I once asked my father why he was out of the house so much and he said, Because I take care of sick kids. If I get sick, will you come home more and take care of me? I asked. He didn’t know what to say. He teared up.
A few years later, when I was seven, we waited in a long line for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Inside the theater, one of my older sisters outmaneuvered me to end up beside my father on the aisle. But after the lights went down and we were transported to a South American jungle, his pager began beeping; the hospital was contacting him with an emergency. As Indiana Jones was outrunning a boulder, pediatric urologist Ronald Rabinowitz was charging up the aisle to reach the lobby payphone.
That’s when I first understood. My father was an action hero.
✶
His specialization in urology came in handy for me the summer I turned thirteen. I was squeamish walking to a classmate’s backyard party because there had been an unsolved ax murder in that suburban neighborhood a few years before. At the party, Bradley was goofing off. He was big for his age with sandy, floppy hair and a constant smile. Someone I’d known forever. Another boy pushed Bradley and he dropped dramatically onto the lawn. I extended my hand to help him up. As he took it and stood, he rammed his knee between my legs so hard that I couldn’t even gasp, could only inhale stratospheres of air.
Bradley and the guys doubled over with laughter while everything in me sought to crumple into a heap of laundry and moan, but I feigned nonchalance and stood because of one thing: girls. There were girls at this party and they were looking our way. Girls were the reason Bradley kneed me. I’d seen enough Wild, Wild World of Animals programs to know that male bighorn sheep kick rivals below the belt in front of lady sheep. I was no bighorn. I was 4’6” with arms the circumference of broomsticks.
Somehow I survived the party. Somehow I walked home. I lay in bed and watched the late afternoon shadows move across the lime green walls of my room. My mother must’ve reached my father at work because soon he was at my bedside. He asked me a few questions, examined me, and proclaimed, You have what is termed a scrotal contusion. Each day you’ll feel better than the day before. Then he replaced my melting baggie of ice cubes with a fresh one.
Bradley and I were in classes together for the ensuing five years and I never confronted him. But long after I could again walk upright, I worried I’d lost the ability to procreate. This belief was exacerbated by the girls in my high school who used to tell me I would be a good father, which meant they thought I was nice but preferred to date asshole guys that kneed nice guys in the crotch and prevented them from becoming fathers.
I held onto this reproductive worry for many years. When the French teacher that everyone liked went on mat leave, I thought of Bradley and his big fat knee. When I moved to New York and gave up my seat on the subway for women who were showing, I thought of Bradley and his big fat knee. When I watched the rerun of Seinfeld where George discovers the woman he’s been dating has missed her period and exclaims, My boys can swim!, I thought of Bradley and his big fat knee. Twenty years later, when my wife told me she was pregnant—no, when she was far along with the pregnancy—no, when I was the first person to set eyes on my daughter in the maternity ward of the regrettably named Overlook Hospital, I thought, one last time, of Bradley and his big fat knee. The point is, never help an eighth-grade boy off the ground.
The point is, I should have asked my father. He would have given me the truth, calm and measured, possibly as an unvarnished percentage footnoted by a recent peer-reviewed study.
The point is, I could not bear to ask. I was not emotionally strong enough to hear my odds. Not at age thirteen. Not at age thirty-three. Even though it was because of my father that I never wanted to become a doctor, it was also because of my father that I always wanted to be a father.
✶
Do nice guys get what they deserve? What do they deserve? In the 1980s, nice guys had no choice but to play the long game. The public school system was built for jocks, cheerleaders, and adolescents with clear skin. People like me had to maneuver through those hallways with humor and tubes of Clearasil. We simply had to build character.
I had numerous experiences scurrying from bullies. The first one occurred at synagogue. My best friend and I were running an errand for our Hebrew school teacher which took us through the bowels of the building.
That’s the guy who lives here, my friend whispered to me the way seven-year-olds do. His voice carried and the custodian whirled around, grabbed the staircase railing above us, and yanked his body forward so violently I thought he might vault over and tackle us.
What the hell you looking at? he asked.
We were too young to know the term rhetorical question but we knew it was a rhetorical question. We also knew to run.
