How my father and I started a new life

When I was 13, my mother learned she had multiple sclerosis. At that point, she could no longer drive, dress, or walk alone. My father became her sole caretaker and she was less than grateful.

When she rang the buzzer, it was never there fast enough. When he brought her a glass of water, there was never the right amount of ice. He even wore long sleeves in the summer because she scratched his arms furiously when he helped her to the bathroom.

They eventually moved from Long Island to Fort Myers, Florida so she could have a house with no stairs and a driveway with no snow. But in Florida, my father had no friends, so I worried how he would cope with the lack of personal purpose when she was gone.

One thing made me worry less. As a teenager, my father had been proclaimed a child prodigy by his art teacher. He had traveled more than an hour round trip from Brooklyn to attend Manhattan’s High School of Industrial Art and then Pratt Institute.

He became an art teacher and had some exhibitions of his oil paintings in libraries and galleries in Queens and Long Island. But when my mother fell ill, his creative life came to a halt.

As my mother’s condition worsened, she was admitted to an assisted living facility, where my father was her constant bedfellow. Once, while coming from Los Angeles, where I worked as a freelance writer, I was wandering the halls and heard a patient yelling at a nurse that he was being “micromanaged.”

I had a strange thought: Do single-celled organisms complain under a microscope that they “microphone micro-managed”? I scribbled it in the notebook I kept in my pocket. When I returned to my mother’s room, she was dozing. Remembering my father’s love of art, I quietly asked him if he would be interested in drawing a one-panel cartoon.

My father was not much of a talker. My mother’s overbearing personality had forced him into a shell—getting more than a few words out of him was rare. When he taught me how to drive, I had asked if it was more important to focus on the cars in front of me or the cars behind me.

“Both,” he said, then fell silent for the next three miles. Getting even the shortest conversations out of him was like playing the lottery.

He didn’t give a definitive answer to my cartoon question. I asked him again the next day. Still no real response. Finally, I dropped the idea of ​​working together and went home.

I understood it. He already had enough on his plate.

About a week later, my computer pinged with an email from my then nearly 80-year-old father—with an attachment. I downloaded the file and there it was. The microphone micromanaging cartoon I asked him to draw. The positioning of one cell scolding another cell: “Move your membrane to the edge of the slide, please!” was exactly as I described it. His style was reminiscent of the 1950s; clean, simple lines with no wasted energy. It was perfect.

We started doing four to five one-panel cartoons a week. I’d come up with a series of ideas, email them to him, argue with him about where the joke was, and fight for a swear word if the cartoon wouldn’t work without that joke.

My father had many forbidden topics: no foul language, no sex, no politics. Comic book heroes were a favorite subject of his, and we made a series called ‘Superheroes when their moms are around’.

Here’s what a typical idea emailed to my dad would look like:

We see a person drowning in the ocean screaming, “Help me, Aquaman!”

Aquaman, his mother by his side, stands on the edge of the sand and calls back, ‘Sorry! I just ate. I can’t go in the water for another half hour.”

My mom loved watching the cartoons as much as we enjoyed making them. Sadly, she wasn’t around for very much.

After burying her, my father was driven into the land of unknowns. When an elderly person’s spouse dies, there are often two paths to choose: to give up on life or to reinvent oneself. I was determined to make sure my father chose the latter.

I started posting our cartoons on social media and a (very) small following followed. I then started a website where I would repost them. The process of emailing the cartoon ideas to my dad, talking on the phone daily, and then providing feedback and tweaks to his art gave us purpose. By then most of my magazine work had dried up, as had my television jobs. Worse than the financial blow I had received was the creative slump.

Even though we lived 3,000 miles apart, my dad and I grew closer than we had ever been. He began to relax his litany of taboos and, with some pressure, now covered almost every subject except politics. Occasionally he even pitched his ideas to me, almost all of which had no punchline. Conversely, I would have a go at drawing, but the resulting art was awful. We needed each other to make this work.

The art also motivated my father in other ways. He joined Overeaters Anonymous, a gym, several book clubs, and a temple. He eventually started dating.

Drawing gave him confidence. Besides, he told me that if his future date laughed at our cartoons, it ticked a lot of boxes. I started coming up with more relationship-oriented content. He especially liked the caption “Bad Blind Dates” which features a porcupine sitting in a restaurant across from a balloon twisted into the shape of a dog.

Shortly after my father’s 85th birthday, I received a call from my sister Patti, who lives around the corner from him. “Daddy’s in the hospital,” she said.

He had had a heart attack. I got on the next plane to Fort Myers to see him before it was too late. He was snoring in his hospital room. On the back of his tray of food, I saw a napkin with some scribbles on it. The caption read, “Surgical Luxury.” The drawing was too cluttered to decipher the joke, if any.

But it gave me an idea.

“Dad, how about this for a cartoon,” I said when he woke up. “The worst cardiologist in the world. Then we see a doctor operating on someone, holding up his damaged heart as if it were a trout and saying, ‘This heart looks awful. Good thing everyone has two!’”

My father laughed. Eleven days later I was able to drive him home.

The first thing he did after I closed his front door was dragging his oxygen tank to his drawing board. The day of his heart attack, he’d been working on a cartoon of ours about how it was impossible to say who was the better harmonica player—with two men each holding their hands, instrumentless, over their mouths. My dad was determined to finish it that day, which he did, even when the plastic oxygen cord and his drawing hand got tangled up.

When my father regained his strength, he was overjoyed with cartoons. He often carried a folder of his favorites to show to new friends at the synagogue, post office, and Silver Sneakers yoga class. For decades, his artificial muscles had shrunk, but when he rebuilt them, the enthusiasm of his teenage self returned.

Then last April I felt lightheaded, with strange palpitations – something I had never experienced as a devout athlete. I went to the doctor who sent me to the hospital, where I ended up spending the night on my 20th wedding anniversary.

The next morning, seconds after I checked my email, five nurses walked in. My resting heart rate had risen to 187. They assumed I had had a heart attack. I explained that I had just received an email saying that my father and I had sold our first cartoon to The New Yorker.

The nurses didn’t seem to understand the magnitude of the situation.

After almost a year of waiting — and nearly twelve years since my dad and I started working together — our first cartoon appeared in the magazine two months ago (and three weeks before my dad’s 90th birthday). He may be the oldest new cartoonist at The New Yorker.

He paints, draws and talks so much now that I have to pretend to get another phone call to escape his exuberance. If he asked me if I was more proud of the cartoon or the fact that it changed his life, I’d say, “Both.”