choose to be happy the way that my dad chose to be happy, then you can overcome tremendous obstacles.
My dad was a big believer in self-help, in Norman Vincent Peale and Joel Osteen. I may not agree with them, but they worked for Dad. They allowed him to greet an often cruel world with a warm, welcoming, and sincere smile.
I’m at the stage now where everything reminds me of my dad. His footprint in my life is so massive that he remains a beloved component of my everyday life.
I’m writing this at a modestly priced steakhouse, where I ordered the lunch special because I’m deep into what my dad would call a cash flow crisis.
When the waitress asked me if I wanted bread, I smiled because Dad loved free bread. He saw free bread as proof of god’s benevolence. The good lord gave the fleeing Israelites manna from heaven to keep them from starving. Some delis give out free bagels and bialys as a pre-dinner treat. It’s the same general principle.
My father also LOVED tap water. He used to call it God’s soda. I personally prefer Mountain Dew, a beverage made by the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company. All it took to make my dad happy was free bread and tap water. To others, that might literally be the least you can have while staying alive, but Dad never took them for granted. Dad never took anything for granted. That’s one of the virtues that he modeled for us. He taught me to be grateful. That is a wonderful gift.
As befits the father of two authors and a librarian, my dad had a way with words. My memory is filled with dadisms. Some are aphorisms he lovingly recycled. My sisters and I set up a GoFundMe to raise money for an academic prize in honor of our dad for disabled students. We want to give out some of that free bread that dad loved so much.
My wife asked how it was going and, true to form, I recycled one of my dadphorisms and said that a watched pot never boils. Like many aphorisms, it endures because it’s true.
I have bad news for my family: I will never stop sharing the terrible dad jokes that my father taught me. They will forever be a way for me to connect with my dad. They’ll always make me smile despite being brutally, dispiritingly unfunny.
As a kid, I could make my dad laugh. I developed my sense of humor and love of history because they brought me closer to him.
Dad was a real character. He was unique. He was a modest man of simple pleasures who nevertheless left behind an extraordinary legacy in the friends he made, the lives he touched, and the children and grandchildren who owe their existence to him.
So rest in peace, Dad. I know you’re somewhere where the bread is always free, the water tastes like wine, and the Chicago White Sox are always winning.
Donate to the GoFundMe for the Harvey Rabin Prize here
You can pre-order my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror, here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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