Later, I didn’t tell my mother because she would have done something about it. I didn’t tell my father because he would have told my mother. Or maybe I didn’t tell my father because, like me, he’s a nice guy. He survived high school by doing homework for football players and getting paid in protection. He never yelled at me or my sisters or my mother. He has always been patient. Mild mannered. There’s only one incongruent moment I can retrieve from my memory. Only one time I can think of when he did not act like a nice guy.
✶
Recently a festschrift was held to celebrate my father’s legendary career in pediatric urology. A hundred people showed up. Current and former colleagues, each with funny anecdotes, presented brief papers. They made jokes about kidneys and there was TMI on prepubescent UTIs. Over lunch, he and his pals continued their tête-à-têtes on testicular torsion. A festschrift is a frat party for academics.
Because I hadn’t seen many of these people for forty years, my experience was commensurate with Proust’s petite madeleine. I was transported back to sprawling Fourth of July celebrations where adults asked, Are you going to be a doctor like your daddy? I considered applying for the job until I was six and, rummaging through my father’s briefcase, came across 35mm Kodachrome slides of surgeries in progress. Let’s leave it at that.
✶
There was another reason why I opted not to become a doctor like my daddy. He was the only pediatric urologist in town, so he left for work before I woke, shuttled between two hospitals throughout the day, and returned home after my bedtime. Unbeknownst to me, when he would come to give me a goodnight kiss while I was fast asleep, I’d stick out my tongue at him. This went on night after night. He and my mother would sometimes switch who came in first, but I never gave her raspberries. It was Pavlovian or something. At some point, my mother told me about it with some glee. My father was getting his comeuppance while she was receiving overdue credit for running the show at home.
Another time, I came home from elementary school with a crayon drawing I made of the family. The proportions were way off. I drew myself the biggest, followed by my mother and my older sisters. Where’s your father? my mother asked with a giggle. I had included our fish tank but forgotten the guy who bought the fish.
My father’s job as a surgeon meant that he was absent, invisible, worked long hours in a mysterious adult world while my childhood operated independently. By contrast, when my mother was a child, her father was frequently out of work and monetary worries were grappled with in front of her. When her father was home, his mind was elsewhere—on money. I had heard of the word poverty, even in connection to her, but because my father had done his job so well, I remained ignorant of its meaning. Just as it is possible to be present without being fully present, it is also possible to be absent without being absent.
✶
Nestled deep in my consciousness is a memory of all his mannerisms. The particular way he clears his throat or the measured delivery of his dry punchlines or how he says hello—Greetings!—as if he is, I don’t know, a space alien. I could be anywhere in the house and hear his briefcase clunk against the storm door as he came home on the weekends around dinnertime.
Through the mercurial temperaments of my childhood and the moodiness of my teenage years, my father was even keeled. His calmness was grounding. Nothing seemed insurmountable when he walked through the door. I recently asked him how he could go through life so placidly and he said, What’s the point in worrying? It’s a fine way to exist. Just incongruent with the central tenants of casual Judaism.
When I heard his briefcase, I would drop my diary or my action figures or my book and race to the mudroom to watch him remove his shoes and then follow him to the bathroom and wait outside the door and then follow him downstairs to his windowless basement study where his important papers overtook the floor like kudzu vines. He would talk into his dictaphone while I played with his Air Force dog tags. Sometimes I’d crawl under his desk—just a door laid horizontally upon two filing cabinets—and watch his pant legs move as he shifted positions in his chair. Then, I would follow him to the kitchen, where he’d give my mother a peck on the cheek and she’d serve dinner.
When Dad gets a partner, she would tell my sisters and me, he won’t be on call so much. When Dad gets a partner, he’ll be home more, she would say.
But upstate New York was a tough sell. People around me commonly joked, We only have two seasons: winter and construction. A local band summed it up best with the song “I Live Where It’s Gray.” Climate was the culprit. Climate kept my father from us, forced him to be on his feet for so long in the operating room that he had to wear graduated compression stockings to prevent blood clots. Climate is what prevented pediatric surgeons from parachuting into town, Mary Poppins-style. When Dad gets a partner, my mother repeated like a mantra.
