Old Friends

“Old friends, old friends,
Sat on their parkbench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
of the high shoes of the old friends

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

Can you imagine us years from today,
Sharing a parkbench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears“

Songwriter: Paul Simon

An old friend passed away not long ago. It’s always sad when somebody dies, especially in a tragic circumstance like we hear about every day on the news. It’s someone’s son or daughter, father or mother, friend, or co-worker. But when it’s somebody you grew up with, it’s personal.

Today with social media, we can keep up with people who we knew in kindergarten yet have not spoken to in forty years and see what they are having for dinner.

Did I say forty years? I lied. The Hewlett High School class of ’79 just celebrated its 40^th reunion, so I may be off by a few years. Does it really matter at this point? To say that it’s been a while, is putting it mildly, especially when it really does seem like yesterday.

I met Michael on my first day of seventh grade at Woodmere Junior High School North. After seven years at Ogden Elementary School, it was time for junior high. It was a melding of three elementary schools into one building and I was nervous. I was sitting in science class. The teacher called our names from her roster and you sat behind the last person called or started the next row.

I was sitting next to Lenny Goldberg. As luck would have it, he and I had been together since kindergarten, so I was at ease. As soon as the last name was called, the teacher said that she would be right back and that’s when it happened.

Michael walked from the other side of the room. Lenny and I were seated at a lab table, not the desks in the middle of the room. He wanted to know what we were doing.

“Nothing,” we both replied to this rather large, gregarious, and intimidating person with large tinted glasses and shoulder length hair.

He glanced at my notebook and saw that I scribbled the word LeGo, short for Lenny Goldberg. He then looked at Lenny’s notebook. He wrote Skaye.

I thought that LeGo had more panache, but we were twelve years old on our first day in a new school.

A grin took over his face. “Cool names. I want one.”

We looked at each other and Lenny asked him his name.

“Michael Stern.”

“Okay,” Lenny, who wrote MiSt in his notebook, said.

“That’s stupid!” he exclaimed as the teacher walked in and told him to return to his seat immediately.

Mrs. Skowronick took her seat in the middle of the crowded room and asked us to come up one by one take a textbook. Michael stood up and gleefully shouted, “Erno!”

Lenny and I looked at each other as the teacher shouted, “Michael, that’s enough.”

With a big smile Michael looked at her. “It’s Erno. That’s my new nickname.”

I turned to Lenny. “You can’t pick your own nickname.”

“You gonna tell him?”

From that point on, Michael and I were friends. He and Lenny were the only people to ever call me Skaye and somehow, it became my e-mail address years later.

If that were the end of the story, it would be a cute memory and a reason to take a pause as one realizes his own mortality while taking inventory of his own life.

But, as you guessed, it’s not.

As is not unusual, we lost touch after high school. Michael took a family trip to Israel and, at the age of twenty-nine, became a Rabbi. That’s what I said. A Rabbi.

And not just any Rabbi. Michael was the Rabbi without Walls. I urge you to click and watch. No favor or challenge ever went unanswered. He used that bigger than life personality of his to help everyone who he ever met.

I had the pleasure of catching up with him a few years ago.

I was living in Boca Raton and Michael took a position down here. He reached out to me to talk when he saw that the job came with many issues.

We had not seen each other in more than 30 years. Except for the shoulder length hair traded in for a buzz cut and beard to mask the receding hairline, he was still Michael. He was happy, and silly and smiling.

“Skaye. I knew it was you,” he said as I sipped on my venti black coffee at Starbucks in West Boca.

“How are you? Tell me about you. Is all well? Is your marriage good?’, he continued.

A few laughs about the old days and a little more about me.

He finally opened up about his situation, but after a few hours, he told me that he solved other people’s problems. It was not about him. God put him on this earth to help others.

We walked out and passed what was clearly a person less fortunate than the two of us. He was sitting on the sidewalk with a bag of his belongings in need of a shower.

Michael sat down and talked to him for a few minutes. It was clear to me that nobody had done that with him in quite some time. Upon finishing his talk, Michael reached into his pocket and handed the man a five-dollar bill.

“He assures me that his mother lives nearby and the money will be used for the bus and a slice of pizza.”

I dropped my head. “Yeah, sure.”

“Skaye, you must have faith. Believe in God. Believe in the goodness of your fellow man.”

And that was Rabbi Mike. Not the intimidating twelve-year-old. The kind, loving man he had grown into who believed that he was put on this earth, to help anybody in his path. (Again, I urge you to watch his video).

We walked to his car and he said, “I made a mistake. I thought that I could make a difference here. This position I accepted will never fully accept me into the community. There are three shuls here. Reformed, conservative, and a combination of the two. I will never be able to succeed. I met with all three Rabbi’s. The Rabbi without Walls may soon be without a job.”

“You gonna pray for a new job? A place where you will be accepted without such tumult?”

“No. We don’t ask HaShem for such things. We cannot pray for a new car or a better job. We must continue to help our fellow man. We pray for another day. We pray that he keeps the lights on and our our family safe. When the time is right, I will be placed where I am needed.”

“You have a better attitude than me. You moved your family down here and now you tell me that some people don’t want you. I’d be screaming bloody murder.”

“Skaye, it comes with the territory. It’s about patience and belief.”

Michael was offered a fantastic position a short time later in Yardley, Pennsylvania. It took twenty-four hours for his congregation, and the community embraced him.

I was saddened to hear that last year this loving and decent man, my contemporary, and friend suffered a massive stroke. The family suffered through months of rehab but too much damage had been done. My friend, I correct myself, the world’s friend, was gone.

A few months after that first day in science class, Michael asked me about baseball.  Back in 1974, I read box scores the way an accountant reads a spreadsheet. That afternoon, there was a knock on the front door. I was in my room doing homework when my mother yelled.

“Steven, your friend Michael is here,” she said as I heard him stomp up the stairs with his Strat-O-Matic baseball game tucked under his arm.

He unzipped his jacket looking as comfortable as he did in school. “I told you I love Strato, right?”

I dropped my pencil as he placed the box on my bed. “How’d you know where I lived?”

“Somebody told me but I forgot which street number you were, so I knocked on a lot of your neighbor’s doors,” he said laughing and opening his box of the original fantasy baseball game.

And that was that. We played for the next three years. No phone calls. Michael just knocking on the front door, saying hi to my mother and clanging up the stairs. “I have Stargell but the Pirates are in Los Angeles, so nothing counts because we have no box score.”

I am certain he is barging in on somebody as I write this but making their eternity just a bit brighter.