Ben Stein's Diary: My Mom
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein My Mom Monday The worst day of my life. I awoke early for me, about 8 a.m., to get ready to go to New York City to speak at the annual dinner of the...
...The flight attendants, of course, woke me up to ask what kind of salad dressing I wanted...
...No one will ever do that for me again...
...I talked in my hotel room at the River Inn about how Right44 I gave a little speech about how Right to Life was about the only crucial moral issue in America now...
...My father is not the kind to laugh when his heart is breaking...
...I started being opposed to it when my father-in-law, who won the Silver Star for bravery there when he was in his forties, came back and said the best young men in the world were being slaughtered by the government for no reason except to let LBJ say he never lost a war...
...My father would wave at me and then sensibly go back inside if it was cold...
...When I moved to sunny Cal, I came back to visit them at least once a month for the last ten years, sometimes more...
...No, no," my father said...
...I kissed her...
...She had an idea of what you were supposed to have for breakfast—three strips of bacon, one egg, beatThe American Spectator • July r 9 9 7 53 en up in a chocolate milkshake, and toast...
...Out of nowhere, Sammy said, with real passion, "Tell that man at the funeral home that you can just rent that casket, because your mother isn't going to need it for long...
...That's the kind of question a Communist would ask," I said to her in front of the class...
...I called my father and he answered in a rush...
...I called her a few days later and said, "Hi, Mom...
...I picked up a condolence note to my father from a smart friend from the Reagan days...
...A plump stewardess with a scowl said, "This is the galley...
...This is not your mother," she said...
...Then, when I was in college, all alone, all of those letters...
...My God, I thought, my little mother who used to follow me to the elevator and just stare at me, my little mother who used to quote poetry to me night and day, who stood up for me — she's in there and we're throwing earth onto her casket...
...My mother is with the paramedics and the emergency room people from George Washington University and I am with the actor/doctor from TV's emergency room...
...Finally, I said that our cause was as right as the abolitionist movement, and even more stark, and at the end of the day, we would triumph...
...I told them I was not hungry, and I thought about what wasgoing on...
...Then behind Western High School, past a park where Pat Kane and I used to go to hippie gatherings in 1972, and then to the funeral home...
...But tradition is tradition...
...Sit down and let me look at you...
...was a perfectly nasty woman, who was always making trouble...
...My father would be alone for the first time since 1937...
...I was only nine, and I could not distinguish what was our house behind the trees—except by the sound of the Army-McCarthy hearings coming through the trees...
...There's always money for the devil," my mother used to say, and she said it because her mother said it to her...
...Soon we were back at my father's apartment...
...There is a certain symbolism here...
...Burning Santa Anas were blowing through the window...
...His face was drained, sunken, desolate...
...That morning I had known I might need a Bible, so I had packed my wife's trusty King James that I had given her ten years before...
...I had my Bar Mitzvah in this room in 1957...
...When she was in high school in Monticello, New York, even though she was short, she played guard in basketball...
...Mom had been through a rough week—bad one day, better the next, then bad again...
...Now, my mother is dead, no longer able to ask me how school was or Ping-Pong or a date or anything...
...And then in law school, maybe another few hundred...
...In the family room next to the chapel, my sister Rachel, brother-in-law Melvin, niece Emily and nephew Jonathan, cousins Joe, Steve, Betsy, and Jane, Uncle Joe, and, most of all, my father stood and waited for the rabbi...
...We're in a small chapel with names of the dead on the walls...
...I don't like the sound of this at all...
...That was so we were well fed when we got to school...
...My mother was obsessed with them...
...Shoot if you must, this old gray head," she constantly recited, "but spare my country's flag, she said...
...She was a righteous woman and she'll be goingwhere righteous women go, not staying in that casket...
...I wanted to be a little eighth-grade Lothario with bad girls in love with me...
...She was just thinking of her glory days, as we all do when we get tired...
...I just recall hearing on BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...My mother always used to cry whenever she heard it because it reminded her of her father collecting money for "Eretz Israel" as he used to call it in Monticello, the tiny town in upstate New York where she grew up...
...I have to say I feel for him, since his family needs shoes, too...
...But I have never seen anyone look as sad as my father looked...
...I was about two hours out of LAX...
...Then a few weeks later, she blackballed me for the Honor Society...
...Today is the first night of Passover, and Rachel is preparing a big Seder...
...The paramedic says he thinks it's under control...
