Touring with this book, I get to hear from readers around the country.  They email me at AssistedLoving.com too.  These days, there are many befuddled boomer kids with  parents on the prowl for new love.  One senior mother wanted her son to score her some Viagra so she could give it to the man she was dating.  Another, after her husband died, took up with a man she loved as a teenager in Europe.  Several middle aged children told me about lists left behind by dying mothers or fathers with names of potential new spouses. (Considerate or controlling?  Who knows?)  One woman had a father who, after seven days of mourning her mother, declared, "I can’t live this way anymore!  I need a new wife!"  Then there was the bemused middle aged son in Saint Paul who told me that when his mother died, his father, after 50 years of marriage, decided he was gay.  He was eighty, and went online and met someone nice who was twenty years his junior.  Men! 

What’s a good son to do but laugh?

And what was I to do but laugh when, after cleaning out my father’s junk strewn sedan to sell after his death, I reached into his glove compartment to give the new owner of the car the title, and found a recently purchased Trojan that would not expire for years.

"My father," I said, "was always a very hopeful man."

I’m hoping that readers of this book won’t only get a new view of their parents, but a new view of themselves too.  That’s why I wrote Assisted Loving.  It’s about never giving up on the idea of love, whether for a parent or in the quest for a significant other. 

Love is a decision.  I learned that from my father. 

But only when I was ready to hear it. 

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy the book!

The post The Story Lives On appeared first on Jewcy.

It pains me to admit it, but the idea of having either of my parents living with me when they were still alive seemed like a fate worse than death.

In my book, Assisted Loving, which is about me helping my father find love after my mother died, there’s a scene in which he proposes we move in together.  He suggests buying us a house in the Hamptons, an area I’ve always loved and not all that far from our Long Island home of 50 years.  Idealistic as it might have been as a proposal for bringing together a bachelor son and newly single, octogenarian Dad, I could not imagine it.  He would talk my ear off.  He would want to control my life as a writer, pounding me with suggestions for what I should and shouldn’t write.  He was a slob who left trails of bank statements across any surface he touched, along with free newspapers, half eaten sandwiches, dirty clothes and bridge contract sheets.  How could I stomach waking up in the morning to find him at my breakfast table pouring orange juice and Splenda into his tea?  It would be impossible, in my mind, to see him before the first cup of coffee in that ski parka he liked to wear over his pajamas until noon.  And what if he were to pick up my phone calls or intercept my mail?  He was a terribly friendly man who wanted to be heard, and wanted to feel useful.  There was no way I was going to live under the same roof with him.  I could never even consider the notion of letting him get that close to me and shanghai my autonomous bachelor life.

Yet, my parents had done such a thing years before for my mother’s father.  Grandpa Moe, a craggy, old-school, tough little retired salesman was there, across the hall from my childhood bedroom when I moved home after college.  Grandpa Moe wasn’t much of a presence my whole childhood.  He lived far away in upstate New York with a second wife, with whom my mother and her sisters were not close.  When his second wife died,  he needed company and care.  So he moved in with my parents.

At first, I was peeved.  Why did I have to share my bathroom with this old man?  Worse, why did I let him push me into getting up several days a week at 7 am to take him to Minyan?  In the course of our year under my parents roof, I had to force myself to pretend to like him – a conservative Jewish man at the end of his life who read the National Enquirer for his news, and drummed his fingers on our formica kitchen table because he had nothing else to do.  By pretending to like him, and forcing myself to converse with him, I became interested and amused by his humor, and I did come to like him in the five years or so he was in the house.  I also came to like the minyans I drove him too, seeing, at his shaky side, a hidden world of little old Long Island men reveling in their devotion to Judaism.

Seeing my parents reamain so patient and welcoming to an old chauvinist who they had plenty of reasons to find disagreeable, gave me new respect for them as people.  Their careful upbringing of my brother and me was one thing.  Now they were doing it again, this time for the older generation.  My father, who had every reason to silence Grandpa Moe as he talked through the news on TV, was terribly patient with him, never raising his voice.

