Sundays with Stanley

Reader Bob Brody is an essayist who lives in Forest Hills.

Even in the weeks just before he died of cancer this month, Stanley Siegelman kept writing poems. Already 87, the longtime Great Neck resident could hardly help himself. As he might have admitted, he could always have done verse.

I knew Stanley for 34 years, first as my editor, then as my friend, always as my mentor. Through it all, he loved to indulge in wordplay, particularly the practice of punning. In a poem, he marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the bra. "This was a deed of some import," he wrote, "that over time won full support."

Ten years ago, he lost his wife of 47 years, Shirley. I began visiting Stanley every few months to keep him company. We always went to the Seven Seas diner on Northern Boulevard for scrambled eggs. We might then drive over to Steppingstone Park to converse and admire Long Island Sound. So went my Sundays with Stanley.

Around that time, he began contributing poems to the legendary Jewish Daily Forward. As a veteran journalist, he had published most everything -- news articles and editorials, features and profiles -- at first for Fairchild Publications, later for Hearst Magazines. But never poems. But then, he'd never lost Shirley before.

Over the next decade, Stanley waxed poetic about anything Jewish that would give voice to his keen sense of whimsy. From his manual typewriter poured some 185 ditties and limericks, along with quatrains, odes and sonnets. He satirized everything from politicians to Israel, Yiddish and circumcision. I suspect he crafted these rhymes as literary therapy, seeking to ease his grief over losing Shirley.

I marveled at his late-life creative resurgence, and offered to publicize his efforts. I could easily imagine Newsday, for example, profiling this prolific octogenarian. But however much I begged him to let me "pitch'' him, ever-humble Stanley politely rebuffed my overtures. Clearly, he aimed more for private amusement than public acclaim. "Besides," he asked, "why would anyone ever want to do a story about me?"

The last time I visited Stanley, he asked to go out for pancakes. "It's too long since I've had any," he said. So out we went to a local pancake house. He quickly polished off a stack doused in maple syrup. I interpreted his request as a sign he wished to make this visit different, special, as if it might indeed be our last.

But his poetry never stopped. In one birthday card he sent me, he wrote, "Aging we cannot avoid, maybe it can be enjoyed?" In one of his last notes to me, he wrote, "I've just turned 86 -- no joke! Let's hope this ain't the year I croak."

Only the other day I found out while Stanley and Shirley first dated, he wrote poems for her. In a sense, Shirley inspired all of his poems over the last 10 years, too. No doubt his life with her was all pancakes.