I was at a party talking about an upcoming trip to New Zealand. Someone pointed across the room and said, “Go talk to my dad, he just got back. He’s narcoleptic, but he’ll talk your ear off about the trip.”

I went over. “Your son says you just got back from New Zealand. Which island do you recommend?”

“Well, we loved the north. It was—” And with that, he closed his eyes and his head tilted to the side. I thought he died.

After a minute, which is a lifetime when you’re watching a stranger sleep, he opened his eyes and looked at me. Patient, unhurried, as if he’d simply stepped out for a moment. I was the one who was rattled. He just picked up where he left off.

“The south,” he said. “Definitely the south.”

What the hell? Didn’t he just say the north? I was so thrown I started blathering about every vacation I’d ever taken. He fell asleep again somewhere around my 2011 trip to Peru and I scurried away.

It’s usually harmless when I ramble.

Sometimes it’s not.

When I was admitted into rabbinical school, I became a finalist for the national Wexner Scholarship. Being a Wexner Fellow would be a huge honor. I left my corporate career to pursue this rabbinic path. My friends said it seemed early for a midlife crisis. If I won, I could say, “See, I belong.”

I felt like an imposter during the initial interviews, but the further along I got, the more confident I became. Now I just needed to crush the final interview. Then I’d call my wife and say, “I got it!”

The last session was wrapping up. One of the older rabbis asked, almost in passing, “Mark, how will you address the intermarriage problem?”

I knew that question was coming. I’d been intermarried for years. My parents too. And we were all doing just fine. It wasn’t a “problem.”

Still, I knew my job was to politely dodge the question. All I needed to say was something banal like, “I want to help all people find joy and meaning, no matter their upbringing.”

That’s it. Zip-zap. I’d get the prize and be forever known as a Wexner Fellow.

But something cracked open. I thought, here’s my chance.

“The problem with intermarriage?” I asked. “The only problem with intermarriage is that some people think it’s a problem.”

I gave a five-minute dissertation on how intermarriage is beautiful, enriching, and statistically helpful. One of the younger rabbis tried to rescue me, but I kept talking anyway. I watched myself speak and couldn’t stop.

I finished my rant and they said, “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.”

I walked out of the room, and the rabbi who sponsored my candidacy pursed her lips and nodded softly. We didn’t need to speak. I left the building, alone.

I still have the rejection letter. It didn’t say “why did you talk so much?” It didn’t have to.

I replayed that interview for years. I’d be in the shower or driving to the grocery store when it would hit me. Maybe I didn’t belong. Who was I to become a rabbi? Some days I don’t even like people that much. I told myself I didn’t really want the award anyway.

The rabbinic program lasts five years. That’s a long time to sit with a mistake.

I try not to babble when I’m feeling insecure anymore, and sometimes it works. I was at a board meeting recently where I argued we needed to remove an ineffective leader. I didn’t have anything against the person, but he was holding the organization back. I laid out my case. I even closed my laptop for emphasis.

There was silence for a moment, and I worried I wasn’t convincing anyone. Then I remembered something else I could say. “Oh, and another thing,” I almost said. It felt like a sneeze I couldn’t stop.

But I waited.

Have you ever seen a child hold their breath? Their cheeks fill up with air, and they look like they’re going to explode. That’s how I felt. Blood hammered in my skull, but I stayed quiet.

“I agree,” said one of the other members.

And so did everyone else.

Or maybe they were already there, and this time I didn’t talk them out of it.

The conversation moved on quickly. Someone was already talking about next steps. I had a brief, stupid urge to say, just so we’re clear, that was my idea.

I didn’t.

I exhaled.

I know myself well enough to know that next time, there will be another thing I want to add. There’s always another thing.

The urge to go on and on or to say, that was my idea—I don’t think that’s about vanity, exactly. It’s more like fear. Fear that if you don’t say it, it didn’t count. You didn’t matter.

That man at the party would just stop mid-sentence and disappear for a minute, patient and unhurried.

I’m trying to learn how to do that while I’m still awake.

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If you’ve got your own “and another thing,” I’m all ears.

When I graduated college and decided to spend a year wandering around Europe, my father drove me to the airport. At a stoplight, he handed me a box of fifty condoms.

“Be safe,” he said.

I looked at the box. It had been ripped open and was missing a few. I pointed to the torn opening at the top of the box.

