Crucifying My Dad Insanity runs through my family history like a cheap romance novel. Depression, obsession, schizophrenia, it’s all there, and it tends to lend a certain surreal cast to everything we say to one another. I am haunted by my family’s plastic past.

My father’s father owned a small store in Detroit, Michigan. He sold bicycles, lawnmowers, and bathroom sinks, the cheap marbleized kind with plywood cabinets built beneath. He used to come home from work, set his head on the table and cry quietly for hours as everyone in the family moved edgewise about him. In time my own father would do the same. He tells us stories over shabbes dinner, stories of his own tormented past as though answering a question none of us has yet asked. His mother, my favorite grandmother, would load all the kids in the car and set off merrily down the freeway, chirping suggestions of driving them all into an embankment. She chain-smoked Carleton cigarettes and locked herself in the bathroom for entire days. These are the stories my father offers up as heirlooms, undisputable as the passed-down tablecloths and wavery silver. In my family the past shifts with dinner-table discussions; it was always the best or worst of times.  ¶ 9:01 PM