parents’ anniversary, and many holidays and birthdays were celebrated with similarly absurd configurations of human bodies, often in costume. His family was always his inspiration. He and I painted murals with panels featuring generations of our family engaged in our favorite hobbies and dressed in medieval garb on horseback in enchanted forests. I remember his saying to me, “No, no, the trees you’re making are all wrong. They’ve got to be ‘cottage’ trees.” I looked at him quizzically, and we both dissolved into laughter. His style was all his own, and I was just glad to stand beside him, paintbrush in hand. Painting murals was a lot easier than trying to help him create his colossal bunny rabbit topiary in the garden for a massive Easter egg hunt or hit his enormous quota for Christmas wreaths he would give to our friends and neighbors. His art also came in written form. He penned a play at Georgetown that beat out the work of his fellow classmate future playwright, John Guare. It featured a matronly innkeeper who secretly ran a bookie operation, answering telephones hidden everywhere under pillows and in drawers. He also detailed our family’s little successes and upsets in the hundreds of issues of The Buzz, a weekly newsletter he wrote on a typewriter and sent to all of us once my eldest sister went to college. Never one to worry too much about a string of typos or arcane references, he wrote to glorify our achievements, no matter how things were really going. Our botched interviews were described as fatal errors on the prospective employer’s part, our love interests were hounded by the paparazzi about their intentions, and our barely passing grades indicated we were destined for international fame and fortune. He loved everything we did, and he wrote The Buzz to express his eternal adoration. With little interest in precision, he played piano, cooked, and danced in his signature style. It was always messy and fun and free. He was a brave artist, too: his performance art began when he learned how to scuba dive and skydive at age 50, much to my mother’s dismay. About 30 years ago, he declared that he wanted Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien to be played at his funeral. He had read a biography of Tchaikovsky, and he told me this piece was composed shortly after the loss of Tchaikovsky’s father, a dark time. But apparently a trip to Italy changed the composer’s outlook and inspired the composition of a crowd-pleasing, 15-minute orchestral piece with tambourines and trumpets and tarantellas and other folksy melodies. That’s what my father wanted us to hear as we gathered to bid him farewell. He wanted us all to be comforted by the beauty of that joyous music.
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