✶
Traditionally, Jews not do not “work” on religious holidays. My father was always doing work, though. If he wasn’t in the operating room or in the office seeing patients, he was in our basement dictating charts and co-writing articles for The Journal of Urology.
Work, in the Jewish sense, can be as simple as flicking on a light switch. However, I grew up Reform, a more hassle-free branch of Judaism. We didn’t worry about kippot or kosher laws. Even our rabbi drove to shul on Shabbat. The central tenet was to do good deeds. Be present for others and celebrate their successes. Give generously with your money, your time, and your heart. Be a good person.
And it’s best to be one’s best self on Yom Kippur. This is the rare holiday that brings the entire congregation out of the woodwork. The culmination of twenty-five hours of fasting and self-reflecting and atoning for sins. As the shofar sounds at sundown, God makes the final decision about all the schlubs that will be sealed in the Book of Life through the next year. Yom Kippur is not the day to impale some schmuck on the grille of your car.
The synagogue had a large lot a considerable distance away from the building. It also had a handful of parking spots close to the sanctuary entrance reserved for the rabbi and doctors on call. My father always parked there because he was always on call. His pager would go off in synagogue—he had it on the quietest setting—and he’d abandon us for an emergency. On several occasions, my mother and sisters and I would hitch a ride home with another family, converting their vehicle into a clown car.For the High Holy Days of 1981, a chochem in the synagogue addressed nonexistent parking problems by tapping the custodian to be in charge of the lot. After all, the guy lived in the caretaker apartment inside the synagogue and wasn’t Jewish, so he wouldn’t have to commute or break any religious laws. This reasoning did not factor in the custodian’s hair-trigger temper.
When my father turned into a spot in the doctors’ section of the parking lot and this man blocked the way, I did not anticipate an exchange of pleasantries. With self-importance, the custodian rapped on the glass of the driver’s side window, though my father was already rolling it down.
Can’t park here, he said.
My father handed him the blue parking permit he’d received from the synagogue. The guy held the card between two fingers like a cigarette, glanced at it, thrust it back.
Can’t park here, he repeated.
I’m on call, my father tried to explain. With the hospital. I’m a doctor.
The man smirked and stepped away from the window. He shook his head and said, loudly, What are you, a foot doctor? Then, belly laughs from the two idle men working with him who were holding orange dunce caps under their arms.
Though I did not carry a pad and pencil, I was always taking notes on my father. I wanted to be ready for those moments in the future when I was the one behind the wheel.
My father’s mood shift matched our car’s gear shift. We rolled forward, but the custodian stepped in front of the bumper and slammed his hands on the hood, forcing my father to brake.
Can’t park here, Foot Doctor, the custodian shouted.
My father revved the engine like he was a rebel without a cause, though James Dean drove a svelte Porsche 550 Spyder. We were in a 3500-pound Chevy Impala that consumed a gallon of gas every fifteen miles and was seventeen-and-a-half feet long.
What are you doing? my mother was asking my father between revs. Technically a rhetorical question.
My sisters and I shouted for him to turn around. He let the car’s revving speak for him and even lurched forward a few inches, but the guy would not budge, cared more about not backing down in front of the guys than becoming pavement schmutz.
Ron, it’s Yom Kippur, my mother said.
He made one more rev before a making a U-turn. Actually, a K-turn. A laborious more-than-three-point turn because, as already documented, the car was the size of a megamouth shark. All the while these guys had a good laugh.
We were late—my father was always running late—so the only available spots were at the ass end of the lot. I couldn’t shake the sound of those men laughing. The walk to the sanctuary was so long. Circumlocutory, too, because we chose a path that avoided the custodian. As we stepped to the curb beside the synagogue, I watched the custodian in the distance wave a car through to the doctors’ lot without any trouble.
That stinging feeling of being wronged was not something I could let go of, even on Yom Kippur. Even when I think of that moment now, I want it to be that my father runs over the custodian’s toes and forces him to receive urgent care from an actual podiatrist. While the custodian writhes in pain, a foot doctor (also banished to the regular lot) has to make the long walk to his car to retrieve his Gladstone bag.
My father was too much of a mensch to complain about the incident. The weight of his word could easily send this insignificant man to the unemployment line. Still, that’s the last memory I have of the custodian. By the next Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the doctors’ section reverted to the honor code and my father, always on call, always found a spot.