“Dad…”

“Ach,” he said. “They’re expensive.”

My father was a pragmatist. He showed love by preparing me for a world that wouldn’t.

One morning when I was around ten years old, he looked up from the book he was reading and, apropos of nothing, said, “If you’re ever stuck behind enemy lines, find a brothel. They’ll hide you.” Then he went back to his book. I had no idea what a brothel was, so I looked it up and wondered what he knew about my future.

My friends’ fathers taught them how to throw a fastball. Mine offered a different curriculum. He told me not to inhale cigars, and never to put more than one ice cube in a Scotch. He also said you were too drunk to drive if you couldn’t recite the quadratic formula from memory, which I couldn’t do sober. Also, I was twelve.

He also told me I shouldn’t expect his help once I turned eighteen. “I don’t own you,” he said. “I’m renting.”

He was kidding. He meant it in the most loving way possible. He was saying: Be prepared. Soon enough you’ll need to stand on your own.

My dad didn’t quite know what to do with children, having never really been a child himself. I have a photo of him from Germany when he was six, holding a Schultüte, the giant paper cone filled with treats children receive on their first day of school. My father looked annoyed, like the whole thing was beneath him.

A few years after that photo was taken, his father was arrested and forced to sell his dry goods store for pennies on the dollar. They barely made it out of Germany after that. Most of their relatives who stayed behind were killed in one camp or another. Like so many immigrants, they arrived broke and broken.

So, with no childhood to draw from, my father didn’t know how to be a fun dad. He believed in hard truths. He took me to see a Harlem Globetrotters game for my birthday once. When I worried the Washington Generals were catching up, he scowled, “Don’t be an idiot. It’s fixed.”

As I shook his hand goodbye at the airport, he said, “Your mother’s worried you’ll be reckless over there.”

“Are you?” I asked.

“Nah, she just wanted me to tell you that. But don’t be an idiot.”

My mom wrote me loads of letters while I was abroad, often leaving a little space for my dad to add something. On one, commenting on my upcoming boat trip to Greece, he wrote: “Watch for shoals and the rapids as you sail along the Mediterranean basin.” He was quoting the Odyssey, which he somehow assumed I had read.

He wrote on another that he was jealous of my adventure. I read that line over and over. It felt like pride.

When I had children of my own, he didn’t become one of those swooning grandparents. He once saw me carrying my nine-month-old son Adam in a chest sling and said, “Put him down already. He’s not a baby.”

I raised my kids differently. Tickle fights on the living room floor. Football and baseball games. Dad jokes at the dinner table.

But kids don’t always want what their parents want. I was wrestling with Adam on the floor of a shopping mall once when he was seven or eight, rolling around outside Macy’s while my wife shopped. I had him pinned and was tickling him while he tried to twist free. I thought he was having fun, but he looked up at me and said, “I don’t think I’ll be as playful as you when I’m a dad.”

I froze, crouched on the mall floor. Kids have a way of telling you who you are and who they aren’t when you’re not expecting it.

Years later, weeks before he died, my father talked only about whatever was right in front of him. My bright shirt. His painful dentures. How cold he was. He was always cold now.

He told my older brother Steve he knew he would die soon. Steve asked how he’d like to be remembered.

“Just forget about me as soon as possible,” he said.

The night my father died, I followed some of his advice: I poured a Scotch with one ice cube and smoked a cigar without inhaling.

But I also disobeyed him and started this essay.

Don’t be an idiot, I guess.

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This feels like the right song to end on.

My car needed body work, and I needed a replacement for the week. The rental manager handed me the keys and said it was the only one he had left, but it would be perfect for the coming snowstorm.

I took the keys and headed outside. I was floored. It was a lifted Ford F-150, a larger-than-life pickup truck. I nearly pulled my groin climbing into it.

I looked down from the driver’s seat and felt like a kid playing dress-up. It felt less like a vehicle and more like a costume for a character I wasn’t used to being.

Reactions at the community center where I worked ranged from laughter from my team to admiring shouts from the maintenance crew. I was surprised by how many strangers smiled or nodded when I rumbled past.

The winter storm began, and my Ralph Lauren peacoat didn’t match my new image, so I wore jeans, a baseball cap, old hiking boots, and a couple of thick sweatshirts when I went out. I loved the way I looked in the mirror. I looked like someone who belonged. I didn’t feel like my usual self, concerned with gas mileage and fashion. I was tougher now, someone who knew how to fix a roof or repair a leaky toilet. I had no idea how to do either of those things, but you wouldn’t know from looking at me.