...My mother slowly got out of the car and stood next to me, as if to say that any local bully boy who wanted to torment me would have to come through her...
...That brought me to the main memory I have of my mother in the year 1954...
...How many times did she iron my shirts...
...I awoke early for me, about 8 a.m., to get ready to go to New York City to speak at the annual dinner of the National Right to Life Committee...
...She kept telling us how bad America was and what a fraud the Constitution was...
...First you sort of slide on one foot, then on the other, and pretty soon you're skipping," she said, and pretty soon I was...
...Your mother has read your book and gone into shock...
...I would like to go, but it would be wrong to go to a dinner with fundraising and speeches the night before my mother's funeral...
...We're talking to a capable man about the funeral for my mother...
...F. Shett Today the wind is not just warm but searing...
...It stars Debbie Reynolds...
...Mrs...
...She had a rooting interest in Israel, but America was her promised land...
...fame, along with his wife and two sweet little kids...
...I must again bless Journey Into Self-Obsession, my twelve-step group...
...Always on Arnold bread with just a hint of mayonnaise...
...Now I see why...
...He's not particularly gregarious to start with, and his best friend in the whole world, his one and only wife since 1936, is now in a plain pine casket with a blanket of pink roses...
...My father and sister had time, to say good-bye, although Mom was not conscious...
...Sayings her mother said to her playing endlessly in her head...
...She is next to the phone moment by moment...
...Mom is feeling bad and I called the ambulance and they're here now working on her...
...How many letters and postcards...
...When we were done, I talked to Sammy and Rich about the funeral home and how expensive caskets were...
...I don't buy into the idea that all the anti-war demonstrators wanted the Communists to win...
...She is a match stick, thin and weak...
...I never in my life would have guessed I could feel so sad...
...I want some tea...
...You're the man from Ferris Bueller...
...I sat next to my father with my sister on the other side...
...Just stay in touch...
...It was a perfect Hollywood product...
...This is the way it is with kids and their moms...
...How many times did she make my bed...
...No, she can't be," I said...
...A few years ago, when my parents and I drove to Easton, Maryland, we stopped along Route 5o at a little restaurant-bar filled with tough-looking rural types (not Talbot County gentry) so I could get a soda...
...It is amazing how expensive every little thing is...
...Have a good time...
...Tee-hee...
...By an amazing stroke, his name is Fishman, same as the maiden name of my mother...
...I think I might have played Ping-Pong in that room also at one time...
...I closed the windows and put on the air conditioning...
...The face of a mortal...
...It was simply impossible once Americans understood the truth—that a baby is a baby is a baby, and that killing is killing is killing—that abortion on demand could last...
...My father, my sister, and I are at Gawler's Funeral Home on Wisconsin Avenue...
...I remember when I was in eleventh grade...
...The American Spectator • July 1997 51 Tuesday prepare yourselves...
...Then I remembered that my wife had told me that my mother had been feeling really bad yesterday...
...As my father and I watched the game, I realized that the next day I was going back to L.A...
...After services, I drove my father back through Rock Creek Park to the Watergate...
...I also said this was the worst mass murder in a civilized country ever, since I don't count Nazi or Communist countries as civilized, and that to stop it must be our daily struggle...
...I got back to my Mozart on the Disc-man and listened to the Requiem and fell asleep...
...That part was not wrong...
...No one will ever look at me as I am about to go out on a date and smooth my hair and say, "You look nice...
...It's Passover and she's making Seder...
...But Sunday she had been weak and my father was worried...
...But I 'realized that I had about five different kinds of tranquilizers in my briefcase, enough medicine to make a condemned man feel calm, so I stopped feeling panicky...
...One day she asked us if we thought America or Russia was a better place, considering how blacks (or coloreds, as we said then) were treated in America...
...Then we went back to his apartment to watch a horrifying documentary about Buchenwald...
...I felt disorganized inside, and I said, "Should I change my flight and come to Washington instead of New York...
...How many times did she write to me...
...What I really thought of, and what made me start to cry there in the dark in row 5, was the thought that I would never again get a phone message from my mother that would begin, "This is Mildred at Watergate apartment," and end, "Love, Mom and Pop...
...I felt oddly heavy and I walked to the kitchen for tea...
...Mozart was washing over me and I could remember more recent events...
...Paramedic...
