Assisted Loving Read Online Free Page A

I don’t know why he’s such a sloppy dresser, when Aunt Sylvia always shopped for him at the best stores when he was growing up. And I don’t know why he’s such a happy boor at dinner. His table manners are as questionable as his jokes. For instance:
    So the Pope and Bill Clinton both die at the same time and by some terrible mistake, the Pope ends up in hell and Clinton in heaven. When the mistake is found out, they run into each other while changing places. “How was hell?” Clinton asks the Pope. The Pope shrugs, winces, says, “Kind of hot, not so good. But how was heaven? I am so looking forward to being there. I have always wanted to meet the Virgin Mary.” And Clinton looks at him, shakes his head, and says, “You’re ten minutes too late.”
    Joe Morris is a man who wanted to be a crooner his whole life. To this day he always has a song cued up in his heart, and like it or not, you’re going to hear it, and like it or not, he’s going to try to get you to sing along. For him there’s no occasion that can’t be sweetened by a song, just as there is no dessert that can’t be improved with one of the packets of Sweet’n Low he keeps in his wallet. Whenmy mother, who was pretty and curvaceous enough to be nicknamed “Yum Yum” in her twenties, told him she was pregnant with my brother in 1955, they were in a restaurant on Long Island. He walked up to the pianist, asked for the microphone, and started crooning. She was both mortified and delighted.
    Just Ethel and me
    And baby makes three
    That’s living,
    Long Island Heaven!
    Who is Joe Morris? A man who spent most of World War II performing little parodies of pop songs he wrote at his training camp in Amarillo, Texas. Then, the night before getting shipped off to Europe on a fighter plane, he ate six doughnuts and woke up with a stomachache that kept him from leaving the country.
    â€œWow, Dad, wasn’t that kind of disappointing?”
    â€œThat assignment could have gotten me killed, so I was actually very lucky.”
    We are eating breakfast at his favorite diner on the highway around the corner from the old homestead. It’s a month after our visit to the cemetery, Veterans Day, the day he got married in a modest family ceremony to my mother in 1951.
    â€œSo you never left the country during the war, Dad?”
    â€œI finally got sent to Iceland as it was ending.”
    â€œIceland? All your friends were in Normandy, right? Didn’t that bother you?”
    â€œWhy should that bother me?”
    â€œDidn’t you want to be a hero, Dad?”
    â€œWho doesn’t? But if I had been, then maybe there wouldn’t be any me, and then there wouldn’t have been any you, so things kind of worked out for the best, right?”
    He slurps his tea with orange juice, chews his pancakes with his mouth open. This is no power breakfast. The coffee in this Greek diner is anemic, the French toast soggy, and the view of the parkway entrance across the highway dreary. But to him, this is all perfect. It could be breakfast at the Regency or the Ritz.
    â€œI can’t tell you how much I love this diner,” he says. “Try the blueberry syrup. If you add just a teaspoon of orange juice, it cuts the sweetness.”
    Is there something to be said for being so content? He is essentially a happy man. Or is it just that he can’t be bothered to aspire to anything more than this? My whole life is about trying to leave a mark on the world in ways he never could. And my past few years have been consumed with failed pitches and proposals. I want things that are so far out of reach and beyond his imagination that I live in a perpetual state of aspiration. And what does Dad want? A toasted bagel, a good duplicate bridge game, and for me to enjoy his latest concoction.
    â€œUm, no, thanks, Dad,” I say. “I’ll pass on the syrup.”
    He shrugs it