I needed to get some groceries and supplies from Walmart before the storm got too bad. Cars were slipping all over the road, but I drove through it all, straight and steady. I saw a hatchback fishtail into a snowbank and I pulled over. “Need a hand?” I climbed down from my truck and helped him out.

Driving in the snow, I remembered winter when I was a kid, watching these huge guys in their snowplows. They were so big, the trucks and the men. I wondered if I would ever be like them. As I grew older, I stopped expecting that to happen.

Instead, I tried on other identities, and some fit better than others.

In graduate school, I didn’t feel as smart as the other students in my classes. I once said “para-didgim” in class and the room went quiet like somebody died.

“Pah-ruh-dime,” the professor said slowly, like he was sounding out a word for a child.

I wasn’t the brightest, but my undergrads liked me. Several even said I helped them overcome their fears of writing and public speaking.

Years later, in rabbinical school, I didn’t always feel at home either. All the other students knew every prayer, every ritual. I couldn’t keep it all straight. I once motioned for the congregation to sit down during a prayer literally called the Standing Prayer. Some sat, then stood, then sat again. It looked like Jewish Whac-A-Mole.

My congregants seemed to appreciate me, though. People often sought me out for spiritual guidance. Still, I felt like an imposter. I didn’t respond the first few times someone called me “rabbi.”

Later, when I was running a company, investors wanted to talk about COGS and burn rates. At cocktail parties with other founders, talk of net present value and cap tables made my eyes glaze over. I’d smile, nod, and excuse myself to the bar. I even wore quarter zips, but I don’t think they bought it. When I joined a group, the conversation drifted toward sports, travel, and family. When someone else walked up, it settled back to business.

I left Walmart and trudged through the snowy parking lot with my supplies, which I shoved in the back of the truck. I was a rugged man hauling essentials home through a snowstorm, the truck rumbling beneath me like everything was under control.

I tried to pull out of the lot but got stuck on the ice. My tires spun helplessly. I didn’t know what to do. It was snowing hard now. I was a regular-sized guy in an oversized truck.

A couple of younger guys in a rusty pickup pulled over to help. They were wearing normal winter coats and gloves while I was freezing in my grey Northwestern University sweatshirt. I think I might have put on a southern accent for no recognizable reason, like it came standard with the truck. “Y’all couldn’t come at a better time.”

They showed me how to place my floormats below the tires and how to rock the truck back and forth until I got out. I thanked them and drove home, embarrassed that I couldn’t get myself out of a Walmart parking lot.

The fantasy collapsed. I was a Prius, not a 4x4.

A Prius doesn’t roar. It doesn’t look powerful.

But it shows up.

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I was worried she might say “lovely” when visiting our home in San Diego for the first time. Southern California just isn’t her thing. I think it might feel a little frivolous to someone who grew up the way she did.

I didn’t want her to think I’d traded depth for sunshine and succulents. Like asthma, heart disease, and other childhood ailments, the need for parental approval never goes away. On some level, we’re all still waiting for a report card from our parents.

“Oh look, palm trees,” she said as we pulled into my driveway. Was that sarcasm? I couldn’t tell. But whatever she was feeling before we entered the house evaporated when I opened the door.

“Oh my God, Mark, the art!” She pointed around the living room. “Look at these pieces. I’m speechless!”

I beamed. “I know, Mom. I live here.”

“Stunning,” she said, looking at the Alex Katz portrait near the entry. “Wow oh wow!”

She seemed genuinely happy, which wasn’t her usual measure of a good day. She often says, only half joking, “When I go to bed at night and realize that nothing horrible happened during the day, that’s happiness.”

Mom grew up in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district during World War II. Her father was arrested for sabotaging a Nazi munitions factory. Their apartment was bombed. One morning, she woke up thrilled to see a giraffe in the courtyard, only to learn the circus down the street had been shelled the night before.

I can see why nothing horrible happening during the day was happiness enough for my mother.

When I was a kid, our living room walls were filled with pop-art posters borrowed from the public library. We didn’t have much money, but she hung up those posters like we lived in a gallery. When I was twelve, Mom landed a job at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in downtown Detroit, and suddenly our library posters were traded for Motherwells and Gustons.