...Remember how when we came down here for the March on Washington to end the Vietnam War, your mother told us we were doing a bad thing, but then she made us tuna fish sandwiches so we wouldn't have to eat the food on the route of the march because it would be too fatty and too spicy...
...My sister sat on the couch...
...How many...
...It was easy for me...
...That's what makes it so funny...
...I had a teacher named Mrs...
...Burial of the dead is a business...
...We have to check everything with a learned fellow to find out if we are doing it right...
...She was so proud of it, my father said, that even in her last months she would fly to find her high school basketball numerals...
...She's out of town," said the maid...
...Many years later we learned that Mrs...
...The first class cabin was blessedly quiet and I could think, in a semi-conscious haze...
...So I went off to the airport in a long black car with a driver whom I do not remember at all...
...50 July 1997 • The American Spectator "Your mother has died," she said without preamble, "I am terribly sorry...
...Whenever I visited and then left to go back to Los Angeles, my mother would walk me down a long hall to the elevator...
...The story of life...
...She will surely know how my mother is doing...
...After dinner with my family, I went out to Dulles Airport to pick up Alex...
...Maybe a thousand...
...For the man explaining the funeral to us, the high point is when he shows us the caskets...
...Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...
...I gave a little speech about how Right to Life was about the only crucial moral issue in America now—whether we shall allow the culture of death to legitimize the murder of a million and a half innocent babies a year...
...There also has to be enough money, I said, and balancing the budget is a small thing compared with killing babies...
...F. sent me to the vice-principal...
...It said, "We all talked the talk...
...You need a haircut...
...I am not kidding...
...She was probably 75 at the time...
...We went through Rock Creek Park, in full spring bloom, then by what used to 52 July 1997 • The American Spectator be the Shoreham where I had my senior prom —and I still recall my mother looking at me in my tux and telling me how nice I looked...
...Thursday W e took three limos to the funeral home for the service...
...She just looked at me as if she were putting the vision into the bank...
...I just point out that when they're throwing dirt on your mother's casket is too late to start thinking of how you're going to show gratitude...
...How are things there...
...Tee-hee," said the two women at the Avis counter...
...We had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel...
...You are the funniest man on earth...
...I have two hours left, I thought to myself...
...77 Richard Kimble, Victoria Sackett, Karlyn Bowman—did their work, tossing the stony earth onto the blanket of pink roses atop the casket...
...The airport was a mob scene, as usual...
...And may I say that I have never met a man who fought in that war who thought it was the right war in the right place run by the right people...
...You and Mildred walked the walk...
...How many tuna fish sandwiches for Parkside Elementary School until they put a cafeteria in, before my fourth grade in 1954...
...I kept thinking that at any moment I would wake up from this ghastly dream and my mother would come44 My mother used to say that once you're in America, you have more than you ever bargained for or deserved...
...By a horrible coincidence, the airfone stopped working at that moment...
...to Life was the most politically incorrect gathering in America — because we believe that life is more important than career or income or the in-crowd...
...I was crying more or less nonstop and couldn't really see who was in the chapel except that it was packed...
...Plenty of bad stuff happened in the sixties: throwing a wrench into the war machine was not one of them...
...and then told a totally unrelated story about her roommate and breaking up with her boyfriend by phone or something horribly at odds with what I was feeling...
...It taught me to start addressing life through the prism of gratitude, not always and only through the prism of grievance...
...I just love your voice...
...Usually the mornings here are cool even in summer, but today, the wind is not just warm but searing...
...We're having a small evening service where we can say what are called Kaddish prayers for my mother...
...Yes, and you should call your father and see what's going on...
...Talk about striking a blow against government control of your life—what more can you do than try to stop the government from killing your sons and brothers and friends in a war that never made any sense anyway...
...He said, "I feel as if so much has happened in my life, as if so much time has gone by that my head starts to spin...
...I can recall holding my breath in about 1951 when my parents refused to buy me a Chris Craft cabin cruiser — a real one, not a toy—which I also thought was my divine right...
...She's heavily medicated...
...But my little frail mother would watch me until I was gone, no matter what the weather...
...I opened it up to some of my favorite Psalms, about the snares of hunters and thousands falling on one side and tens of thousands on the other...
...Luckily, Jewish ritual requires the most expensive Bar Mitzvah and wedding, but the most simple casket, made without screws or metal of any kind...
...First it had training wheels and then it had my father and her holding me and pushing me down Caroline Avenue, and then I was on my own...