✶
In due course, sun-shunning reinforcements did arrive in Rochester. I could tell my father’s new partner was a pediatric urologist because he wore a stethoscope like an ascot and carried a briefcase full of perverted medical slides.
However, even with the addition of this doctor, my father’s presence in the household did not increase. Instead of attending parent-teacher conferences, he was repairing blocked kidneys. The night my poster on coin collecting won honorable mention at the middle school science fair, some child from Churchville had conspired to have an incarcerated inguinal hernia. And soon-to-be circumcised infants required my father’s attention more than the opening faceoff of my Jewish Community Center floor hockey playoff game.
For years my best friend’s father teased me about my father’s absences. At T-ball games he’d amble down from the bleachers when I was in the on-deck circle. He’d make a big show of looking around before saying, I carved time out of my busy schedule to come out here for my son, but I don’t see your old man anywhere. I’d smile, go along with the joke like a nice guy, pretend I had not just been kicked in the nuts. Then I’d strike out at the plate.
✶
And then I was out of the house, and then I was out of state, and then I was out of country, and then my father was making retirement plans. When he was in his fifties and had two partners in his practice, he spoke about retiring at age sixty-four-and-a-half. In his sixties, the magic number was sixty-eight-and-a-half. Then seventy.
When my wife Sara and I had our first child and made a will, my father volunteered himself and my mother to raise our daughter in the event of our simultaneous demise.
You mean you want Mom to raise another kid on her own? I asked.
No, no, I’d retire, he said.
He was sixty-four-and-a-half at that point and had already pushed his retirement date to seventy-five.
By the time my daughter was ten and my boys were seven and four, my father decided to do a slow phase-out. He planned to go to half time by the time he was seventy-seven, even though he was down to one partner at that point and they were busier than ever. Most urologists worked with adults, which was far more profitable, so parents from all over the state brought their ailing children to see pediatric urologists. In addition, my father and his partner did not turn away patients, no matter their insurance situation, so other doctors were always sending indigent cases their way.
When he turned seventy-seven, the COVID pandemic swept through the world. Hospital administrators panic-dialed retired doctors much younger than my father to keep the healthcare system from collapsing. Through all of that he worked full time—even took a volunteer pay cut to help the hospital stay solvent. My father is eighty-two now and still seeing patients daily. He had prostate surgery recently and wore a T-shirt to the hospital that reads, I can’t take a leak. (It’s an ad for a plumbing valve company.) The day following his surgery he was at his department’s early-morning staff meeting before running errands.
It had all been a ruse. This talk of partners. Of retirement. He kept moving his own goalposts. Even if there were fifty pediatric urologists in town, he still was going to work those dawn-to-dusk weeks.
✶
My father claims he is not smart. Usually, when he says this, he contrasts himself with his younger brother, who earned a perfect score on his SATs. I’m no Einstein, my father says. Just hardworking.
He has the work ethic of a first-generation American, even though the actual first-generation American in our family was my father’s father, Grandpa Mac. They lived in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. My late grandfather owned a butcher shop fifteen minutes away in Carrick, worked seven days a week, and took one vacation a year. The Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend, the family would stuff into their 1939 black DeSoto sedan and drive 140 miles to Presque Isle State Park on Lake Erie. Grandpa Mac would sleep Saturday and Sunday while my father and his brothers and cousins played on the sandy shores, and then they’d drive home Monday afternoon.
My grandfather sold the store in the late 1960s, but, as my father puts it, he flunked retirement. He was too restless and too gregarious. He began working at Northumberland Meat Market in Squirrel Hill, closer to home. When Northumberland went out of business, he became a vitamin consultant for a General Nutrition Center in a seedy area and worked there into his early eighties, kibbitzing with customers and foiling robberies. He got into health food. Instead of pulling marshmallows out of his breast pockets, as had been his habit in years past, he would treat us grandkids to carob chips. It was extremely disappointing.
On the surface, my grandfather and father did not seem related. The more senior of the two was tall, bald, and the life of the party. The junior had a great head of hair, was slighter in build, and deferred to larger personalities in the room. But both were good with a knife. And when my grandfather gave fatherly advice, my father listened.