Mom didn’t just hang art; she made it part of our daily lives, as if beauty was something you were responsible for, like paying the electric bill. She’d take me to meet artists at gallery openings the way other mothers took their kids to a McDonalds Playplace.

Mom and I talk about art in ways we don’t discuss anything else. When I was a teenager and we had nothing to say to each other that wasn’t awful, we could talk about art like old pals. She once grounded me when she found a glass Pepsi bottle bong that I had made but later complimented its funky aesthetics. Even today at ninety, she can talk about a de Kooning we saw at a museum years ago as if she was still standing in front of it. Her hearing may be shot, but her art appreciation is in full swing.

After dinner we walked through the house again. We stood in front of Carrie Schneider’s massive photograph called Las Bebidas, with Schneider herself staring at the viewer. I said, “She’s questioning the relationship between the artist and subject.” Mom punched me in the shoulder, smiled and nodded, her way of saying “I’m impressed.”

She cried when she saw a small bronze horse she’d given me years earlier. She had never been sentimental, but art always got past her defenses. “Your father and I got this in Mexico,” she said through tears. That undid me. I hadn’t cried at my dad’s funeral, but here I was, wrecked. We stood in silence as she cradled the sculpture in her hand. For a moment, it felt like she was holding my father too. The small sculpture wasn’t just art; it was their life together. Memory travels through objects like that. They hold what we don’t always say out loud.

“And look at our backyard at night.” I boasted as I opened the sliding glass door. The succulents and the pool were magnificently lit and the hot tub gurgled. I took her past the new chaise lounges, the outdoor kitchen, and the tiled dining area. I grinned, “What do you think?”

She shivered. “Lovely. Let’s go inside, I’m freezing.”

We spent the next morning exploring my neighborhood. At Philz Coffee, she stared at the barista’s slow-motion drip pour while we stood in a frozen line. “This is närrischkeit,” she scoffed. She had survived bombings, hunger, and displacement, but waiting for artisanal coffee tested her patience.

I asked if she wanted to go to the beach. “No, I saw it from the car.” The Pacific Ocean had made its case and been rejected.

When a young couple holding beers and wearing flip-flops waved and smiled at us on the sandy sidewalks of Solana Beach, she rolled her eyes. “Lovely.”

I was about to defend them when it hit me. She wasn’t being judgy. I think she was marveling that this couple could walk around the world so unguarded, so relaxed. She wasn’t wired that way.

Mom arrived here from Europe as an 18-year-old war survivor and has lived her life by the German concept of Mann Muss or “one must.” With Mann Muss, you do what’s required, whether you feel like it or not. She appears at 6:55pm for a 7pm dinner party because that’s what one does. She never missed Friday night dinners with her in-laws because that was expected too.

I live as Mann Kann, or “one can,” believing the day belongs to me. I decide how much seriousness it requires and what rules I’ll choose to follow. I live my life freely because she made that possible.

I understand now that I only get to live Mann Kann because she lived Mann Muss. Every easy life is built on someone else’s harder one. My freedom isn’t accidental. It’s inherited.

Mom taught me that what matters in art isn’t what the artist intended, but how you feel in conversation with it. So when she talks about my house, I don’t hear the words. I hear the feeling.

“Oh my God, Mark, look at the art!” (I’m proud of you)
“I’m speechless!” (You’re a good son)

The morning that she was headed back to Chicago, her bags were at the front door hours before we needed to leave. “We can go to the airport early, no need to rush.” She touched my hand as I reached for the car keys. “Thank you, sweetie, this was such a lovely visit.”

She said “lovely.”

It sounded like love.

A Few Miles from Dachau

I was famished when my train from Brussels pulled into the Munich station, so I went straight to the outdoor food kiosk. I ordered a beer and a steaming Leberkäse sandwich, the German staple of ground pork and beef on a crusty roll. Leberkäse translates as “liver cheese,” even though it doesn’t contain either, which should have been my first clue about this trip.

I had $1,000, an overflowing backpack, and no plans beyond getting to the youth hostel I had circled in Let’s Go: Europe. My goal was to stay abroad as long as the money lasted, which I estimated, based on absolutely nothing, would be two to three months. All I knew for certain was that I was eating the best sandwich of my life. I finished my lunch, grabbed my backpack, and trundled down the snowy street.

