It’s too many years to understand, but it’s been 20 of them since Moti and my father, Shula’s husband, Pnina’s brother, Niusa’s nephew, Sara’s father-in-law, and Ari’s grandfather Ari(k) left us. Moti’s been alive for twice as long without him as with him. George H.W. had just started his term that year, and we’ve since watched two Presidents serve out two terms each. Our home computer was an IBM 386SX.
I remember reading his obituary, thinking how long it looked (although for some reason the online version is much shorter — maybe its memory is worse than mine), looking at his picture. Never even heard of Sotheby Parke-Bernet (I guess Sotheby’s bought the largest art auctioneer, Parke-Bernet, in 1964, goes to show how fast a name can disappear). When newspapers go away, I wonder how we’ll mark the lives that are important to us. Arik mattered to our family, and seeing his story there in black and white reminded us that he mattered to a lot of others, too.
Arik left us just before our digital fingerprints really pressed deep enough to be permanent. I searched for him online today and, fortunately, there’s no punk on Facebook with the same name to cloud the results. (One day, little Ari can do that.) You can find him a few places, some wonderful and some wacky: a Wikipedia entry about a convicted murderer (who also was one of the Club Kids at a club my dad designed, the Limelight), a MySpace page about the same crazy cabal, and in the resume of a carpenter who worked for him in the late ’70s.
I want curate the traces he left, to wring everything out from them, and to remember and celebrate him — Arik, Abba, and now Sabba. There’s an urban legend that my dad designed a wing of Stevie Wonder’s house — I have these fantasies of asking Little Stevie someday. Part of me wishes there was a way to find all the people we’ve lost touch with who he affected, get them together in a room, and know the marks he left on their lives. The late night conversations that stuck with someone years ago, shaped the way they think about something in their life, and which I’ll probably never know — but I know they’re out there.
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Last night Ari woke up in the middle of the night, which he doesn’t usually do. And he was calm, which (when he wakes up in the middle of the night) he usually isn’t. Maybe he felt something, too.
And while I was writing this… Ari took his first (half) step. We had a great day with him today. We played some mini-golf and showed him how good his Ima is at skee ball. It was perfect.
