Thinking of the record heat across the country this summer, I am reminded of The Twilight Zone "The Midnight Sun." I wonder what my dad would have said about global warming and what stories might have followed...


www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbQJDBQzgwMJul 2, 2012 - 44 sec - Uploaded by DisclandOnline
Twilight Zone - The Midnight Sun Clip ... Standard YouTube License ... Twilight Zone predicts 9/11 (The ...

Though at the time I didn’t question anything professional that my dad did, I’ve since wondered why he agreed to do a show like “The Liar’s Club” that had so little to do with his image as a serious television writer. I have heard some suggest that he did it for the obvious reason – easy money but from what I now understand, he was paid relatively little, even by the standards of the time. Although it was a silly game show, I think he did it because, despite his reputation as the “Angry Young (and not so young) man, he did have a strong silly streak. He was addicted to practical jokes and genuinely loved to laugh. I think, quite simply, he did "Liar’s Club" because he thought it would be fun, a change of pace. And it was.
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The Liar's Club (1969)--Rod Serling as a game show host - YouTube► 5:33► 5:33 www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0b66Jjqg2MDec 29, 2009 - 6 min - Uploaded by blanquepage
Contestants must discern which four four celebrities is giving the truthful function of an object. Three are lying ...

On this, the evening before the 37th anniversary of my father’s death, I light a Yahrzeit memorial candle just as my dad did for his parents and just as I have every year for him at sunset. Invariably I think back to those first days after he died when his good friend Dick flew from California to our cottage in New York becoming our voice when we could attach no thought to words. But then he had to go back to L.A., leaving behind what he would say at the West Coast memorial service:
“It’s been said that Rod worked hard and played hard. That isn’t so. He played with the enthusiasm of an innocent. And the work, in fact, came naturally. Relatively speaking, of course. For the dramatist’s craft is a highly sophisticated one, and surely he was one of its most gifted and innovative practitioners. But where his peers may have anguished over the creative process, Rod woke up each day saying, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ This was his badge, his thrust, his passkey into our lives. He was eternally the new boy on the block trying to join our games. And he penetrated the circle by regaling us with those many fragments of his Jewish imagination…intellectual stories, fantastic stories, hilarious stories, stories of social content, even one-liners about man’s lunacy. However they were always seen through his prism, becoming never less than his stories. And because he came to us with love…seeking our love…we invariably let him tell us a story. And how much richer we are for it.”

Posted June 27,2012

On Father’s day my dad will have been gone almost two decades longer than I knew him. I cannot reconcile that fact. I cannot stop myself from seeing him lying there beneath the thin blue blanket in the hospital, his face still tan against that starched white pillow. Even now I frantically pull us from that room, back, back, back to when he was well. When he was laughing on the lawn doing a Russian dance or playing Gin with his close friend Dick, the two of them slapping cards down and swearing. When he read bedtime stories to my sister and me in a dramatic voice, the cat puppet on his left hand. When he picked me up from camp, kneeling in the driveway so I could run to him after those interminable weeks, or when he checked beneath my bed for monsters. When he was just my dad who would appear at the top of the stairs when I called him. That was thirty-seven years ago.

The last Father’s day gift I gave him was an audio tape I made pretending I was various relatives that he had neglected to call. I remember him sitting up in his hospital bed pushing the play button of the tape recorder and chuckling away with each imitation I’d done. He kept asking me how I got the phone to ring and then he would laugh some more. That memory so clear, even now. My dad, the tape recorder on his chest and his laughter that could be heard all the way down those pastel colored halls.

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Having just finished watching the "Hatfields & McCoys" on the History channel and skimming this mornings headlines filled with politics and worldwide conflicts, I am reminded of my father's closing narration for "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" and a deep sense of sadness overshadows an otherwise beautiful Sunday morning.

Epilog for "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTe4SJnxPcRod Serling's brilliant epilog for "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street". Note: The visual seems to be a scene from "Forbidden Planet", a 1956 movie which e...

"...like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth."

Rod Serling: "Walking Distance" Closing narration
Photo: Steve Trimm photo of carousel at Recreation Park Binghamton, New York
Inspiration for "Walking Distance."
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On Memorial Day weekend, I make a trek back to my father's grave. Kneeling beside it, I inevitably think back to the first time I came and found a small piece of masking tape attached to a stick with three words: "He left friends." At the time, there was comfort in a message left by a stranger.

But over the years, as more people have found his grave, there seems to be no end to what they leave.  I've had to take a bag to collect the items as they have begun to block my father’s name and mar the stone. To date, some of the things left are as follows: a blue lighter; coins; a Canadian dollar bill; a heart shaped glass stone; a silver lighter; marbles; a piece of driftwood; two movie ticket stubs; a pack of Pal Mal cigarettes; a baseball; a pencil; an angel statue; matches; a business card from Kelly somebody - a tattoo artist. She wrote on the back: "We still love ya. RIP"

And so this weekend, I went prepared with my bag. There were the normal items, the memorial stones and coins, the tickets, a key, a bottle of wine, a brass pipe, a bracelet but there was something else this time. A letter tucked into a yellow envelope.

And as I walked away, I thought back to that piece of masking tape and those words. They didn’t survive a winter; the words faded and the tape was eventually gone but they still offer comfort because my father has indeed left friends.

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“I never had a master plan that included a built-in compulsion to write. I really didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I went to Antioch because my brother went there. I thought I’d major in physical education because I was interested in working with kids. This was a pretty amorphous thing, not really thought out or planned--but it constituted some vague objective, which, of course, the war put to an end…” Rod Serling
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