I don’t like November. Only later, well past the shock, did I figure out why. Not just the accumulating darkness of the fall winning the war with light.

I’ve always rooted for the forces of the winter solstice to claim their slow-moving victory. But, early on, I found the autumn gloom more personal than that. 

My father, Milton Stein, always left early for his 7:00 am shift as a postal supervisor downtown. His only weeknight recreation was bowling in a league. On Wednesday nights, I think. Since I would still be asleep when he went to work, I asked him to write down the scores he got the night before. 

I took them in as I sat down for breakfast and opened the daily newspaper to the sports section. School followed.

My dad was my hero, as almost all dads are. Funny, I’ve never said that before, even to myself. He’s been gone for 25 years.

But I was talking about autumn, wasn’t I? About November 1958. 

Someone from the office knocked on the door of my seventh-grade class at Jamieson School on a Thursday afternoon that year. The teacher called my name. I left the room and entered the hallway as requested. 

Mom was waiting for me. 

She shouldn’t have been there. 

Something was wrong. 

We drove home, and she told me when we arrived. Dad was in the hospital. He suffered a heart attack. She broke down as she delivered the news. I remember the place we were standing. 

Much later, I learned that he had been afflicted at least twice. Once at the bowling league and once on his way from the downtown Chicago Post Office the next day. He described a crushing pain, unlike anything he had ever experienced. Dad rested against a building until it passed.

My father didn’t exaggerate. He had survived the Great Depression and World War II. He had survived his father leaving the family apartment to live with another woman. What had it been like to endure such things? And now this.

When I returned to school the next day, a group of girls in my class surrounded me. “What happened?’ My voice cracked as I told them the story.

I was not yet 12.

Dad was sentenced to six weeks in Michael Reese Hospital, typical of heart disease treatment in the ’50s. It felt like a prison term to me and for me, a long one.

Kids couldn’t visit. Nor do I remember any phone calls. Just waiting. We wrote letters. I still have one telling Milton Stein that my brothers and I had saved some money to buy him a present. 

It must have meant something to him, because he saved it.

It was formal, though. I stuffed down my feelings.

Dad was a funny guy. He joked with his three sons—me, Ed, and Jack—about his alleged baseball career and imaginary time playing for the Chicago Cubs. 

Dad claimed he was so dependable that his nickname became “Rain or Shine Milt Stein,” a man who could compete for the team, pitching every day, no matter what. 

My brothers and I share the joke and much else. Dependability, keeping promises, and working hard. That was the creed of our father and his sons.

He returned to our house. At least someone who looked like him came back home, but I wondered. I needed to ask. He’d become like a Christmas gift in a dented box, portending something disappointing if you tore it open.

Dad and I were in the front room when I raised the question. I faced the street, and he sat on the couch with his back to Talman Avenue.

I was direct. 

I wanted to understand why he wasn’t himself. 

“I’m afraid,” he said.

Of that quotation, I am sure. Of the wisdom of honesty in that moment, I am less sure.

He offered more. Dad was scared of another heart attack. Scared of dying. He said this matter-of-factly, but the message carried doom, like a guided missile headed for the heart of his firstborn. Heart disease, the real kind, killed, and men his age all but piled up on the street. At least that was my sense of it.

From then on, mom started reading magazines on diet and disease prevention. From then on, my dad took nitroglycerin pills every day.

The Stein boys did neither, but took their fear to school with them. Every day. 

When “Rain or Shine” walked upstairs for the Western Avenue elevated train arrival, he stopped long enough to take a nitroglycerin tablet. With time, I wondered whether it continued to serve a purpose beyond mere reassurance.

Nonetheless, we all—sort of—tried to forget about pop’s vulnerability to heart disease: put it in a box that opened, but not as often as it had. Medical science learned a few things, too, and the death rate from the ailment declined. 

Still, when you love an aging parent, something I have become myself, there is the internal whisper reminding you of the Grim Reaper. This strange creature, a personification of death, has been a recurring subject in painting since the 14th century.

The dangerous fellow is out there, always waiting, his scythe ready to perform its inescapable task. In Dad’s case, the news came from my brother Eddie, who announced to Jack and me that the irreplaceable one was gone. 

The patriarch of our family made it to 88, a long life he defined as happy when he and I created his four-hour videotaped oral history at 75.

A friend who celebrates Hanukkah tells me that lighting the menorah (candelabrum) candles during the current Jewish holiday, as well as lighting candles before every Sabbath, is both a commandment and a good deed.

On the same day as the Bondi Beach massacre, December 14, people came to the village hall in her town on a cold night to celebrate the holiday, but carrying the heartbreak.

The rabbi acknowledged the crowd’s pain while reminding them that they must never give in to despondency. He told the assemblage that the reason for lighting the menorah for eight nights—by adding another flame each evening—was to reinforce its message: never give in to the darkness. Increase the light instead.

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The first image includes my parents. The second photo from the left, first row: Jack, Gerry, and Eddie. Second row, from the left, my parents, again.