The advice was: Never retire.
I decided to break the cycle. I decided to find a job that would not keep me away from my family for long stretches. I became a public school teacher for a stretch, but it turns out the best job is to homeschool my kids. The best job is to use cracks of time to write on portentous topics such as what it’s like not to become a pediatric urologist.
✶
At the festschrift, no one mentioned the irony that the son of a butcher would grow up to become a surgeon. That my grandfather’s cleaver and knife evolved into more precise instruments: the scalpel and the forceps. I have no real inheritance. No physical tools, anyway. All those cutting instruments have been internalized.
A large contingent of the people who presented or gave toasts had been trained by my father. They really knew him. They knew his one-liners, knew his habitual tardiness, knew his eternal patience. One young doctor showed examples of the many drafts he went through before submitting a peer-reviewed paper—each with more meticulous markups than the previous—until he mischievously submitted an earlier draft, to which my father had written at the end, Nice try. I couldn’t laugh with the crowd. I thought of all the hours these residents had spent with him. I thought of all those guys I grew up with who went into business with their fathers. I thought of myself at six years old, rummaging through his briefcase. If I had flashed forward to this moment, would I have made more of an effort to align our life goals?
Many of the speakers were thoughtful enough to bring up my mother. That his achievements could not have been possible if she had not handled everything else, especially when my sisters and I were little and needed the closest attention. And indeed, when I think of so-called great men who had families, they only could become legends because of their wives.
There’s a long tradition of this. No way Leo Tolstoy could have penned Anna Karenina had Sonya Tolstoy not held down the fort. Even the Buddha, according to tradition, could only give nirvana a shot after he left his wife and newborn son. Tom Brady retired from football in his forties to spend forty days with his wife and children before famously unretiring. By the midpoint of the ensuing football season, he was also famously unmarried.
Albert Einstein had little appetite for domestic life, as well. Around the time he was perfecting his general theory of relativity, when his sons were ten and four, he wrote this letter to his then-wife Mileva: You will see to it (1) that my clothes and linen are kept in order, (2) that I am served three regular meals a day in my room. … You will expect no affection from me. … You must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to.
My father definitely is no Einstein. But just as Tolstoy was destined to write long-winded novels and the Buddha was destined to meditate and Brady was destined to fling an oddly shaped ball and Einstein was destined to theorize while someone else did his dry cleaning, my father was destined to take care of sick kids.
✶
If a bighorn sheep gets kicked in the nuts enough times, he will leave the procreating to the assholes. But if you are a human and a nice guy and you can make it to eighty-two, you can see the arc of your life. You can see that you are a model for your children. You can acknowledge that you made a difference in the world.
So what I am trying to understand is why one of the enduring memories of my childhood is the time my father completely lost his shit. This man whose heartbeat never rises unless he is playing tennis or softball or watching the Steelers. This man whom so many people depend upon to make the right call. This man who always comes through.
This memory stays with me because it was the first time I saw my father not just as my father, but as a man matched against other men. And I suspected, in some small way, that the attributes I admired most about him—his humor, generosity, and dependability—didn’t matter out here in the world. In the world there were men who looked at those traits as weaknesses. Men who solved their problems with blunt instruments. It took a while for me to get used to being a father myself. And then, when my baby became a toddler and began to speak, began to call me Dad, that was also an adjustment. The very idea of occupying the same name, the same role as my father. But I never felt the need to compare myself with him, to participate in some sort of rivalry. Which is welcome news because his curriculum vitae is seventy pages long. But I do occasionally look at myself in relation to other men, and I wonder when my kids look at me whether they see the same vulnerability that I saw in my father.
✶
Quantum superposition is when one particle occupies two spaces at once. Einstein did not believe this could ever be the case. He thought you could only be in one place at one time. But it turns out he was wrong. The physicists that followed him were able to prove the existence of superposition.
Recently I tried to get hold of my father. He returned my call at the end of the day. I’m three time zones to the left, so when I answered at ten at night, I understood he was phoning at one a.m. Greetings, he said. The office had been a zoo and he’d been in surgery most of the day. We talked about my kids and health stuff and all the offseason moves the Steelers made. He was optimistic about next season, which is the same thing he said leading up to last season and the one before that.
