Dr. Schwartzberg's Wonder Emporium

If my dad were alive he would have turned 83 today. That is difficult to wrap my mind around since he never made it to his 53^rd birthday. I have written some general reminiscences about my dad before, most notably on Father’s Day 2014. If you have not seen that post and are interested, please click this link.

Today’s post is inspired by something my wife did a few months ago. She came across an artifact from my dad’s work life and decided to put it in a small frame and display it in our living room. Being the stereotypical oblivious husband that I am, I didn’t notice this sweet gesture for weeks. But once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop looking at it. And now I look at it every day. I am, of course, talking about the eyeglass cloth pictured above. It is a seemingly simple object, but it does not bring with it, simple memories.

My dad was an optometrist and for years he had his own private practice.  His office location moved around a bit, but the eyeglass cloth pictured here is from the office I remember, as it is from the last office of his own, before he closed up shop and went to work as the optometrist for a local vision center. As a child my dad’s optometry office, located on 17^th Avenue and 85^th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was a place of mystery and wonder and I always felt a thrill when I visited there.

I will admit that at 47, my memory is not what it once was, so my recollection of my dad’s office is spotty at best, considering it closed down sometime in the early 1980s. But this is what I remember…

When you entered my dad’s office there was a lobby. To the left of the lobby was a small examination room and to the right was a large magician’s shop. At least it seemed to me like a magician’s shop, though in reality it was my dad’s optometry workshop, where he made and repaired eyeglasses. This workshop was enormous and off limits to patients. I, of course, was allowed in, which is part of the reason it was special to me as a kid. I got to go where the public could not! There were a variety of unusual looking tools in this shop—clearly not the kind you would find in a hardware store. I can’t tell you what most of these tools did, but that added to the wonder and the impression that my dad was some kind of wizard.

Actually, there was one tool that my dad used in his shop that I was very familiar with—it was a very tiny screwdriver that he used to work on eyeglass frames. My dad was incredibly adept at using this tool and I would often marvel at the dexterity with which he drove those miniscule screws into the frame with his meaty hands. As I think back upon my dad’s impressive skill decades later, I find it somewhat ironic, since outside of his optometry shop he was one of the least handy guys in Brooklyn. Indeed, I have no memories of him ever holding a regular-sized screwdriver.

At this point in my life, my early memories are essentially a bunch of still photos floating around in my brain. I have a specific image of what my dad’s office looked like from the outside—the brick exterior with a grey, metal door; the last business before a row of residential houses. Interestingly, because of the miracle of Google Street View, I was able to see what my dad’s old office looks like from the outside today and it pretty much matched my memory perfectly—except now the door has a red awning above it and houses the offices of a newspaper called “Russian Bazaar.” But other than that, it’s just like the still photo in my mind.

Of course, I’ll never be able to see the interior of my dad’s office again. All the mysterious tools are gone now, but I do still have the eyeglass cloth. It has yellowed with age and at the bottom there is a reminder to “HAVE YOUR EYES EXAMINED REGULARLY.” I do not. I have not set foot in an optometrist’s office since the early 1980s.

A Father's Day Blog

My dad passed away in 1986, a little over a month before I turned 17.  It was sudden—no long illness—just a massive heart attack in his sleep and he was gone.  We were all shocked and devastated.  But it’s not my intent to write a depressing blog about that time in my life; it’s my intent to write about what came before.

The two words that always come to mind when I think of my dad are intelligent and funny.  Just saying those words on their own, though, doesn’t seem to do him justice.  It’s more like “fiercely intelligent” and “ridiculously funny”.

It seemed like my dad had an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything.  He was an optometrist, so, as one might expect, he knew a lot about the sciences, but his knowledge of science went way beyond the biology and physics that were necessary for his career.  He had a deep love for meteorology and it was clear from the conversations he often had with the television screen that he knew significantly more about the topic than the weather guy on the local news.

But my dad’s knowledge was not limited to science; he seemed equally comfortable discussing history, geography, politics, and literature.  He would freely quote the works of William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe.  There were times when we thought that he was randomly spouting gibberish, but we figured out years later that he was reciting passages from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Cantebury Tales off the top of his head.  This sort of amazes me to this day, because I was an English Literature major in college, and even when I was actively studying The Cantebury Tales I couldn’t quote it off the top of my head.

My dad did “voices.”  When he told a story about real events from his past he gave every character a unique voice.  But the interesting part is that rather than attempt to imitate the person’s actual voice, he would give them a voice that better fit their personality and/or the circumstances within the story.  This made for much more entertaining reminiscences, as his friends often sounded like Peter Lorre and Cary Grant.  (For more thoughts on my dad’s story telling skills click here.)

Another frequent source of amusement from my dad was his spontaneous, topical song parodies.  For example, during the 1976 presidential election cycle my dad was depressed by the choice between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as he thought they were both clueless.  One night (possibly after a televised debate—but I can’t swear to that) he started singing his own version of the Fiddler on the Roof song “Far From the Home I Love.”  He changed the lyric that was originally “Oh, what a melancholy choice this is/Wanting home, wanting him,” to “Oh, what a melancholy choice this is/An idiot, an imbecile.”  It was moments like these peppered throughout my childhood, that likely prepared me to work at MAD magazine when I graduated from college.

These days I think of my dad most often when I attempt to wake up my oldest son in the mornings.  My son does not wake up easily and when I was a young boy, neither did I.  This was a major source of contention between my dad and I, and it used to enrage me that he was so perky in the mornings while I desperately wanted to stay in bed.  He used a variety of techniques to wake me up—which I now employ on my own son—including singing, tickling, and anthropomorphizing stuffed animals.  The method that used to irritate me the most was when he flicked my earlobes.  Because I remember despising that technique so much, I almost never employ it myself.  But this morning, in honor of Father’s Day, I decided to try it myself.  I went into my son’s room, told him to wake up, and when he didn’t respond, I flicked his right earlobe.  He swatted me away and turned over, so I flicked his left earlobe.  He swatted me away and turned over again.  I chuckled to myself and walked out of the room.  I didn’t actually need to wake my son up—I just wanted to honor my dad.