When my daughter Zoe came to visit with 5 month-old Zach, my first grandchild, we looked together through the photo album I’d made of her first year. In it we found a picture of me feeding her in the very same rocker in which she liked to sit feeding her baby. Nothing had changed. And […]
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to look or not to look
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Reverse Parenting
Hunting an illustration for an essay about my father’s late-life mutation into a skirt-chaser, I googled “lecherous old men painting,” and up popped Susanna and the Elders. There were dozens of versions. The paintings depict a biblical story of lechery, a popular subject in the Renaissance and beyond, and fit my subject only too well. […]
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diagnosing the dirty old man
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Reverse Parenting
This essay was previously published in a somewhat different form on Cognoscenti.wbur.org on April 22, 2015. The stock character of the dirty old man dates at least from the Romans and is a comic staple today; but, when your own father becomes that character, it’s no joke. If it’s someone you’ve always loved and […]
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Glimpsing the Father Who Was
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Reverse Parenting
Watching my widowed father age as he neared 90 was like watching an old photo fade: every time I saw him, he was a little less himself. Day by day, Leo, a humanist, a devoted Central Park South dentist, a lover of opera, golf and political debate, shriveled into a generic old man, irascible and […]