What time are you getting up tomorrow? I asked at the end. The usual time, he said, which meant six o’clock.
There was no pressing need to get to me as soon as he had a spare moment. It could have waited for another day. But he had called me back in the wee hours. That’s when I finally realized he had not chosen work over family. He had chosen work and family over sleep. My father believes in quantum superposition.
✶
First, he was a soda jerk at his uncle’s apothecary out in Pitcairn. Then, a pinsetter at Beacon Lanes—the kid who would reset the bowling pins one at a time after they were knocked down. Sometimes he’d have to dodge bowling balls thrown prematurely by immature boys. He also worked in his father’s butcher shop. Later, newly married and enrolled at the medical school downtown, he and my mother lived near the cluster of hospitals.
It was the 1960s. A rough neighborhood. A lot of trauma cases. Members of what the doctors dubbed The Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club. Because the medical personnel patched everyone up and were thus neutral, they were usually left unmolested. So when he was walking to work or heading from one hospital to the other, he wore his white lab coat. Doctors had earned the respect of the neighborhood.
For my grandfather and great-grandfather, hard work meant eighteen-hour days of hauling and cutting meat. For my father, it meant long days of studying and stitching flesh together. It meant serving in the Air Force in the early 1970s and doing two fellowships in one year to rapidly advance his knowledge and skills. It meant living a crepuscular life, only seeing family on the day’s fringes.
I think those are significant factors in determining what set off my father on Yom Kippur. Sure, low blood sugar from all the fasting had something to do with it. Being laughed at is never a good feeling. And, of course, witnessing an insignificant man lord his tenuous position of authority over others played a role. But what really did it was that the custodian had no respect for the health of others, was callously putting people’s health at risk, did not seem to care that if my father was paged—which happened with regularity—and did not reach the hospital quick enough, it would prolong a child’s agony, or worse.
When my father had returned my call late at night, one of the things we talked about was that particular Yom Kippur. I hadn’t brought it up in decades. He told me the custodian originally had been hired by the big-hearted synagogue president as a charity case. The custodian was married and had a child and a criminal record and had trouble finding work. But during his radioactive tenure he had behaved abusively toward many people, including his family, and was eventually let go.
I would meet the custodian in other forms throughout my life, a person with a shitty sense of humor who used slight leverage over others in overtly cruel or underhanded ways. My first year in college he appeared in my dormitory as an ungulate of a freshman who pinned me against the wall and threatened me over a triviality. During my time abroad he became the roommate who put me in a chokehold after I accidentally ran the hot water in the kitchen sink, chilling his shower. Once, he even transformed into an administrator who caressed my face when I requested a day off. I did nothing in moments like these. Did not tell the boy to fuck off, did not crotch-kick the roommate, did not tell my boss to keep her hands to herself. Whenever I faced the custodian, I lost.
My father does not remember any of it: the revving of the engine, the pleas from my mother and sisters and me, the jeering laughter of the guys in the background, our demoralizing denouement through the parking lot. According to him, the custodian made some insulting remark and blocked the way, but my father rolled down the window, told him to get his hand off the car, and drove forward into the space he deserved.
✶✶✶✶
Aaron Rabinowitz’s debut poetry collection, Suggestions, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press. He is the winner of Meridian’s Short Prose Prize and PRISM international’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest. His essays are in journals such as Longreads, Subtropics, The Normal School, and Prairie Fire, and he has a notable essay selection in The Best American Essays 2025. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Grain, Chautauqua, Passages North, and elsewhere.
✶
Dmitry Samarov was born in Moscow, USSR in 1970. He immigrated to the US with his family in 1978. He got in trouble in 1st grade for doodling on his Lenin Red Star pin and hasn’t stopped doodling since. He graduated with a BFA in painting and printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. He drove a cab—first in Boston, then after a time, in Chicago—which led to the publication of his illustrated work memoirs Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and second cabbie book from a press not worth mentioning. He has designed and published six books since. He writes dog portraits and paints book reviews in Chicago, Illinois.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
Another Chicago Magazine 