“No one ever forgot meeting him.” My mom said this the day before my father died, and in the messages of condolence from friends and family and townies this note was struck again and again: “he was larger than life,” at least a dozen people wrote. “Unique and unforgettable.” “I can see him roller skating down Kennedy parkway.” “He was the Mayor of West Lawn.” “What a memorable voice, what a memorable laugh, what a memorable smile.” “How he loved you and your brother and your mother.” I want to share with you today some of the echoes of the memorable voice of my Dad in my head, about the unforgettably large figure he was in my life, how he hailed and hove us along, cheerleading and cajoling, always excessive and passionate, visionary (if occasionally delusional), and above all a blazing star in whose orbit we oscillated.
Whenever I run into someone I know from Livingston, the first thing they ask me, every single time, is “does your father still roller skate down the highway?” In the 1970s and 80s, long before inline skating was a fitness trend outside of Venice Beach, my dad cruised town in his quad skates (tinkering with the ball bearings and the wheels was the one and only time in his life I saw him use tools). He would skate down Route 10 or Eisenhower Parkway, without helmet or pads or any awareness of mortality. When I was young he would tie a rope around his waist and then attach it to my bike and pull me along, even up the long, steep hill of West Lawn to our home at the summit. That was my dad: outsized, improbable, loving, weird, strong, always careening recklessly along and hauling everyone behind him.
Every summer of my youth and early adolescence we drove west from New Jersey and spent July or August traveling in our family's motorhome. There were places we were drawn to again and again: southern Utah, the Dakota Badlands, Cody, Wyoming, the Oregon coastal seastacks, the Canadian maritimes. We never went to cities and stayed in national parks wherever possible. My parents would put on the cruise control in the motorhome and change drivers at full highway speed. We hiked and biked and skied and listened to ranger talks; my parents filled the motorhome with art: a Bird Woman carved out of redwood, a Tlingit totem pole, Acoma pots, naïve nautical paintings, a life-sized wooden self-sculpture by Mr. Boudreau, who also carved the figure of Longfellow’s Evangeline that stands at the foot of their stairs. That I am an Americanist scholar now in my professional career (teaching US literature and culture) is because of these trips.
My dad was a native New Yorker who came to this relatively unusual mode of travel after making a cross-country delivery of a car with my mom before I was born. The transcontinental drive opened a new world to them, one they lit out for again and again, more or less annually until my dad’s health challenges started to cramp his restless style. Traveling by RV when one was from the dense ethnic enclaves of North Jersey was deeply weird at the time—motorhomes were common out West but conspicuous in the mid-Atlantic. (It was also weird and deeply embarrassing to me when my parents would use the motorhome as a second car with which to pick me up from basketball practice.) My dad said and did a lot of weird things, it must be said—and I’ll list a few of these shortly—but the traveling was the best possible iteration of his outsized enthusiasms and his drive and ambition. He made possible unexpected, improbable moments of magic, moments out of time, pulling us along by his charismatic tether.
Carl Blum was not a subtle man. He was big and loud and took up space and moved to the front of lines. He did not do patience or nuance. Part of this was his native genius for seeing directly into the heart of things, piercing their core. After retiring he audited a few graduate literature classes at Rutgers-Newark, reading Shakespeare. In that native genius of his, it only took him a week or two to figure out the secret to all academic inquiry: “it’s all about power.” The subtleties didn’t matter. He cased people upon meeting them and was almost never wrong. He was especially unerring in detecting assholes. I once showed him some of the materials that academic job seekers are expected to provide to potential university employers. “That is the worst way to hire people I have ever seen,” he immediately said, and no academic I know would disagree. His directness was bracing, sometimes too much so. “Your self-pity sucks” he would say if I was down about something, which may be a bad bedside manner but was consistently restorative. You never had to guess where you stood with my father, for better or for worse.
If you ever knew my dad in a professional context you know that one of his core tenets was always to use positive language; it sounds better to say “I am proud of having closed two deals” than to say “I only closed fifteen deals.” The unparalleled skill he had in teaching people how to secure a job is something I once took for granted and now recognize as one of the most influential forces in my life. And he did not only practice it professionally—this was a way of life for him, his ability to sell anyone on anything at any time. Less than two weeks before he died I thought he sounded strong and sharp on the phone, a judgment my mom passed along to him. He told her it was bullshit, that he really felt horrible—“but I’m a salesman.” He was always closing. Take shots, he taught me. 100 people can say no, you only need 1 person to say yes. Show them who you are. Show them who you are.
