For his son, a poignant meditation on life

Most of us possess a blind faith that our lives will be long; that there is time to experience all of our children’s milestones until, white-haired and tired, we sit at the head of a Thanksgiving table packed with our progeny.

If Joel Siegel, movie critic for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” once shared that faith, it ended in 1997. At 57, he was met with the cruelest of coincidences. He learned that his wife Ena’s in vitro fertilization had taken and that he would be a father for the first time.

He also learned that he had late-stage colon cancer.

So Siegel, known for his curly mustache and mischievous smile as he praises or pans the latest flicks, found that familiar expectation of the future to be gone. What would happen if he didn’t live long enough to watch his child grow? Considering his long career as a freelance journalist, broadcaster and critic, it made sense to him to write down those things he might never get a chance to say in person. The result is “Lessons for Dylan,” a book of letters addressed to his son, who’s now 5.

“One day as Ena was leaving my hospital room,” he writes of the removal of a colon tumor that, later, doctors found had metastasized to his lungs, “I noticed, for the first time, that she was starting to show. I started to cry.... I began charting the coincidences that had brought me, in the words of a Jewish prayer, to this season.”

So begins Siegel’s meditation, first on his illness, then on his family, his relationships and a career full of sometimes surprising revelations (he wrote jokes for Robert Kennedy’s campaign and worked in the civil rights movement, meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.). Without the “Dear Dylan” that opens every chapter, Siegel has an entertaining, often very funny memoir here; with this salutation, every word that follows has a numbing effect as one realizes that this book is intended for only one reader -- the rest of us are merely eavesdropping:

“Dylan, it’s something I wasn’t able to do, maybe something I’ve never been good at, maybe something I was cheated out of, but it’s something I miss: someone to grow old with,” he writes, thinking of the women he’s loved and married.

Siegel underwent the removal of a part of his colon that required a colostomy, lobectomies to his left and right lungs, chemotherapy and radiation that left him feebly staring at a glass of water, even though it was just an arm’s length away. This crisis and Ena’s pregnancy put an impossible strain on their new marriage, he confides, which ended not long after Dylan’s birth in 1998.

“I got sick so soon after we got married, we never had the time couples need to develop a net, a bottom line the relationship can’t crawl beneath ...,” he tells his son. “We love each other, but we never learned to live together.”

Siegel looks back on his birth in 1943 and his childhood in the Los Angeles neighborhood of City Terrace. He paints a lively portrait of his family, especially his grandmother, who once chased an armed robber from the family’s San Gabriel grocery store with a dish towel, cursing him in Yiddish.

“We are survivors, Dylan. Not just you and me, all Jews,” he writes elsewhere, and it especially applies to this scrappy bubbe. Young adults need reassurance as they strike out in the world: Siegel’s description of his 20s should inspire his son to enjoy himself and trust that all will be well. Siegel enjoyed his 20s after taking a history degree at UCLA. Sharing an Ocean Park bungalow with comedian Harry Shearer, he paid his $200 share of the rent by juggling freelance work for the Los Angeles Times, Playbill and Los Angeles Magazine with a gig producing newscasts for radio station KMET.

Siegel’s unorthodox style and quirky stories caught the attention of a local talent scout for CBS, and he was later called to New York to do the same for a larger, national audience; his stint on ABC followed.

There is a great deal crammed into this book, of course: Siegel has untied the sack containing his past and emptied it. There is a moving portrait of his first wife, Jane, a film editor, who died of a brain tumor; a glossary of Yiddish terms (“in comedy a shpritz is a rant ... Chris Rock shpritzes on racism”) as well as his own aphorisms for his son (on bullies: “If you fight back and get hit, it hurts a little while; if you don’t fight back it hurts forever”).

Most touching are later chapters entitled “I’d Give Anything to Take You to Your First Ball Game” and “Movies I Want to Watch With You” that clearly underscore what is at stake in the writing of this book.

At publication time, his prognosis is good, Siegel reports, though he’s understandably cautious. His book reminds us that all people could write similar ones about themselves; it’s a pity that few people find the time to reflect unless prompted by a doctor with grim test results.

Siegel has a lucky son, named for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. One day, after reading this book, he’ll realize his father did not “go gentle into that good night,” but, with wit and candor, he managed to shpritz, shpritz against the dying of the light.

*