The publishing house waiting for our Pershing short story has asked us if we're on track for the 12/31 deadline.
We are on track and will try to wrap it up tomorrow. After all, for us Jews Christmas means time to get Chinese and go to the movies. Actually in the Stroock family from 1980 till 2003 Christmas meant visiting Mom's relatives in Western Kentucky. Here's our grandfather's grave (from whom we get our middle name, Thompson, and why we went by Tom till college). This is cemetery hill, Livermore Kentucky. The first time we've laid eyes upon it since 2004. Decorated and photographed by our cousin Molly:
In 2004 began the Stroock family tradition of Christmas lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in NYC. Always we sat at the famed Algonquin Roundtable. It was a tradition beginning with our grandfather's grandfather, Jacob Loeb (b. 1869), who used to take him to lunch there after going to the George Washington Bridge construction site. Here's four generations of Stroocks, at the Algonquin, our last Christmas there (probably ever) in 2017.
This time last year we were wondering around Ferncliff Cemetery in a driving rainstorm trying to find his marker. Our father would have gone but he was staying at the hospital with our mother, who would die ten days later.
A man we at once feared, admired, resented. An overarching and domineering presence in our life from out very first memories. One to whom we are numb.
For some time we thought we'd do a long post on the man, more than the hagiography necessary and just at the time of his passing.
Alert reader(s), and you people know who you are, perceived that our relationship with the man was...complex. He was the family patriarch after all, and if the Stroock family history were written as a historical drama of an empire, then he'd be the great emperor.
We thought his death would relieve us of a simple burden, the nightly phone call, but no. On November 16th our mother died and so...
Today our father will be going to Ferncliff Cemetery to perform the mourner's kadish.