Starting my post-college journey in Germany wasn’t a deliberate choice. While my Jewish father grew up there, and his family was expelled by the Nazis, I chose Munich because I found a cheap flight. My connection to Germany, or Judaism for that matter, felt immaterial. At twenty-one, I believed identity was a lifestyle choice. You could lean into it or set it aside. Postponing decisions felt like freedom.

“Why do you want to be an au pair?” the woman at the desk asked me two days after I arrived in Munich, as if either of us believed I actually wanted to be an au pair. I had stumbled into her office by accident, asking for directions after my friends ditched me at the Hofbräuhaus. My German was decent, and after she explained how to get back to the hostel she asked if I wanted to be an English tutor for a 13-year-old boy for a few months while I was in town. Oh, and tidy up a bit in exchange for room and board and a travel allowance. I always say yes to new opportunities, especially if they make no sense, so I filled out her forms and said being an au pair would help me practice my language skills and learn about my father’s home country. Neither mattered to me, but it sounded like something I was supposed to say.

The next morning, I boarded a commuter train to Gröbenzell, a small town north of Munich that turned out to be a short bike ride away from the Dachau concentration camp. That information wouldn’t have meant a thing to me before my time abroad, but it changed the context of my life.

I moved into the basement of the Keller family a few days later. Dietmar was the father, who I drank beer with most nights. Sabine was the mother, who told me privately that she slept in a spare bedroom down the hall from her husband, a subtext I didn’t catch at the time. Manfred was the 13-year-old son who had no interest in English. And Alexandra was the 17-year-old daughter. One would think that would disqualify a 21-year-old male live-in au pair. It did not.

A few months into my stay, I rode the family bicycle to the nearby Dachau concentration camp. I knew about the horrors of the camps from school and the movies, and I figured my parents would want me to see it. I wasn’t particularly interested in my Jewish background. If anything, I was embarrassed by it. Like a lot of kids, I wanted parents who seemed normal and impressive. My non-Jewish friends had cool parents who drank cocktails and belonged to country clubs. My parents had accents and belonged to a synagogue. Judaism was dowdy and uptight and I was neither.

I got lost the first time I tried to visit the camp and ended up at a fun street fair, with musicians, crafts and food. I bought a hot cup of Glühwein and laughed at one of the street fair performers who had a trained mouse run up and down his arms and shoulders. Feeling buzzed from the sweet hot wine and feeling bad for having a good time instead of going to the concentration camp, I asked an older woman next to me in German if she could tell me how to get to Dachau. A bit drunk herself, she put her arm around me and said, “Sweetie, you’re in Dachau right now.”

The music kept playing behind us. Someone was laughing. It all sounded suddenly obscene.

I hadn’t realized that Dachau was the name of a town, not just the name of the concentration camp, and I couldn’t believe I was drinking and laughing in the city that killed so many innocent people. I threw away the rest of my wine and walked to my bike, dizzy and ashamed. What the hell was I doing? My father was a Holocaust survivor for God’s sakes.

I rode to the concentration camp and, seeing no bike racks, chained my bike against the camp’s rusted barbed wire fence. So many prisoners saw this fence as a place to be electrocuted and killed. I saw it as a convenient place to lock up my old bicycle.

I went inside the camp and bought a ticket. It felt strange to pay money to go into a place of such horror, but I did it every week or two after that. I would mostly walk alone on the cement foundations of the old housing barracks. I found the experience of pacing alone in the cold more meaningful than standing in front of the ovens, listening to the tourists gasp. With strangers, I traveled through a museum. Alone, I traveled through time.

The world used to feel very light, and often still does, but walking over the foundations filled me with darkness. It made me wonder what the Kellers knew, and what they had decided not to know, and whether that kind of not-knowing was something you practiced or something you inherited.

And it made me wonder how that knowledge shaped the way people felt about me in my quaint little village of Gröbenzell.

Did they wish I didn’t exist?

Or do they feel absolved because I do?

During my first few months, Gröbenzell had been a light and happy place to drink beer and flirt, but it became something else, a place bordering atrocity, where my Jewishness mattered in ways I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t given my Judaism much thought over the past decade, but now it raised its hand and asked, “What about me?”

Some questions don’t care how old you are. They wait patiently in the background, sometimes just a few miles away, until you’re close enough to hear them.

I didn’t answer the question right away, but that winter in Gröbenzell was the first time I understood that identity isn’t something we always get to choose.

Sometimes it waits for us.

And then it chooses us.