Ghosts of Pesach past make this a fraught time

This article was published 23 years ago in the Long Island Jewish World, where the author penned a column for many years. He is now a resident of Riverdale.

The room was full of ghosts — including my own.

It was the 25th anniversary reunion of my Yeshivah of Flatbush High School graduating class. As it approached — weeks, then days, then hours — my mood swung from anticipation to dread and back again.

Who would I find there? There were people I was curious to see again. Would they have any interest in seeing me? What had they accomplished in the intervening quarter century? What had I done? The inevitable comparisons would be made, though not, of course, aloud.

The whirring of evaluation would inevitably take place in dozens of hearts and minds. How would I measure up?

There was also the physical dimension. Some, astonishingly, had changed hardly at all. The prime example was Eliot B., my teammate on the varsity basketball team. Eliot was our point guard (before the term “point guard” was invented). Slight of build then (and now), quick, smooth and efficient, Eliot is still there in the VCR of the mind: me, gliding down the wing, looking over to my left; Eliot, dribbling deftly, confidently down the center of the court. As he approaches the foul line, I angle to the hoop. If I am free, the ball finds its way into my hands, softly, affording me a layup. If he has the opening, he pulls up for the jump shot.

Eliot hadn’t changed.

Some had changed — and so dramatically that at first glance they looked like total strangers, the spouses of classmates perhaps. Until they would turn to me, smile, extend a hand: “How ya’ doin’?” I’d glance at the name tag affixed to the figure before me. No, it couldn’t be. So much weight gained (or, in one or two annoying cases, lost); so much gray; so little hair. Yipes.

Others had changed just enough to induce a double or triple take. Is that …? No … Yes, it is. Well, well.

• • •

Of course, not all were friends of mine back then anyway. We all had our particular circles, and though many circles overlapped, many remained separate solar systems in the universe that was our school. I was reminded of this at one point as I turned from one conversation and found myself greeting Harriet S. We hadn’t had much to do with each other between 1964 and 1968. It was more than a little awkward when, after the usual “Hi! How are you?” we just kind of nodded and grinned.

And nodded and grinned some more.

At the first opportunity, Harriet and I were relieved to be able to escape from each other. See ya’ in 2018.

Still, there we were, 25 years later. Most with our spouses — however reluctant they may have been to attend — feeling as though they were crashing someone else’s family gathering. For most, though certainly not all of us, our first and only spouses. Doctors, professors, computer wonks, therapists, lawyers, homemakers, teachers. Each with 25 years’ worth of bumps and bruises, neuroses, tales and laughs.

Each of us was also accompanied by a ghost: a 17-year-old kid, bewildered or confident. Already on track for a career, or just beginning to realize how little he or she knew about what the future would bring, and unnerved by that realization.

The ghost had perhaps already loved and lost, or been loved and had spurned another. But more of the same was in store, and the ghost knew nothing of it.

The ghost was serene: it knew nothing of the fits and starts to come — the academic majors, the extracurricular minors, the professions, the relationships, the various endeavors embarked upon with the most fervent of hopes and the steeliest resolve, only to be discarded like yesterday’s newspaper when they didn’t work out. The quests for love, fulfillment and growth were, in some cases, redeemed and in others frustrated.

The curves, the forks in the road, the blind alleys, the detours were not knowable to that most callow ghost. The ghost imagined a future, and perhaps could even envision that not all would go according to plan. But a future there would surely be.

• • •

Except, that is, for two ghosts in attendance that evening, each without a corporeal partner.

One, Neil S., was my best friend in high school, in summer camp, in the catering halls where we earned pocket money, and on through college. Together we went to the theater, played ball, debated politics, dated and demonstrated. Finally, we were roommates while at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I say “finally” because that is where it ended. I would have to leave him there, lying on a strange bed, his body wasted and, in truth, barely recognizable, when I departed at the end of June 1971. And when I took his hand in mine as he lay in the deepest of sleeps in Hadassah Hospital, and as I whispered my goodbyes, I feared that I would never see him again.

And I never did.

The beginning of the end began on the day before erev Pesach. Neil had changed his plans at the last moment. He would not be accompanying us to a kibbutz for Pesach. He had decided to stay in the apartment we shared with Harvey and Jerry, two other American students also at Hebrew U for the year. Harvey and he would stay behind.

So on erev-erev Pesach there were pots and utensils to be kashered so that food could be prepared during the holiday. And Harvey had a motor scooter to whisk them around Jerusalem as they made their appointed rounds.

Even though our sages tell us to approach each day as if it were our last, I would later wonder whether Harvey or Neil had an inkling — the barest of hints … a premonition — that this bright spring morning would be the last one they would see. At a nondescript intersection in Sanhedria, they collided violently with an army truck.

By chance, I happened upon the scene shortly after the accident took place. I was in a taxi with relatives who were visiting and who had invited me to travel with them that day. We encountered a traffic jam where I knew there shouldn’t have been one; nine months in the city had taught me such things.

I noticed a scooter across the street painted a familiar color. I rolled down the window and asked a passerby for details, and became increasingly alarmed as he related that two Americans had been hurt and taken to Shaarei Zedek Hospital.

I had myself dropped off there and burst into the emergency room, only to learn that Harvey had just been pronounced dead. Neil was unconscious and would have to be transferred to Hadassah for further care. I climbed in the ambulance with him, and off we went on our final journey together. As I would do again some months later, I held his hand and murmured words of hope and comfort to him. My speech was as much for my benefit as for his. There was no response then, as there would be no response later.

• • •

Neil remained in a coma for six months before passing away. I received the news by telephone from Jerusalem in the fall. They said they couldn’t reach his parents, and I suspect they were relieved by that. I was asked to perform that miserable task, something I couldn’t bring myself to do. It had fallen to me to call Harvey’s parents six months earlier from halfway around the world. Somehow, the distance between Flatbush and Bensonhurst seemed greater. This time it cut too close to the bone. Instead, I phoned one of Neil’s uncles whom I knew and broke the news to him. He would pass it on.

At the 25th anniversary reunion of the Class of 1968, the room was full of ghosts — the ghosts of adolescence past, the ghosts of youth, ghosts with dreams.

Two ghosts were there without corporeal partners. One of them was our senior class president, my best friend.

Neil.

I don’t know why he had to die when he did, why the rich potential within him had to be snuffed out, any more than I know why babies are born diseased or deformed, or innocents maimed. I was later reminded of a Norman Mailer essay in which he employed the phrase “a calculus at heaven” to describe the unknowable. A calculus at heaven dictated Neil’s passing, and the equation eluded my feeble powers of comprehension.

What I do know is that I began missing Neil on a clear spring day in 1971, continued missing him on a gray day in October of that same year, and have missed him ever since.

A ghost in attendance at the reunion of the high school Class of 1968 reminded me that erev-erev Pesach was approaching.

I didn’t need to be reminded.

Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com