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This is an emotional thank-you to Brad’s Gramma, who asked me if I would consider reposting my Dad’s eulogy I delivered in 2000 for this beautiful Father’s Day thread.

My dad has been gone now for for nine years. I can hardly believe it. I miss him so much, and wish I could have just a chance to speak with him again. Just for a few minutes. I love him so much, and isn’t it odd, him gone so many years and all of a sudden, right now, I feel like a band-aid has been ripped off my heat exposing that hole in it. He was a good, good man. I was just speaking about him with my brother the other day, and something I hadn’t thought about for years popped back into my head.

It is his relationship with two men in our town.

There was one gentleman named Manny, who lived in the house next to ours on the busy Main Street. It was a house of men, three brothers, a father and an uncle. All of them were mentally ill with varying degrees of schizophrenia. Even though they had been there as long as my dad had (he purchased the house he grew up in from his father after he retired from the Navy)

These men were scary, to say the least. The most severely affected of the boys was in and out of high security mental facilities, where he had been repeatedly sent for violent behavior. The other two boys were able to function in society. The father was a recluse, and Manny was...well...a huge question mark. In all the years I lived there since 1973, I was the only one from my family who had gone in their house. It was the town haunted house, kids would cross to the other side of the street. The house was completely overgrown with vegetation, the front porch door was broken for years and held on by one hinge. When I went in the house for something, the squalor was indescribable...a thick covering of grease on the stove...no furniture, mattresses on the floor with no sheets. The claw-foot bathtub was literally broken in half.

Anyway, Manny was the uncle. He ran a dry goods store downtown that could have come out of of the great depression or the wild west. All the goods were stored in cardboard boxes stacked on top of tables. I don’t think they ever sold anything, but that was their family business. It was never open, and when you walked by the grimy storefront windows, the items in the windows and the prices had not changed for years. A pair of boots. A hat. Things like that.

Manny was known to everyone in town, because he was the only one who ever left the house. My dad told me he had once been brilliant and went to MIT, but had a nervous breakdown, and ever since then he was as we saw him. He was Jewish, in his sixties, and he could be seen walking up and down Main Street. He walked hunched over, never looking anywhere except straight in front of him. He always had the fingers of his right hand inserted up to his thumb into the front of his trousers with his elbow jutting out, as if he had an abdominal hernia he was holding in or something.

He would pick up trash off of the street and carry it with him. He never talked, never looked at anyone, never stopped except to pick up that trash. He was the target of kids who would mock him, and they would throw things at him from cars as they passed. At school, you could see the occasional kid making fun of him by walking like him. Basically, the town was afraid of him and his family and made them the butt of jokes. As a kid, I occasionally did it too, sad to say.

But my dad would have none of it. When we were in the yard, raking leaves or doing anything else and Manny would walk by, my dad would call out “Hello Manny! How are you?” Manny never looked, never acknowledged him, never slowed down, just kept going.

But my dad would make a point of speaking to him every single time without fail. When I asked him once if he was friends with Manny, and if so, why didn’t Manny ever answer, my dad just looked at his back retreating up the street and said something like “That’s just the way he is.” He said he had never had a conversation with him in all those years.

One Thanksgiving, we had the entire family at the Morel homestead. Aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren. There were probably 35 of us. My dad and I were out in the front yard talking, and Manny went scurrying by as I had seen him do a thousand times before. My dad called out “Happy Thanksgiving, Manny!”

To my utter and complete astonishment, Manny suddenly did a 90 degree pivot, walked over to my dad and began talking to him. I think my mouth must have been hanging open.

My dad asked Manny if he didn’t have any plans, would he like to join us for Thanksgiving dinner? When Manny said yes, I swear my jaw hit the ground. This was unbelievable. You can only imagine how the REST of the family felt!

Manny was the perfect gentleman, didn’t say a word that I heard, just sat there and ate. We were all sneaking glances at him, I am sure. From that day on, as my dad would call out to him, Manny would turn his head an imperceptible fraction of a degree that you would never even notice if you weren’t watching, and he would do a swift wave of his free hand, just a little wiggle in the air.

Amazing. Years later, when Manny got sick and was in a rehab, I went with my dad to see him. My dad had stroke shortly after that, and ended up in that same rehab, never to walk or speak again.

Then there was another guy named Jimmy. Jimmy was another unfortunate cast away from the town. He was a severe alcoholic, was slightly mentally handicapped (I think) and worst of all, had survived some kind of terrible disfiguring oral cancer where they had to remove some large part of his jaw, lips and face so the poor man was terribly disfigured. People shunned him because he was so wretched and disfigured. Kids made fun of this poor man as well, but I can say that I never did. I always felt an enormous pity for this unfortunate man. You would often see him, blind drunk, sitting on a curb all by himself with that skinny gangly frame of his, a simple plaid shirt, cuffed pants and worn, dirty oxfords. His disfigured chin would bob up and down, eventually coming to rest on his chest, where it would stay. What a poor, piteous man he was. It brings tears to my eyes to remember him.

My dad ran a large boarding house downtown, and had a room for him there. He got him a job at the bank where he worked as an operations manager (Baybanks Harvard Trust in Harvard Square) and every single day, my dad would drive downtown, pick Jimmy up and drive him into Boston with him. At night, my dad would make sure Jimmy got to the AA meeting.

When I watched these things back then, I didn’t give it a second thought. “Oh, dad is saying hello to the weirdos next door...” or “Yep, there goes dad downtown on his way to work to pick up Jimmy...”

When I look at it now, I see something completely different. I see a man, a kind, compassionate man who reached out to people nobody else would reach out to. He didn’t do it so that someone would say “Isn’t Al a great guy?’ and he didn’t do it in the hope that it would help him get into heaven when he died.

He did it because he saw men who were not as lucky or fortunate as him, and never would be. I think it was his way of thanking God for giving him such a great life and a great family. What a man.

I miss him so. Happy Father’s day, Dad. I love you.