My grandfather’s house smelled faintly of steak, salt air, and Florida mold. No curtains. No fans. Just the hum of air conditioning so cold that stepping outside felt like leaving the planet.
Everything in my memory of him is bathed in sunlight – the whisper of lush hedges, the clink of ice in Tanqueray and tonic, the taste of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream after dinner. I don’t remember having to eat a single vegetable.
He was a small, dark man. A doctor who’d come from almost nothing—one of the few Jews admitted to medical school, slipping past the quota. Later, he joined a Palm Beach yacht club that had probably only just stopped excluding people like him. There’s a story that someone once “accidentally” spilled coffee on him, mistaking him for a Black man.
He wrestled with his Jewishness—proud of how far he’d come, wary of being marked by it. He didn’t reject being Jewish so much as hover at the edges, finding comfort in belonging nowhere fully. Moderation, I think, was his way of staying safe, softening the sharp edges of identity.
He used to say, everything in moderation. When I was little, it sounded like permission – for another scoop of ice cream, another swim before sunset. Now I think it was how he survived: by keeping himself in balance, in check, in the middle. Moderation was his armor in a world that rewarded extremity.
I think of him lately while scrolling through my feed – the endless parade of certainty, outrage, righteousness. Everyone seems so sure. It’s easy to hate, to repost, to belong to a side. Moderation, these days, feels almost radical.
Sometimes I open Google Maps and wander his old neighborhood on Street View. His house isn’t there. A newer one took its place, all glass and glare. But I can still hear him: everything in moderation. Not just about food, I think, but about life – about empathy, about staying human, about learning to live in the in-between when the world splits in two.
