the importance of love

September 14, 2025

A Gift to Last a Ten-year-old’s Lifetime

On a recent visit to the Chicago Writers Museum, I conceived the idea of giving my eldest grandson the gift of a lifetime—something small, forever to keep. 

An exhibit featured brief short stories by named authors including Sibylla Nash. I pressed a button on an upright mechanism, similar to an electronic ticket machine. It spooled out a slender, two-foot-long paper containing all of her tale, The Big BOO!

No charge.

Ten-year-old X is a voracious reader, and the story suited him, but it wasn’t the yarn that made it a distinctive present. My handwritten note beside the title on the narrow page offered this:

For X from Grandpa. To be read to your brother Z, your children, and your grandchildren!

Yes, I was thinking ahead, but looking back, as well.

My own grandfather was on my mind when I inscribed this request to a boy I love. Leo Fabian was an imperfect yet loving man whom I last saw when I was a teenager. Mom and I went to the hospital, knowing the dreadful speed of his life’s clock and the shortness of his time.

Grandpa sat upright in his bed, watching TV, but his still blankness suggested a man defeated, the loser in the battle with Death, a larger than Life opponent with an undefeated record.

An artist would have needed only one color to paint Leo Fabian’s likeness that day—a gray man of gray hair and skin, with a face robbed of expression.

My mother entered first, but when I appeared a few steps behind her, his face came to life. He held out his arms and we hugged each other. One of those indelible memories you relive but for the touch. The touch you want more than anything.

I own faded photos of him, but I don’t have any videos or recordings of his voice. In their absence, it will be harder to tell my grandchildren what made him important to me.

No one else is left to do it, as my brothers were too young to know him well.

My grandad and I worked in proximity to each other at my uncle’s business during the days I had an after-school job. This son of Romania crossed the Atlantic to come to our promising land. He spoke several languages, and I listened to him use them. I recognized the charm, wit, and joy he carried and carried him through much of his life.

And I knew he loved me.

On occasion, he used the phrase “kick the bucket” well before he was inches away from the metaphor turning real. An event now long past.

Leo Fabian would be proud and happy that I think of him and pleased with this quiet honor. Writing his name, bringing it to life, and saying it out loud for nothing more than his remembered love. Such is part of a Jewish custom.

I wish the world permitted me to reach back in time and show you how he walked, spoke, and joked. His animated smile would have taken you in, with its sense of mischief, and the scent of the aftershave he applied to his cheeks. The twinkle in his eye, his imposing height, the width of his wrists, and the strength in his hands all said this was a man. 

Not the bad stuff in his life, just the best in him.

The record of my life is more comprehensive than my grandfather’s, yet whatever is told or shown of it, whenever I am gone, at the end, love is what matters.

James Lucas wrote this in a Substack essay on September 11, 2025:

So many of us drift through life as if wrapped in a fog, caught in the monotony of routine, numbed by a rhythm that feels imposed rather than chosen. We move like sleepwalkers, bound by the weight of what we think we should be doing.

And yet, it’s only when we truly grasp that our time is slipping away that the most beautiful part of us rises to the surface. Perhaps it’s because, when everything is stripped down to its essence, the noise disappears… and the thing that remains is love.

Love as the purest truth of who we are. Love is the only weapon we’ve been given against the cruelty of life. 

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The painting is titled “Old Man and Grandson” by Ghirlandaio. The cropped section shown here was done by Frank Vincentz and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is followed by a photo titled “Hand of Grandpa and Grandson” by Nikhil More. The source is the same.

 

May 15, 2022

An Unwritten Diary

Its title is All His Life. The book’s cover illustrates a beautiful baby boy with garlands hung above the newborn’s crib, topped with a ribbon sewed into and above the fabric.

The 9″ x 12″ object has a satin-like covering, perhaps rayon. For the time, the volume probably wasn’t cheap. A gift, I suspect.

The first printed page offered the following:

All his life
is written here.
In pictured prose
And records clear —
From Infant small
To manly state,
Are told events
Both small and great.

