By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — This morning in Columbus, Ohio, my lifelong friend Harley’s mother, Noami, will be buried near her husband, Bernie. Harley and I, who met 46 years ago during a regional synagogue conclave, are now both without parents. We are each 62 years old and we are growing old with laughter, élan, and bittersweet wisdom.
Naomi’s death was not unexpected—she had been struggling with various ailments for some time. What remains unexpected, inexplicable, uncomfortable, and inevitable is this: just the other day, Harley and I were two sixteen year old boys in an exploratory dance with the stern Judaism of our parents, quivering with sexual adventures, commandeering our parents’ automobiles, and making sure to avoid Vietnam.
The year we met, 1969, found us in between the assassinations of two Kennedys and one King and the massacre of college students by Ohio National Guardsmen at nearby Kent State University. The Beatles were starting to break up, Woodstock fired up the musical and narcotic souls of our dropout generation, and the astronauts of Apollo 11 beamed back the grainy images of an uncertain future from the cratered surface of the moon.
Harley and I remained focused on car keys and conquests. The world swirled around us in racial convulsions and we were aware, in 1969, of Joe Namath’s “guaranteed victory” of his New York Jets in Super Bowl III and then of Tom Seaver’s “Miracle Mets” that won the World Series. Harley and I were just trying to finish high school stay proximate with each other beyond our senior year of 1970.
I regularly boarded the Greyhound bus for the two-hour trek between Cincinnati and Columbus in order to spend long, lazy weekends at the Schottenstein home in the upscale suburb of Bexley. A willowy 14-year old local brunette named “Judi” was also an attraction for me as I set up camp under Naomi’s culinary tutelage and Bernie’s folksy advice. Judi, my first girlfriend, lived in a doll-like, pink mansion just a couple of blocks from the Schottensteins and I was drowning in puppy love.
Bernie chuckled about my infatuation and over-eagerness. “Too much honey isn’t good for you, Ben,” he told me. He really didn’t appear to be engaged or even that concerned about my social welfare but I have never forgotten the raw veracity of his declaration. Nor his and Noami’s unconditional generosity to me.
Noami prepared lavish meals of steaming matzoh ball soup, juicy briskets, braided challahs, flaky potato borekas, savory kugels, lavish Israeli salads, and moist apple cakes. These were serious ethnic banquets that defined Naomi’s cultural mystique in the tight-knit and opinionated Columbus Jewish community.
Harley and I ate heartily at the table but preferred to slip out on other occasions to the almost-heretical “Phillips Original Coney Island” hot-dog stand on Broad Street. We would sneak into the notorious Drexel Theater on East Main to take in the exotic, “independent” films. We got woozy on surreptitious, cheap peach brandy. On more than one occasion, we smoothly talked our way out of speeding tickets by expressing droll contrition to the tightly-wound local cops whom we literally wore down with our dissembling discourse.
Wasn’t this lusciously innocent time just yesterday? How is it that both Harley and I have endured divorce, new unions, the complicated journeys with our children, the vagaries of employment, the twists and turns of health, and that my fair-headed teenage buddy is now a doting grandfather? How is it that all four of our parents now belong to the ages even as our memories of them are stained with as much heartache as sentimentality?
My old friend and I were just together for another long weekend—here in my home environs of San Diego. We are jaunty, fit and still filled with mischief and moxie. But as we walked along the shore in the chilly Pacific waters one brilliantly sunny morning, we felt the presence of the horizon and shook our heads in affectionate resignation to the receding tide.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. Your comment may be sent to ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com or posted on this website, per the instructions below.
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