My father, like me, has a profound capacity for regret. Some regrets are minor like the time he missed the early bird special at Spaghettiville, a restaurant operated out of a basement.

When merciful indifference is the best option available

Monday. 7: 30 a. m. I awake feeling uncommonly happy. Realizing this, I panic.

I was raised with the Eastern European Old Country notion that evil forces are waiting to prey upon any whiff of happiness. Growing up, my mother called it “the Evil Eye.” This is how it works: to admit things are good is only to have them revoked. As far as my mother is concerned, the universe’s workings are more than a little ironic. In this way, the universe is not unlike an old episode of The Twilight Zone.

At my bar mitzvah, to ward off the all-seeing Evil Eye, my mother sowed a red ribbon into a pair of my underwear. Today there is no need for red ribbons, though, because thinking about the Evil Eye has drained me of all happiness. Phew.

9: 40 a. m. No sooner than I finish my poppy seed bagel and cream cheese breakfast than I find myself regretting not having ordered the sesame seed kind. In my life, no experience is entirely complete unless it has been properly and thoroughly regretted.

My father, like me, has a profound capacity for regret. I imagine that just below the surface of his skin there flows black rivers of it. Some regrets are minor like the time he missed the early bird special at “Spaghettiville,” a restaurant that operated out of a basement. (It was a lot like “Margaritaville,” but with spaghetti.)

“What have I done!” he’d moaned in the restaurant parking lot, hands on his knees as he took shallow breaths. Of course going inside and paying the regular price was out of the question, and so we rode home where we ate cheese sandwiches in mournful silence. But other regrets are deep and soulful like not having gone to see his favourite band, Bread, perform at the Montreal Forum.

“To have witnessed a live version of ‘I’d Like To Make it With You’ in person!” he cried. “I can just kick myself.”

To have been in a Bread audience might have made him happier than my mother would’ve been comfortable with anyway. Compared to my mother, my father’s vision of the universe is less malevolent. At the age of five, he had a vision of God that came to him in the night. “I saw a large head floating in the sky,” he said. My father was five in 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz came out. It was the first movie he’d ever seen and I know it made a big impact on him. So I can’t help thinking that this memory of a sublime Godly vision sounds suspiciously similar to the projected image of the Great and Powerful Oz at the end of the movie.

In general, my father sees God as a rather Oz- like figure: a mostly benign hoax. And my mother sees him as someone who wants to keep you from getting too big for your britches. And I have come to see God as mercifully indifferent. Compared to all the various possibilities, that feels like a pretty good deal.