...The representative of the funeral home was clearly disappointed in our modest choice...
...I thought back to my mother teaching me how to skip in our tiny little house on Caroline Avenue in Silver Spring...
...My mother had been put on life support, but it was not enough with her weakened heart, and so she died...
...She was sharp until the day she died...
...These are arrayed in a large, brightly lit room with spotlights playing off the satin and silk linings and little cards explaining the cool features of the caskets, such as zinc linings...
...For just a moment, I started to feel panicky up in the middle of nowhere...
...Respect and admire the men who fought, struggle against the policy-makers who sent them there to die...
...When you borrow time, you have to pay it back...
...The moms work like madwomen, and the kids just slurp it up and think it's owed to them and never think to be grateful...
...And maybe laced with LSD...
...My main point was that we had to teach every woman carrying a baby in this country that there was enough love for her and her baby, that no matter how embarrassed she felt about having a baby in any circumstance, she was a hero if she carried it to birth...
...Miserable," my father said...
...In the room next door, I learned ballroom dancing...
...This is a physical token of the grief you are feeling," said the rabbi as he attached a strip of black ribbon to my lapel and my father's, and my sister's suit, and then cut the edges of the black ribbon to shreds...
...My mother was dead and I was up in thin air...
...I mean packed...
...I tried a few phones and none of them worked...
...Plus, my mother died on Erev Passover, the night before Passover, and that means that she cannot be buried until Thursday...
...Her mother is very sick in the hospital in Washington, and she flew down there...
...I asked...
...I can recall seeing its stock touted as a long-term buy many times...
...Yes," said the maid...
...I didn't watch...
...Saturday had been a good day...
...the radio that as of 8 a.m., it was 91 degrees, a new record for that time of the morning...
...Maybe she knew something...
...Her maid answered...
...Who should be in front of me but Anthony Edwards, of "E.R...
...I can easily do it if things are bad...
...When I was in college at Columbia, deeply lonely and miserable, my mother wrote to me every day...
...It's not charity...
...At the time, I suspect, she strongly disliked McCarthy, but I suspect she later learned to dislike the other side far more...
...I cannotrecall the upshot, but wow, was my mother angry...
...After about an hour, I picked up the airfone and called my sister...
...I will just spend it thinking about my mother and blessing her and commending her soul to God...
...So a brief video is being made...
...She's been on borrowed time for a year or so...
...After reaching JFK, I arranged to fly down to National on a tiny American Eagle flight, and then rented a car at Avis...
...My mother, in memory of her father, always wept when she heard Hatikvah, and so did I this afternoon...
...My mother was enraged...
...I feel as if I'm on the edge of the earth, and so much has happened since I was born and the edge of the earth is so far from where I was born that I could just get spun off into space...
...Where are my numerals," she would say, as if she were going to suit up for a game as Mildred Fishman, young American woman basketball player in that safest and most blessed of places, Eretz America...
...My father sobbed, and so did I. Of course I was sobbing the whole time...
...Two of the pallbearers, Wlady and Ron, were from the Spectator...
...Don't be out late, or we'll worry...
...On the way back to town, I started to calculate how many times my mother made breakfast for me: maybe 6,000 times, maybe more...
...My mother has congestive heart failure...
...Life, though, is personal and not political...
...For this, she got in return—for most of my life—a child who thought he was God's gift to the world and considered all that his parents did for him to be his lawful due—and a lot less than that...
...About a boy who moves out on his wife, moves in with his Mom, and buys her crotchless panties...
...The movie on the flight was called Mother...
...I guess this is where his real wage comes in...
...I can still recall how my parents would stand outside the circle at parties and receptions, just holding each other's hands, in their own world...
...The whole thing cost a fortune anyway...
...My father was extremely brave throughout, except when the rabbi was saying a prayer for my mother and said her name"Masha Zelda"—Mildred Sylvia—in Hebrew...
...I so badly wanted to learn, and she just started skipping around her room...
...Grandma stopped breathing and she's on life support at George Washington Hospital," Jonathan said...
...With far more than her usual vigor, she had said that she was feeling "much, much better...
...It sounds so sad...
...Sometimes twice a day...
...How many times did she pick me up in the rain...
...This is not to brag...
...I am also a fan of these simple lines: "Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted...
...She had flown in for the funeral...
...I think maybe she made me about 700 of them...
...I asked the salesman...
...She wasn't losing her memory...
...There is a price list...
