My father died a week ago, in the early hours of Saturday morning March 1, 2025–in his sleep, in his own bed, at the age of 93 with his wife of 72 years sleeping by his side. While he’d been failing in recent weeks and on hospice, the quickness still came as a surprise, but I’m enormously grateful his death was peaceful and pain-free. 

Last week, I wrote about being in a still space, unable to grasp the words that captured the profound sadness I was feeling about my father’s imminent death. While I remain in that foggy place, punctuated by a few rushes of angry winds and smatterings of quiet rainy weeping, I’ve managed to unearth a few more words about my father and his impact on my life.

As a child, my father played stickball on the streets of the Bronx. He was “the extra man,” which meant that when the other players were chosen, the team captains would once-twice-three shoot for the extra man. And then, whoever won would say to the captain, That’s okay. You can have him. Then they’d send him off to right field, which he had to share with Harry Jupiter. My brothers were lucky to inherit my mother’s athletic ability, but I spent my childhood being picked last on every time in school and day camp, and when I stood at the volleyball net, the team captain made sure to tell me not to even try to hit the ball if it came toward me. Someone else would cover. When I complained to my parents about this shame and humiliation, my father would once again tell me, what I came to think of as the “Harry Jupiter story.” (Underlying message: it’s your genetic fate; there’s nothing you can do about it).

But while I’ve often lamented inheriting my father’s unathletic genes, since his death, I began to wonder if being out there in right field, where there wasn’t too much going on, or being on the bench while Harry Jupiter took his turn, enhanced one of my favorite qualities about my father–a way of stepping outside the face value of the moment and taking a sidelong, irreverent view of the world, which seemed to be the genesis of the ironic and witty one-liners he was known for. I’ve never been a one-line comic, but like my father, I’ve always been a daydreamer. By example, he taught me that it was perfectly okay to take respite in the fog of my own mind and develop my own ways of expressing whatever I perceived.

My father also modeled another way in to the realm of the imagination, which was through playfulness. When I was a kid, all the inanimate objects in the house had their own personalities. Every day at breakfast, my father would flap the tea kettle’s steamy spigot open and shut, and let it utter its croaky greeting, daily kvetch, or philosophical witticism. And bath time was an adventure with Sammy the Soap and Tommy the Towel, characters that my children and nephews grew to love, and which I’ve tried to resurrect with my grandchild. By example, my father taught me that when playing with characters we could be as ridiculous and uncensored as we wanted to be. And this may have been why it felt so easy and normal to have imaginary friends as a kid, when I didn’t have too many real ones. All this childhood practice also made it easier when I started writing fiction. I could just close my eyes, dive in, and imagine my characters’ voices.

I believe this trait of embracing the unbridled mind, whether through play or daydreams, with a no-holds barred first-draft permission to probe the world of the subconscious without editing or self-censorship, is an absolute necessity to becoming a writer, and far more important than any genetic predisposition or so-called talent. But since I came from a family that emphasized the limitations of my genetic inheritance early on, I’m glad that writing was in our family’s genes. I fell asleep every night to the sound of my father’s manual typewriter clacking away at scripts for the documentaries he wrote and produced for WWOR TV.

In sharing stories with my family this past week, one of the key things that stood out was my father’s humility. My nephew, for example, who knew his grandfather only in his retirement years, was unaware until quite recently that my father had received several Emmy nominations and two awards for his documentary work. My father just wasn’t the type to mention it. Somehow this makes me feel validated for choices I’ve made to focus on my writing, rather than hyping my work, my brand, all that sh*t. Even in blogging, which is about the one marketing-related thing I regularly do, I’ve made the choice to keep it personal and hopefully focused on insights that can help others, as my father did. The people I spoke to this week who worked with him told me he always encouraged their ideas and inspired them to take leadership.

Dad and me at my wedding (Mom in background) October 1983. Photo by Brian Goldman.

So whether it’s genetic or not, thanks, Dad, for showing me the path forward to writing, playing, and dreaming.

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More than forty years ago, when my grandfather died, my father, who was sitting next to me at the funeral home, gestured to the person giving out the prayerbooks and said, “That man has a walk-on in my life.”

As usual, he was going for the one-liner, squeezing the humor out of a sad situation by taking a step back and focusing instead on a random absurdity.

Even now, at 93 and in the end stages of his life, as he drifts in and out of moments of confusion, he’ll claw his way to clarity by finding a joke. When my mom gave him back his wedding ring, which had to be removed when he was treated in the hospital for swelling due to congestive heart failure last weekend, he put it on, looked into her eyes, and said, “I do.”

It was another sweet moment in their 72-year marriage, a number my mother proudly managed to work into the conversation with all the “walk-ons” of the past week: the doctors, the nurses, the hospice intake workers… I think she would have even told the insurance people, if she hadn’t asked me to make the phone call for her.

I could write about more about my father and about my own struggles with sad moments, of which there have been far too many this week–in my own life, and in what’s happening to our country, and I’m sure I will in weeks to come. But what I really wanted to write about in this post was the idea of “walk-ons”  in writing: how to use what could be considered extraneous details and incidents to our advantage.

One big difference between real life and writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, is that anything one chooses to include in a piece of work needs to matter. Real life is full of irrelevant happenings like the man giving out the prayer books at the funeral, but readers don’t want the minutia unless the minutia means something. The objects, metaphors, place descriptions, and incidents we choose to include in our work need to create an layer of meaning that resonates, adding an extra glow. So, it’s helpful to ask ourselves when writing (regardless of whether it’s fact or fiction) what a particular image or set of details adds to a piece. Is it worth including, or does it simply bog down the pace?

