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01/07/12 - (1)
King Saul
My dad went after it — success — With a passionate tenacity bordering on obsession. It must just have been that his synapses Were shaped, created, encoded, orchestrated, choreographed, As far back as the days of Abraham and Moses, With the same energized vision those noble patriarchs possessed When they assumed the life of peripatetic prophets Sent by God to lead their families, tribes, nation to greatness, Plant the seeds of all the innumerable generations to follow.
And for almost three score and ten years of his career, My father never let a single, solitary hour escape his accounting, Rather held each in the palm of his indomitable psyche, To ensure that none of his plans, strategies, dreams, decrees Ever got out of his mind's eye's sight, Caused him to lose a night's sleep, fail to awaken, every dawn, Eager to seize whatever new achievements were in his reach, Be they a dozen more trousers than he expected to sell Or windfall discounts from one his fabric suppliers.
That he traveled frantically, frenetically, with ceaseless abandon, Leaving his wife, his children, during the forties and fifties, Every second week, never even resting on the Sabbath, Ever in pursuit of his personal "promised land," Which, for him, would translate into a suburban estate, Seven holy acres on prestigious Litzsinger Road . . . That he needed to be in New York, Cleveland, Washington, L.A., To sell his line of men's dress clothing, was understood, accepted. We knew him as the absentee landlord, King Saul.
Today, he never travels beyond B'nai Amoona Cemetery (Not a five-minute drive from where I sleep), But I still think of him as a larger-than-legendary hero, A man of meager means, as a youth, Who breathed in his future, deeply, widely, imagined vastly, And decided that, for the undefined time of his life's destiny, He'd press his powers relentlessly, test the resilience of his brilliance, And hope to leave, after his eventual passing, A legacy recognizable, even in God's estimation, as godly.
01/07/12 - (1)
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