Finding Immortality
The Making of One American Family
by
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Trains hurtled by, big trains with bulging locomotives, not far from our house when I was a boy, and the thrill of running down to the tracks and waving to the engineer and getting a wave in return never wore thin.
If we were late and a long freight train was click-clacking by with its geography-lesson collection of cars, we were patient. Chances were, the brakeman would be out on the little platform of his red caboose, and he’d never let a good wave go unnoticed.
For years on end, my family, like millions of other American families, went out for Sunday afternoon automobile rides. Our destination was almost always the same place—the Howard Johnson’s near the beach. It didn’t take twenty-eight flavors to make me happy. I always ordered either black raspberry or maple walnut in a sugar cone, and they always had one or the other. Besides the ice cream, those Sunday rides were also prime opportunities for waving.
Kids waited atop overpasses, grinning and waving strenuously at strangers, taking pleasure when they got a wave back. You wouldn’t drive by a person walking down a country road without a wave, and people who didn’t practice this gentle protocol were deemed a little odd.
I didn’t think about it much then, but I do now. Waving is one of the great small gestures of mankind. It is the simplest act of animation, the almost effortless raising of an arm and movement of a hand. But what spectacular dividends it can bring!
A wave can stimulate a feeling of warmth, an atmosphere of civility. It can tell people they are attuned to a social order, partners in it, connected to one another, without imposing any unwanted intimacy. Waving is a way for two strangers to tell each other they’re both having fun and then move along. Waving communicates between people in a strange land, between infants and grandparents, between all generations.
In more recent years I began to notice that some people were reluctant to wave. During a ride in a speedboat, I waved toward other boats without getting any response. When we cruised slowly through a channel back to the dock I tried again, waving to other boaters and people on the banks. They looked away. I was disappointed and puzzled.
I saw some people standing on an overpass not so long ago, and when I waved, I got a glare in return. I drove behind a station wagon brimming with children. They were huddled in the outback, behind the seats. The motion of the car tumbled them gently about, like playful cubs. I waved. They did nothing. I figured they couldn’t see through the glare of the glass, so I waved again. They finally saw me. The startled cubs turned toward the front of the wagon and reported me to their parents.
I began to feel that a small but important practice was being lost. I also had an inspiration.
I rounded up my children—although one may borrow someone else’s children, or go alone, or take the grandchildren—and we headed down to the local railroad station.
We didn’t pay much attention to the electrified commuter trains, with their drivers sealed off in little compartments. We waited for an old diesel locomotive, fat and wide, to come hauling its train down the tracks.
When it approached, we began waving. The engineer leaned out of the high side window of his cab, spotted us and began waving back. As he got closer he waved harder, then reached back in and blew a handful of blasts on his whistle. As he passed I saw the pleasure on his face, as he must have seen it on mine. We waved to each other until he was gone, a quarter-mile beyond the station.
The children were so ecstatic they jumped up and down. They hugged each other and danced around the platform. Inside, I did the same.
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About the Book
In this lyrical and poignant book, Finding Immortality: The Making of One American Family, award-winning writer Herbert Hadad records the joys and sorrows of parenthood and, in so doing, opens a wide window into family life that is intimate and unmistakably American. The masterful prose of Finding Immortality conveys the true tale of one family confronting and triumphing over real issues, from infidelity and drink to mortality and racism. These universal themes provide a treasury of lessons for parents and all other admirers of fine writing to learn and enjoy. Here is what some readers have had to say about Finding Immortality:
“These gritty and flavorful essays address the emotional costs of virtue, faith, and true love.”
—Lawrence Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for The Looming Tower and staff writer for The New Yorker
“An elegant writer and story teller, Hadad spins tales as compelling as O’Henry’s. These are vivid, often roguish, portraits of the angst and pleasures of contemporary existence.”
—Selwyn Raab, author and retired New York Times reporter
“Kid boxer and life-long journalist Herb Hadad has been around. He’s seen a lot. Part Jew, part Arab, and all American, he loves his children, his wife, and his world. These stories will clear the mind and warm the heart.”
—Benjamin H. Cheever, novelist and journalist
“As strong as the bonds are among Herbert Hadad’s family members in these pellucid domestic narratives, he makes clear that as a father he has as many faults as the next guy. These are not stories about suburban Care Bears. Yet the episodes flow so smoothly that you imagine it must be easy to do this kind of writing. It isn’t.”
—Stephen S. Pickering, retired New York Times staff editor
“Hadad doesn’t blink, he doesn’t flinch. He looks straight at his subjects, sometimes in sorrow but mostly in joy, and tells the stories that dwell in most of us. Finding Immortality is a wonderful read.”
—the late Dennis Duggan, columnist, Newsday
“Herb Hadad distills with a great eye and a great ear what we care about and presents it brilliantly, with wit and understanding.”
—Dr. Myles Striar, professor of education emeritus, Boston University, writer, and translator
“His essays are personal and quirky, with an angle, a larger theme, that makes them stick and gives them an edge. The big test: as a reader it is hard not to care about Herbert Hadad and his family. I think of E.B. White here, how he could make his geese, his dachshund Fred, his neighbor with the plow, himself with doldrums, all off-center and yet universal, something we understood. He made his little world feel connected to ours, us to him. That’s the gift. I think Herbert does that.”
—Geraldine Van Dusen, editor and freelance journalist
About the Author
Herbert Hadad is an award-winning writer and former contributing reporter and essayist for The New York Times. He currently serves as a press officer for the U.S. Department of Justice and teaches writing for the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. He has lectured at prominent universities and appeared at Symphony Space, New York’s renowned performance center. His essays and articles have appeared in several national and regional publications, including The Times, the International Herald Tribune, Parenting, Reader’s Digest, New Choices, Lear’s, Yankee, The Rotarian, New York Daily News Magazine, Salt Water Sportsman, Writers’ Digest, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, Northeast, Northeastern University Magazine and Cornell Magazine. His work has also been collected in several books, including The Random House Guide to Writing and Sephardic American Voices: A 200-year Legacy of Literature (University Press of New England).
Among other distinctions: cited for a "notable essay" in the best-selling The Best American Essays 2003, a recipient of The New York Press Club features award, winner of gold and silver medals for magazine writing of the Washington-based Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and received the Editorial Excellence Award from Folio magazine. Member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Writers Union, the New York Press Club and first vice president of the Society of the Silurians, one of America’s oldest continuous press clubs. In 2007 was honored by the Hudson Valley Writer's Center for 20 years of service and was recently named by Northeastern University, celebrating the centennial of its cooperative education program, as one of its 100 most outstanding graduates. He and his wife live in Pocantico Hills, New York, and have three children.