Some of us spent yesterday morning saying goodbye to Sidney Goldberg at a funeral marked by two of the most beautiful, heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny eulogies I’ve ever heard — one by our own Jonah and the other by Jonah’s brother Josh. Both Goldberg men paid tribute to a father whose life was spent engaged in ideas and enfolded in family. Sidney was a dispenser of wisdom — the best kind of wisdom dispenser, in fact, because the wisdom he dispensed was not of the Polonius, “to thine own self be true” kind. Josh talked about riding around New York with his dad on aimless bus and subway rides that helped instruct his sons in the glories of the city. And Jonah spoke of the time when he was around 8 years old, walking up Broadway with his dad, when Sidney offered him the most important advice any boy has ever received. “If you are in a South American country and you’re stopped by a policeman,” Poppa Goldberg told young Jonah, “say, ‘I’m sorry, Officer. I must have made a mistake. Is there any way I can pay the fine right here on the spot?’”

An American original.