Sara Faith Alterman - Lets Never Talk About This Again: A Memoir

I am pundamentally a word nerd. It comes from my father, or came, I guess. Past tense. He died. But his puns live on posthumorously.

Dads name is Ira, or was. I dont know if a box of dust can have a name. I guess Ira is as good a name as any for a box of dust .

When I was a kid, our family Volvo was my comedy classroom. Wed pile into that overripe tomatocolored station wagon for quick trips to the ice cream stand in the next town over, or endlessly long trips to the L.L.Bean outlet in Freeport, Maine; Dad would throw me and my brother, Daniel, into a rapid-fire game of wordplay, which had no point but to make each other laugh, or groan. His favorite was a rhyming pun exercise hed made up to pass the time.

Ill give you an example: One summer our neighbor hired me to walk her dog, Esme, rhymes with yes, may, which inspired hours of brain twisting.

My father would call back over his shoulder, something like, Whats Esmes favorite condiment? and youd screw your face into a constipated prune, trying to contort syllables in your head until you finally came up with the answer: Esme-onnaise.

Dad would be so tickled when we figured it out. Well, if. We almost never figured it out. But Dad could go for days. What would it be called if Esme were a spy? Esme-ionage! Whats Esmes favorite song? Esme-rican Pie! How did Esmes ancestors arrive here? The Es-Mayflower!

This was all happening in Massachusetts. When I was born, we lived in the suburb where the Boston Marathon starts; later, we moved to a historic town that had such a starring role in the American Revolution that the zip code is 01776. And if you think there are no puns to be made about that, its here that I must Minutemention the varsity-level quip skills we coloneeded to keep up with Dad. I Paul Revered him. Ill stop there.

I ate those word games up with a spoon, so in awe of my dads quick wit. In many ways I was a junior version of him, or wanted to be. We had the same coarse curly hair, same Silly Putty nose that points to our chin when we smile. Smiled. We were both wild for Chuck Berry records and Mel Brooks movies, and I loved Dad so blindly that it took me ten years to realize hed shaped my tastes on purpose.

It took me another ten years to realize that our favorite Mel Brooks movie, Young Frankenstein, has a sex scene at the end. Id always assumed it ended, kind of abruptly, on Madeline Kahn brushing her hair at a vanity table while singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is when my father would spring from our scratchy brown couch to jab the stop button on the VCR.

The first time I watched Young Frankenstein as a young adultin my French vanilla concrete dorm room, freshman year of collegeI learned that it does not end after Madeline Kahn brushes her hair while singing, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. It ends after Madeline Kahn squirms beneath Peter Boyle while singing, Oh, sweet mystery of life, at last Ive found you.

I didnt ask Dad why hed never let me watch the full ending of Young Frankenstein, because I didnt have to. This was a man who was allergic to difficult conversation and made us say bottom instead of butt. A man who grounded me for two weeks when he caught me with a cup of coffee before I turned sixteen, the age hed sanctioned as coffee-ready. A man who did whatever he could to protect his kids from prematurely becoming adults.

He was also a man who picked me up from every ballet class with a carton of chocolate milk and a package of peanut butter crackers, who taught me to drive his car in the snow, and, years later, drove thirty miles to dig mine out in a blizzard.

And he was a man who eventually lost his wonderful words, driving privileges, and social graces to Alzheimers disease. No longer burdened by the need to filter the world for the benefit of his children, Dad finally spoke openly and honestly about something hed kept hidden from us for our entire lives; an open secret that I didnt have the stomach, or balls, to talk about, until conversations with my father had an expiration date.

More on all of this later.

For now, all you need to know is that I loved my dad so much. Love. Present tense.