So of course, it plagued me when my father suggested he and I live together when he was 80, and alone and in need of companionship.  Never, I told him.  Instead, I went into full gear in helping him in his search for new love, thinking if he wasn’t so lonely then I wouldn’t have to worry.  Of course, it turned out that the more I concerned myself about helping him find love, the more I came to love him myself.  Pimping for my father was the best way for me to learn about his charms.  Just not while we were living under the same roof.

Today’s New York Times article about mothers living with their children.

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Mom is in the House appeared first on Jewcy.

People who meet Laurents are impressed that he sounds like a young man, not an old one.   I suspsect that the secret of a lively end of life is a lively beginning of one.   If you carry your curiousity with you for all your years, it may be all you need to keep things interesting.  That’s what my father was like when he insisted on meeting new woman and dating when he was 80.  Laurents will begin readying  his bilingual West Side Story after he gets back from Europe.  Right now he is going skiing in St. Moritz with producer Hal Prince, who is 80.

Don’t you want to be skiing at 80, and in St. Moritz, no less?

Directing at 90, skiing at 80!

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Hal Prince Skiing at 80 appeared first on Jewcy.

"Both of them love to talk about sex. If they show up fifteen minutes or a half hour late for dinner, they might say ‘We had sex four times today!’" 

Vulgar? Absolutely, but also kind of endearing.

I can’t say my father was ever that active or that outspoken. But it was clear that romance was what made him tick, and it’s why I wrote Assisted Loving. Just a few months after my mother died, he enlisted me to help him start dating.  And when I asked him if sex was in the picture for him, his response to me was, "Son, with the pills they have today and the positive effects of the hernia surgery I had the year before last, I could go all night if I want to."

I cringed when I heard it. But I also was proud of him. He wasn’t giving up on life at age 80. Sex is rarely a question any of us want to explore when it comes to our parents. And when they’re in their senior years, it’s all the more uncomfortable. But given what’s going on today – Viagra, internet dating, personals ads and the frank sexual conversations that have entered daily life – why shouldn’t sexuality be a part of the conversation at any age?

You can read several articles about all this on the links page of www.AssistedLoving.com. Or you can find this unseemly and click off in horror. 

To life! To Love! To Sex!

L’chaim!

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Geriatric Sex appeared first on Jewcy.

I thought I’d spend my week chronicling some recent shonde for the Goyim.  And since my memoir, Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad is set in and around Palm Beach, what better way to begin than with the Bernie Madoff scandal?  He was a big backer of the Palm Beach Country Club down there, and had many meetings with his investors on the premises. The Palm Beach Country Club came about because there were not one but two other clubs in the area that did not (and still don’t) allow Jewish members.

As a tragically aspirational person who thinks socialites are interesting, I actually found myself tickled to be invited by one to the PBCC for brunch years ago. Okay, it wasn’t exactly the epitome of society, and for its lack of historic charm, it might as well have been a Ritz Carlton, but I enjoyed a little petty exclusivity while eating my lox.

Years later, I was pleased to hear that my father was spending time at the club too. You have to understand, he wasn’t a society snowbird. He lived in a building unfashionably south of Palm Beach (in what some call The Gaza Strip for its large Jewish population) and had no need to mix it up with the elite that flapped down from Park Avenue every winter.   But when he started dating a wealthy woman (encouraged by me, even though she wasn’t very nice) she started taking him to the club for bridge games. When my father would call to report this, I found myself being pleased for him in the way a parent might be pleased hearing his child is dating a doctor.  He was already 80 years old and a fully formed open hearted man without a snobbish bone in his body.  Yet,  I hoped his time at a prestigious club might upgrade his status, and by affiliation, mine.  You can check out more about all this in the video on my web site.

Anyway – now, instead of being prestigious, Palm Beach’s big Jewish Country Club is tainted with scandal and littered with investor casualties. And apparently, the anti-semites in the area are having a field day with Madoff’s affiliation. Their comments to the Palm Beach Post became so rabid the paper had to shut them down. 

Read about it below, and cringe or laugh, depending on your level of insecurity.  Tomorrow, let’s cringe together at Herman and Rosa Rosenblatt, who, after being caught making things up in their Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, have decided to repackage it as fiction.  Or as I like to say — Frey it up a little! 

Palm Beach Poster Jew

Bob Morris, author of Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Shame on Jew appeared first on Jewcy.