The hardcover was published in 1944, but I came along later.

This particular copy of All His Life was about me.

The pages are yellow now, despite the old plastic bag in which the volume has been housed. I’m not pristine myself.

After naming the doctors who delivered me, the date, and the time, Jeanette Stein wrote her first question to my dad:

Is he cute??

Dad’s answer:

Don’t expect too much at first!!

I guess Milton Stein never got trained as a cheerleader!

The remainder of the 60-page volume is filled with more babies and boys, in colorfully lithographed paintings by Edna Mason Kaula, and space for answers to more printed questions. My mother’s elegant handwriting is featured in each response.

For example, the 11th page lists early visitors to the hospital or our apartment in the Logan Square neighborhood. Many spaces instruct the writer to “paste snapshot here.” Two blank spots are shaped like feet, two others like hands, all awaiting a bit of ink on those body parts for an imprint of my tiny appendages.

Gerald M. Stein’s weight at birth remains readable, written with a fountain pen in the same deep blue used for all the other entries. The mass-market ballpoint variety was new and uncommon.

Then?

Nothing? The last entry listed my height.

No first words, date of an initial carriage ride, or timing of the first smile. No record of when I discovered my hands. Nor can one find evidence of when Gerry began to walk or photos of anyone else, though I have an album including many early childhood pictures.

The publisher’s plan anticipated the growing young man would take over entering information after a while. I didn’t even know my parents received such a present until they died in their 80s, over 20 years ago.

Empty room for entries included friends’ names, hobbies, teachers, favorite subjects, ambitions, and space for “my philosophy,” which makes me laugh. Not the kind of thoughtfulness I possessed as an infant or a young man.

Funny about that in another way, as well. I only began dedicated reading of philosophy at age 65.

There is a blank spot for adult fingerprints. Perhaps someone imagined I’d take up a life of crime! Ah, but the times were more innocent, as evidenced by a place for my social security number, making identity theft easier. That common form of illegality took more years to emerge.

I’m sure my birth overjoyed my parents. Moreover, I quelled my mom’s fears by turning into a good-looking, curly-haired little boy. Well-behaved, too, by all reports.

Why then no additional attention to the book? I imagine my folks had plenty to do, buying the required necessities, doctor’s appointments, teaching me language, and learning how to handle a vulnerable creature. Everything was the first time for them and for me.

Mom told my wife she didn’t understand how to put me into the crib and just dropped me in at first. I hope she bent over a bit. Guidance from her mother couldn’t have been helpful, given grandma’s tendency to criticize.

Still, I would like to know more about my first few years. My children might, too. The time and its history fled like a sandcastle’s erasure by the incoming tide. So are the names of my parents’ youthful friends and distant relatives in the surviving photos stored in the bedroom closet.

Some people look familiar, but not even nicknames or occupations remain, except perhaps in the memory of a few of their descendants. As Goethe expected, names vanish “like sound and smoke.”

Most of us hope to make a mark on the world, something to outlast our lifetime. Children and grandchildren are the only posterity I care much about. That and the continuation of a habitable planet, a republican form of democracy (also called a democratic republic), along with the presence of enough enlightened and committed people to make it so.

As I got older, having achieved more in my life than I imagined (though nothing of grand, historical importance), my ambition slipped away. No major loss. I never persuaded myself of the meaningful value of what the Western World was selling. I didn’t even try.

Beyond what I’ve said, I will add a couple of things you’ll find contradictory and add one more thought as a bonus:

  • I don’t find most well-educated people as rational as they think. And, yes, I include Dr. Stein in this group on occasion.
  • Despite humanity’s irrational pursuits, life can be delightful. I find myself smiling and laughing more than ever.
  • I take myself less seriously, too,

No advice today, just the above observations. Make of these statements as much or as little as you wish. And I should add, try not to carry grudges, but give as much love as you can muster. You will never run out.

Any other way will reduce your well-being and the happiness of those you care about — and those you will care about if you know them.

I guess there was some advice after all.