BANK SHOT

Pete Shimrak, a banker, had my number.   He, my father, and I were in the banker’s office.  Shimrak turned to Toby, my father, and said, “Does money turn the kid on?  I want to know.”

Toby didn’t answer.

Me?  I tried to disappear.  I wasn’t into money; I was into Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Shimrak said to me, “Does it turn you on?  Do you want to get rich?  You don’t have to play games with me.  If money doesn’t turn you on, say so.  You’d rather be poor than rich, right?”

Shimrak — a self-described “Croatian dead-end boy” — had come up the hard way and was friends with the bank’s principal owner, a Slovak.  The bank had originally been Orol Savings.  (Orol is Slovak for eagle.)

“I like money to be around,” I said.

“Stick with your father.  He knows how to find it.”

I did stick with my father — until he died in 1986.

Then my dad came back! I became my father.  That took several decades, but I managed it: marriage, kids, college tuitions, excessive worrying.

When I was young, I liked to aggravate my father, like so: “I think thirty-five grand is enough to get by on, Dad.”

Toby thought that was preposterous.  “What about when you’re married and have a family?”

Family? Married?

. . . The guys in Yiddishe Cup, we talk about 401(k)s and which shuls are moribund and which rabbis are in trouble, sometimes in flagrante delicto stuff.  And how much the Jewish Federation boss makes.  Basic old-man talk.

I used to disdain old people’s shul talk.  Like:

Aunt Bernice: “The young rabbi thinks the Young People’s Congregation gives out the lifetime tenures.”

Uncle Al: “The new rabbi isn’t too smart.”

If my parents and aunts and uncles could come back from the dead right now — and I had just an hour with them — I would devote at least eight minutes to shul talk. I would lay out who got fired, why, who moved, who did what to whom, and in what room.

Shimrak, the banker, liked my dad and me, because for one thing, we weren’t Mayflower descendants.  Shimrak’s wife, an Italian, made a terrific spaghetti sauce, he said.

“I’m not a bitch moaner, I’m not a negativist,” Shimrak said, showing us to the door. “Nobody gave me anything.  Nobody gave your father anything either.  Listen to him.”

I did listen.

I’m still listening to my father.  I just wish he would come back for an hour and listen to me.

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See the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show at the Maltz Museum, Beachwood,  Ohio, Wed. March 24 ,7 p.m.  It’s  a one-hour prose-music performance by Stratton & Douglass LPA.

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See Yiddishe Cup at COW, the College of Wooster (Ohio), Sat. March 27, 9 p.m.