...What do you want...
...I know who you are...
...I'll be here to tell you if I find out anything...
...Putting the vision in the bank...
...In the late afternoon, a wonderful guy named Richard Kimble from National Right to Life and his cameraman, a lively, smart young fellow named Sammy Kent, came over to record a message from me to the National Right to Life Dinner in New York tomorrow...
...I saw my crew from TAS— Bob Tyrrell, Wlady, Ron Burr, Catherine Campbell...
...I closed the windows and turned on the air conditioning...
...My mother used to say that once you're in America, you have more than you ever bargained for or deserved...
...The service is lightning fast, mostly very rapid reading of prayers in Hebrew, then a few words from the smart, sympathetic rabbi—who seems to be about the hardest-working man in the religion world, teaching, preaching, consoling, all day long...
...Plenty that I knew didn't want the big government of LBJ—or Richard Nixon—to send men to their deaths to avoid embarrassment...
...But my father hates being swamped with visitors, even his son, when he is worried...
...for a week or so...
...I just can't believe it," she said over and over...
...71 padding out of the bedroom in her little pastel cotton bathrobe and her eyes would sparkle the way they did when I came into town and she'd say, "Herb, Benjy's here...
...How many times did she shop for my clothes...
...And then she started to cry...
...Then we watched basketball...
...What...
...Always with an apple in a Captain Video lunchbox...
...When I published my diary of my first, rather racy year in Hollywood, DREEMZ, I sent it to my mother...
...I didn'twant to be reading prayers in Hebrew...
...Some of them looked at me as if they were auditioning for a part in Deliverance...
...54 July 1 9 97 The American Spectator...
...Service Corporation of America, headquartered in Dallas, Texas," he said cheerfully...
...We had our relatives over to the house, but my father felt so bad and so pained that he finally very politely asked to be alone, and we left him to his grief...
...I came to the end of the Requiem and then to the wonderful Laudate Dominum, and then I put down the earphones and called my wife at her office...
...She was also afraid of that," I reminded Alex...
...I boarded the plane and got into my seat...
...When I left to go to the airport, she and my father would go down to the front of the Watergate to watch me get into the car and leave...
...Bob Tyrrell helped to turn several spades of earth onto my mother's coffin...
...When I got to my father's apartment, he sat in his usual chair...
...She didn't kiss me or hug me...
...It's a perfect spring day, with blue skies and a gentle breeze carrying the exactly right amount of moisture...
...The most wrenching moment came at the beginning, when the cantor sang Hatikvah, a Jewish song about Israel...
...The folks who had followed us to the cemetery in Virginia — relatives, my wife's pal Linda Fairstein,44 The most wrenching moment came at the beginning, when the cantor sang Hatikvah, a Jewish song about Israel...
...It was behind a thick grove of trees abutting beautiful Sligo Creek Park...
...We had just moved to a new house that my parents had helped design...
...By the way, I am not going to apologize for demonstrating against the war in Vietnam...
...At that point I began to sob, and I guess I was still sobbing when Sammy and Rich left...
...I told her I had to be by myself...
...She marched in to see the principal and complained...
...In the past ten years or more, I called my parents everyday—actually, now that I think of it, I've been doing that since 1975...
...Of all the days to be buried...
...I want to talk to her," I said, pointing to a friendlier looking flight attendant named Colleen...
...Who owns this funeral home...
...What an irony...
...You can scarcely imagine how much I disliked every single part of the preparation, ceremony, and celebration...
...Sunday My father and I drove out to a synagogue in Chevy Chase where we used to go to services and where my parents still went until very recently...
...What a difference between the world of Buchenwald and America 1997...
...Every day, from Japan or London or California or wherever she was...
...My parents have lived in the Watergate now since 1973...
...I called my nephew, Jonathan, who lives near her and would surely know what was going on...
...Soon my mother's name will be up there with a little tiny light that will blink when the "yahrtzeit" or anniversary of her death comes around...
...I felt record-breakingly sad, empty, bereft...
...F. had in fact been a Communist, and had lost some kind of job for being one...
...I remembered her teaching me to ride a two-wheeler at about the same time or maybe a little later...
...The stewardess brought me tea and said, in a calm, chatty voice, "Something a lot like that happened to my roommate...
...Colleen came back to my seat and I said, "I just learned over the airfone that my mother has died...
...There were lots of people from AEI, and friends from long, long ago and from now...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
