Finally I turned to my date, dropped her hand, looked her square in the eye, and said: “Um.” just like that: “Um. My brain absolutely loves to remember this. “Way to go, Dave!” it shrieks to me, when I’m stopped at red lights, 23-1/2 years later. Talk about eloquent! My brain can’t get over what a jerk I was. It’s always coming up with much better ideas for things I could have said. I should start writing them down, in case we ever develop time travel. I’d go back to the gym with a whole Rolodex file filled with remarks, and I’d read them to my date over the course of a couple of hours. Wouldn’t she feel awful! Ha ha!

It just occurred to me that she may be out there right now, in our reading audience, in which case I wish to state for the record that I am leading an absolutely wonderful life, and I have been on the Johnny Carson show, and I hope things are equally fine with you.

Twice. I was on Carson twice.

A Million Words

It was time to go have my last words with my father. He was dying, in the bedroom he built, He built our whole house, even dug the foundation himself, with a diaper tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was always working on the house, more than 35 years, and he never did finish it. He was first to admit that he really didn’t know how to build a house.

When I went in to see him, he was lying in the bedroom, listening to the “People’s Court.” I remember when he always would be on those Sunday-morning television talk shows, back in the fifties and sixties. Dr. Barry, they called him. He was a Presbyterian minister, and he worked in inner-city New York. They were always asking him to be on those shows to talk about Harlem and the South Bronx, because back then he was the only white man they could find who seemed to know anything about it. I remember when he was the Quotation of the Day in the New York Times. The Rev. Dr. David W. Barry.

His friends called him Dave. “Is Dave there?” they’d ask, when they called to talk about their husbands or wives or sons or daughters who were acting crazy or drinking too much or running away. Or had died. “Dave,” they’d ask, “what can I do?” They never thought to call anybody but him. He’d sit there and listen, for hours, sometimes. He was always smoking.

The doctor told us he was dying, but we knew anyway. Almost all he said anymore was thank you, when somebody brought him shaved ice, which was mainly what he wanted, at the end. He had stopped putting his dentures in. He had stopped wearing his glasses. I remember when he yanked his glasses off and jumped in the Heyman’s pool to save me.

So I go in for my last words, because I have to go back home, and my mother and I agree I probably won’t see him again. I sit next to him on the bed, hoping he can’t see that I’m crying. “I love you, Dad,” I say. He says: “I love you, too. I’d like some oatmeal.”

So I go back out to the living room, where my mother and my wife and my son are sitting on the sofa, in a line, waiting for the outcome and I say, “He wants some oatmeal.” I am laughing and crying about this. My mother thinks maybe I should go back in and try to have a more meaningful last talk, but I don’t.

Driving home, I’m glad I didn’t. I think: He and I have been talking ever since I learned how. A million words. All of them final, now. I don’t need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs. I think: Let me not define his death on my terms. Let him have his oatmeal. I can hardly see the road.

Subhumanize Your Living Room

Today we’re going to talk about redecorating your home. My guess is you’re unhappy with your current decor, especially if you have small children around, the result being that all of your furniture and carpeting, no matter what the original color scheme, is now the color of mixed fruit juice.

Fortunately for you, home decor is an area I happen to know a great deal about, as I have done my own decorating, without professional assistance, ever since my college days, when I shared a dormitory suite with several other design-conscious young men. Our watchword, decorwise, was “functionality.” For the floor covering in our bedrooms, we chose the comfortable, carefree casualness of unlaundered jockey shorts. By the end of a semester, there would be six, maybe seven hundred pairs of shorts per bedroom, forming a pulsating, bed-high mound.

For our living-room-wall treatment we opted for a very basic, very practical, and very functional decorating concept called “old college dormitory paint, the color of the substance you might expect to see oozing from an improperly treated wound.” We highlighted this with an interesting textural effect that you can obtain by having a Halloween party and throwing wads of orange and black crepe paper soaked in beer up against the wall and then leaving it there for a couple of months to harden and trying to scrape it off with the edge of an economics text book.

But our pice de resistance (French, meaning “piece of resistance”) was our living-room furniture, which was a two-piece grouping consisting of:

–An orange emergency light that flashed when you plugged it in.

–A “Two-Man Submarine which we purchased for only $9.95 via an advertisement in a Spider-Man comic book. It was made of sturdy cardboard and measured five feet long when fully assembled. It was not only very attractive but also quite functional inasmuch as you could sit inside it and pretend you were actually deep beneath the ocean surface, driving a real submarine made of sturdy cardboard.

As you might imagine, the overall effect created by these design elements was quite impressive, especially when we had dates and we really spruced up the place. We’d stack the deceased pizza boxes in the corner, and we’d create A romantic atmosphere by spraying a couple of cans of Right-Guard brand deodorant on the jockey-short mounds, and believe me it was a real treat to see the look on the face of a date as she entered our suite for the first time and, seeing the striking visual effect created by the orange emergency light flashing on the “Two-Man Submarine,” she realized what a suave kind of college man she was having a date with.

But enough about my qualifications. Let’s talk about your own home. Clearly you need new furniture. To select exactly what you want, you need to have some Creative Decorating Ideas, which you get by purchasing about $65

worth of glossy magazines with names like Unaffordable Home Design. Inside these magazines will be exquisite color photographs of the most wondrously perfect, profoundly clean rooms anybody has ever seen, rooms where even the air molecules are arranged in attractive patterns. How, you ask yourself, can rooms look like this? Where are the hand smudges? Where is the dark spot on the carpet where the dog threw up the unidentified reptile? And how come there are never any people in these photographs?

The answer is: These rooms are only four inches high. The magazines have them built by skilled craftsmen solely for the purpose of making your home look, by comparison, like a Roach Motel. In fact, occasionally a magazine will slip up, and you’ll see through the window of what is allegedly a rich person’s living room, what appears to be a 675-pound thumb.

OK! Now that you have your Creative Decorating Ideas, You get a sheet of graph paper, and you make an elaborate scale drawing of your existing floor plan, showing exactly to the inch where you would put all your nice new furniture, if you were a major cocaine dealer and could afford nice new furniture. Unfortunately the furniture you can afford comes from Places with names like Big Stu’s World of Taste and is made of compressed bran flakes. So, frankly, if I were you, I’d spread my glossy interior-design magazines around so they covered as much of my current decor as possible.