Let me show you who my dad was: he hated bullies. He had an uncanny ability to calculate compound interest. He told me I was smart and beautiful and loved every time I talked to him. He had no access to my financial records whatsoever in my adulthood and yet he could estimate my net worth to within a couple of percentage points, something he did as recently as seven days before he died. He loved fresh fruit and pancakes and dark-toasted bagels and coffee ice cream even though he was a tea drinker who always demanded that the tea be “supa supa supa hot.” He had a hilarious/enraging habit of walking into the room when I was watching TV, standing there for a minute, and then loudly saying “well **I** am going to READ.” In recent years he exclusively read books by Nobel Prize-winning authors and a week before he died was asking my mom to bring “Macbeth and Othello and maybe Paul Bowles” to the hospital for him. He was never cautious or measured. He held grudges. He laughed explosively. Everything was a competition, but he didn’t want to triumph over his kids. I remember playing racquetball with him and while he would play every point to the death—he was great at killshots, and was annihilating me—but he felt bad about it and would lie about the score in my favor, claiming he was down a point or two when the score might have been 20-2 in his favor. He loved Sondheim, especially Sweeney Todd, and Charles Laughton, and Waiting for Guffman. He had the fiercest imaginable pride in his children and grandchildren. He didn’t believe in stretching or weight lifting until he started taking YMCA classes in the last few years, which he adored, and he adored his gym classmates. He loved trees and the ocean and a good rope hammock. He lied about his health constantly. He left serial voice mail messages. He was a storm chaser, racing to the shore for rough surf, vowing to body surf no matter the conditions. He loved to shoot craps and taught me to go to casinos only carrying the amount of money I was willing to lose. He taught Al to shoot craps and play chess by the time they were 6 years old. When I was about 4 years old and accompanying my dad into the city he forced a full NJ Transit bus to pull off its route, off the highway, because I had to go to the bathroom. He was a great dancer and loved Jerry Lee Lewis and Otis Redding and early soul music. He once told me an amazing story about selling his pocketwatch to buy combs for my mom’s long hair, only to find that she had cut and sold her hair to buy a chain for the watch. Such was the power and richness of his storytelling that when I read, years later, the classic O. Henry short story that he appropriated as if it were his own (“The Gift of the Magi”), I thought somehow O Henry must have copped the tale from my dad. (That story was published in 1905.) He bruised easily and spectacularly, both epidermically and emotionally. He liked to put things on his head or up his nose while dining out, whether there were toddlers at the table to entertain or not. When he would act like that in public, and I would say to him “what is the matter with you,” he replied invariably: “flat feet.” After he died I found among his desk drawer contents a note that my kid had written to Baba, their beloved, silly, subversive, hilarious Baba, when Al had first learned to write: “NO PUTTING THINGS ON YOUR HEAD BABA.” His cheerleading at my basketball and soccer games was loud and strange—“TAKE A BODY!” was not a typical parental encouragement. If anyone asked him to tone it down in public he would say “what, I’m in a good mood.” If you offered him something he didn’t want—avocado or something innocuous—he would reply “avocados killed my mother.” He hated to see anyone excluded and went out of his way to make sure that anyone at the margins was warmly welcomed in to the circle. His non-sequiturs were epic and legendary, and most of them I have cut from this eulogy for appropriateness. But here is a benign one, at a random dinner table: “You know, I just really like Patti LuPone.” [Ask me later about some of the others.] Consistent words of advice he gave to children included “don’t eat any gorillas” and “don’t take any wooden nickels.” When I sent him pictures of Jonathan and Al and me at museums or sculpture parks he would say approvingly “you’re paaaaart of the aaaart.” He was fanatically devoted to my mother, whom he loved and revered and could not be apart from.
My dad was all heart, but in the last ten years of his life his heart kept trying to escape its cage. He had always sought medical escape. “I have a tremendous will to live,” I have heard him tell cardiologists, oncologists, endless specialists before and after his metastatic cancer diagnosis. “Do not think of me as a normal patient.” He told my mom that when he died he didn’t want it said that he died “after a long illness.” My mom replied that “dying suddenly” coded as suicide [not for an 80-year-old! I told her]. To this my father replied “okay, then say I died from a botched lobotomy.” I lost my fight to put this official cause of death in his obituary, but it’s the only cause I recognize.
On the day he was discharged to home hospice care he told the palliative care social worker “I am going to fool everyone with how long I last.” But it was only five days. How I wish he had had more time to be home with my mom, his magnificent, epic, love of his life—to look at my mom’s garden, to marvel at his luck in living on the Rockaway River, to watch the hummingbirds vibrate on the deck. I don’t believe in magical thinking but I’m still somehow baffled that he could not will his way through one more terminal diagnosis. A week before he died I wrote to friends comparing my dad’s endgame to Leslie Nielsen’s long valediction in the slapstick movie Airplane! [“I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you” etc.] I said to my friends that I wasn’t sure if my dad’s plane would ever land, that he might keep slewing about the runway casting off sparks and taking down a few control towers along the way. I did not think he would die with peace or acceptance, and still had a vision of him coming to some reckless or heroic or improbable end—riding a wave, skating down the highway, biking off a cliff. But the end was gentle and untroubled and strangely beautiful. (Other than when he said “what the fuck do I have to do to get a cookie.”) The last words he was able to speak to me are the words he spoke to me my entire life. I will hear them as long as I live. “I’m so proud of you. You look beautiful. I love you. The love is there. Goodbye baby.”