Take the case of the man handing out the prayerbooks at the funeral home. If I describe a heavy man lumbering down the aisle under more prayerbooks than he can comfortably carry, I’m setting a different tone than if I’m describing a man with a nervous tick who grins at everyone as he hands them a prayer book and tells them to have a nice day. Either of these could add to the weight of a story or essay. But if I simply say, “a man handed us a prayerbook,” I’m wasting words with a flat sentence we don’t really need to hear.

Or, as in the case of my father, the point of a “walk-on” might be how one of your “characters” reacts to it–especially if your character is relatively quiet, the way my father is. Sometimes you can do a better job bringing people to life by emphasizing the smaller moments in a scene, rather than the larger ones. And showing people in action, rather than simply writing about them, is nearly always more effective in showing who they really are.

It’s those smaller moments I’ll remember about my father. As well as what they convey about the essence of his character: how he used humor to sidestep difficult emotions, and yes, like all of us deep-secret attention-seekers, he thrived on our laughter and appreciation of his jokes.

So I’m glad to have the memories, and glad for the opportunity to make scenes out of them, as I’m sure I will as the weeks and years unfold, letting the stories tell themselves and hopefully, through those stories, enabling him to live far longer than the time he has left.

Yesterday, at around 8:30 am, my partner, Shel, and I left Las Vegas, Nevada en route to Death Valley, a 2.5 hour drive. We arrived 8 hours later.

No, we did not have traffic or car trouble. And, in all fairness, we did have a couple of stops planned that we guessed would add two more hours to the trip. But the other four hours? Chalk it up to seizing the opportunities that the moments presented.

The first interruption came when we still in Vegas, on our way to load up on groceries at Trader Joe’s. This was one of our two planned stops–since we were told that Death Valley was a food desert as well as a physical one. Shel suddenly told me that instead of eating some of the food we’d brought from home (or that we were about to buy from Trader Joe’s) he’d really love to have breakfast in a down-home Mexican restaurant that catered to the local community. So when we passed this diner, we had to stop!

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

One large dish of guacamole, accompanied by one burrito, five plantains, and countless chips later (approximately an hour after schedule) we climbed back in our car and pushed on.

We were reasonably quick at Trader Joe’s, stocking up on our general staples (cereal, yogurt, hummus, bread, peanut butter, cheese)–and dithering only a bit in figuring out which produce would keep best and locating the hard-to-find chocolate almond biscotti, and may have made up some of the time we spent on breakfast. I was feeling pretty hopeful when we got in the car and saw it was only 90 minutes to Shoshone, CA, our next planned stop. If all went well, we’d arrive sometime between noon and 12:30, perfect for lunch at the Crow Bar Saloon, which had been recommended by a friend as the only good food in the area. We also hoped to take a quick dip in one of the local hot-springs before driving the last hour into the park, arriving well before darkness made it hard to see where we were going.

We had driven about two miles and were finally out of Vegas and on the open road when Shel saw the sign for Red Rock Canyon National Park. “Let’s stop,” he said.

I reminded him that we’d been there on our last trip 11 years ago when we’d driven from Las Vegas to the National Parks in Utah and hadn’t found it that impressive.

“But it’s gorgeous right now!” he insisted.

I couldn’t argue. The scenery was absolutely stunning. We agreed on a short stop. Thirty minutes just to walk around and soak it in.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

An hour and a half later we were on the road, though not at all disappointed that we’d tarried as long as we had, for the privilege of getting up close and personal with the rocks. Now we were scheduled to arrive at Shoshone at 2, which reset to 2:15 after a gas and bathroom stop. We took a brief sweep of the eclectic one-room local museum, and ate a hearty late lunch at the Crow Bar, but alas, there would be no time for hot springs. It was 3:30, the sun was already sinking pretty low in the sky, and we had an hour more to go.

The light was quickly fading by the time we arrived at our lodgings in Death Valley. As we got out of the car, we snapped pictures of the last smidgeons of sunset.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And by the time we were done checking in, we had to find our parking area, our building, and unload all the suitcases in the dark. But, whatever! We had no problem with the driving and we had an amazing day!

As I thought about this story–a very typical one for us, as our children will be first to grumpily attest–I recognized how important leaning into the unexpected has also been for me in my writing process. In first draft free-writing, my mind often makes sharp U-turns or veers off the road entirely. And while I may not even understand why I’m making the association, it’s often those odd connections that lead me into the juicier more important places. And even in revision, I’ve sometimes found that breaking open a piece that isn’t working and going off in an entirely different direction can help me ultimately find my way back home.

I do feel a bit sad that we didn’t go to the hot springs. But we’ll go on our way back to Las Vegas. Or we won’t–but at least, that’s the plan!

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The night after the election, instead of doing my regular piano practicing, I sat down with Rise Up Singing and played John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s become my anthem. Then I went through the entire book, and played a whole bunch of songs that give voice to hope–even if hope is so wispy right now, it’s hard to find enough to lift myself out of bed every morning.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

I played Let it Be, Love Call Me Home, The Rose, If We Only Had Love, and How Can I Keep from Singing.

And I sang along.

I’ve been struggling with vocal issues during the past couple of years, which has made singing difficult. But I’m now taking voice lessons and it has been thrilling to start recovering my singing voice. When I can sing without losing my breath or croaking into raspy-ness, I feel giddy with power.

And these things feel like what I need right now–giddiness, and, at least, a flicker of power.

In the writing world we talk a lot about finding or accessing one’s own writing voice. It can often take months or years before we find our “groove,” a way of expression that feels uniquely our own.

And in writing, our voice can change over the years as we experiment with new and different approaches. As in singing, we might at times lose our voice (writers’ block) for a while before we find it again.

Let’s trust that even in this very difficult and scary time we will find our voices and use them to speak our truths.

And let’s keep holding onto the vision of Imagine.

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