Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man by Dave Jaffe

    My Dad and Me: Part One of Chapter Three.


     Everything my father was, I wasn't. Yet in the end we were alike.
    My father was a short intense working class Londoner who ran after the rich. I ended up many times working with the poorest of the poor. My father couldn't save a penny. I became a real cheapskate.
    "Jaffe, you're so cheap it's terrible," one woman who I liked told me. "You never spend a penny."
     My dad was one of the hardest working people I ever knew. He worked from the age of 13 till he retired at 78. I, in contrast was a complete slacker. I've worked  a grand total of 11 years out of 75.
      "Never take the dole," he'd say. "The dole" is the English expression for welfare. "Never buy second hand clothing or handle old newspapers." I broke all of his rules. I lived on welfare for years on end after becoming disabled. I routinely go to thrift stores and Salvation Army places to buy second hand clothing, books and furniture. I still fish day old newspapers out of blue recycling bins. All of this saved me a fortune.
    Then again my father was a family man who married and had three children - myself and two daughters. I never married. As far as religion goes here again we went in  two diametrically opposed directions. My father was an orthodox Jew whose religion bristled with harsh rules and regulations. I became a liberal Christian who still goes to church and loves to sing hymns.
    My dad was a very good athlete. I was hopeless at sports save for swimming. My father never learned to swim. My father loved to gobble down thick juicy steaks. I became a vegan and rarely eat any animal food save sometimes for butter.
 So put my father and I together and you have two complete opposites. Yet in many ways we were two carbon copies. Both of us were loud, intense, aggressive and sometimes comical laughingstocks and disrupters of the worlds we moved through.
   "Oh here comes Dave Jaffe!" one New Democrat said when he saw me at a friend's house in the mid-1970's. "Just help me." Like my father I argued with many people. After taking therapy I quieted down. Yet I caused many problems in many organizations I was part of.. My father did the same.
    Once my father crashed a meeting on issues of ageing. "Seniors don't do anything progressive," he told the gerontologist who'd given a good speech on how seniors could be organized into a progressive force. "They're just hopeless." The woman gerontologist never forgave him for this unasked for intrusion..
     My dada and I were simply father and son. "They're both peas from the same pod," some would have said of us both. And they'd be right.