My father, Max had a very short fuse. He was easily provoked, and then he would yell and scream. His aggression was entirely verbal, however. He never physically hurt me or my sister, nor did he ever hit or physically abuse my mother. He hollered a lot, that was all.

My mother and I villified him because of this. We considered his temper a sign of evil, and we treated him accordingly. That treatment only served to make him worse, and it became a vicious circle. The fact that he did not have much formal education made matters worse. Everyone on my mother's side of the family looked down on him, and my mother and I looked down on him too. Poor grammar was taken to be an indication of low intelligence, just like a bad temper was taken to indicate a bad nature. As a young woman, I left home and moved across the continent and struggled to put myself through college and graduate school without any help from my family, and while much of it had to do with a genuine curiosity to learn about the world and to enjoy all the wisdom and goodness available to me in my culture, much of it also had to do with a misguided attempt to disidentify with my "low class family" and in particular, with "my low class father."

I am so sorry now for all of the pain that I created for him with my infantile attitudes, but it is too late to change anything in the past. I know I was wrong to villify him for his temper, because I have inherited it in full, yet I know myself to be a kind and wise person. I was also incorrect to assume my father was stupid because he lacked education. Many young people who grew up during the same period that he did dropped out of school to help support their families during the Great Depression. I also know many people today who speak and write with perfect grammar, and have lots of fancy credentials and degrees, but who nevertheless have never produced a single, creative or original thought of their own. Fortunately, I do not fall into that category, and today, thinking back about my father, Max Sabler, I do not believe that he was an idiot either. Education and intelligence are completely different things. He was certainly intelligent and sensitive enough to know that he was hated and "dissed" by his family, so that when I came to visit him with my husband one Christmas, shortly after my mother left him and not very long before he died, after he moved from New York to Florida, he was so happy and touched and amazed to see me there, standing in his home, that he cried.

More stories to come. "The evil men do live after them; the good is oft interred with their bones…so let it be with Caeser." Maybe with Caeser, but not with Max. Maybe with Max, I can help it to be the opposite. My own life is drawing to a close, so "If not now, when?"

Max Sabler (1921)

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