As I've shared here, my father died in the third week of August. As his funeral was in Philadelphia, our original home, and as Jewish law requires burial within three days, only a very few of his Boston-area law colleagues could attend his funeral. He taught there from 1976 on.

     On Friday his colleagues held a very upbeat, and, of course, bittersweet, memorial for him in the law library. I was pleased it was so well attended; students and faculty spoke. I was pleased, too, that I was asked to share a few words, words colleagues just could not. Theirs were wonderfully satisfying to me, as were those of my niece and my stepmother who, along with the law school, arranged it. I'm grateful to all of them.

     It was wonderful sharing the event with my immediate and extended family and many others, including a boyhood pal of mine who lives in New Hapmshire and found he'd be in the area earlier in the day. That he prolonged his visit, to attend, means a great deal to me.

     An avid Philadelphia Athletics and later, Red Sox fanatic, if dad were to have been there, he'd have loved  the string trio that welcomed us with classical fare, ending the late afternoon with a delightful "Take Me Out to the Ball Game".

     Thanks, in advance, for indulging me here. I share, below, my brief words from Friday afternoon.

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     My father was the most generous, giving man I have known. He taught generosity of spirit; he continually shared of himself. We, all of us here today, were recipients.

     I witnessed when I was not yet ten the single most remarkable teaching he shared with me, an active teaching that has shaped my life. Even at ten I was aware of the implications of his choice to leave his [law firm] partnership for teaching and writing and advocacy. I had some inchoate sense of what he’d be giving up and I also saw his fundamental happiness over the decision grow, year-to-year.

     This single decision has over and again reaffirmed for me the truth that what is most important, what brings the most sustained happiness, is to find your gift, pursue it, and give it away, and every day.      

      Now, as we all are, dad was a broader person than what he was as a professional. We recall his passion for us,  his unconditional love for us and for our children. One recalls his love of baseball, his Red Sox, his devotion to the sports one of his children played in high school and at college, attending so many college football games and genuinely enjoying it.

     Another remembers, among many other acts of generosity, how dad went out of his way to help him start out in his career by remarking to a  business owner how, while yet in college, he created a useful computer program. He stayed with that company many years and  is as yet in the same industry. His only ‘disappointment’ with dad came when he learned as a very young man that dad’s being  a tax policy expert didn’t mean that his passion for teaching would lend itself to teaching nifty April 15th trickery.  

     Another recalls, as I know all of you do, dad’s “heart, graciousness, and warmth.” It shaped who he was as a man, a dad, as a professional. Perhaps most of all, she’ll miss his voice, his excitement and engagement at hearing ours. We all hope our own children have that sense of our own voices. Dad also, I should tell you, shared with me how much he himself delighted in your voices and ideas, his colleagues’ and students’.        

      Now, sometimes you can get a sense of a man’s humility from a small thing that he does that’s so dramatically out of character, so spur-of-the-moment, so contrary to expectation, that in fact it underscores just how thoroughly humble he really was, because you remember it as a striking anomaly, and so vividly forty-two   years on.

     In my freshmen year I got it in my teenage head that I needed one of those then-faddish enormous bean bag chairs. Mom and dad rightly thought it silly and knew I’d never be able to do anything but crawl out of the thing once I plunked down. But I was his son and he was a pushover for my happiness even, at times, when he knew I was being frivolous.