Arthur & Bernie

Looking up. August 2012, Manhattan.

Last weekend was my Dibi’s unveiling. In the Jewish tradition, you wait a year to dedicate the gravestone of a loved one. It was a short, simple ceremony at the cemetery, with our family and a few close friends. We placed little stones, another Jewish tradition, on the graves we knew — Dibi’s mom and dad, her aunts and uncles, her in-laws, Pop Pop’s mom and dad. I cried. Of course I did. But it was a homecoming, a reunion, a party. It was just the way my grandmother would have wanted it.

I came across a journal entry my mom wrote a few months ago, during a visit to Pennsylvania. She went to the cemetery with Pop Pop and my aunt.

I felt the urge to lie down beside the grave, but I didn’t. I placed my hand flat on the ground and kind of stroked the grass, pretending I was stroking the skin on her arm, like I did as she was dying nine months ago. I remember the many times we would bring her home for lunch and a visit in the afternoon. She would lie down in Dad’s bed and take a nap. I would lie beside her and cuddle. I so want to do that again. I realize I will never have that luxury again. What a lovely, sweet person my mother was. I have so much to tell her, but mostly that I love her.

I think she heard you, Mom. And I think she heard us all together.

Making mitzvahs. June 2012, Manhattan.

I like strangers, but I don’t like strangers who try to sell me things. Or sell me on things. It happens all the time in New York — there’s the guy pushing perfume on the A, the kid shouting “Umbrella! Umbrella!” in the rain, the clipboard-carrying college grad blocking the sidewalk in the name of Greenpeace. No thank you, all of you!

But I would like to thank the Orthodox man who joined Arthur and me the other day. It was a Friday evening, right around Shabbos time, and he was hustling from table to table with yarmulke, candles and tefillin in hand. I’ll be honest — I saw him from afar, and avoided all eye contact, thinking maybe we’d be spared. When he started talking to us, though, a light bulb turned on. I saw an opening.

“Arthur grew up in Brooklyn, and spoke only Yiddish until he went to school,” I told him.

“Oh yeah?”

They launched into conversation. I couldn’t pick up on any of the words, but judging by the nods and the shrugs and the laughs, it was a success. I’ve asked Arthur to speak to me in Yiddish before, and he’ll say a couple sentences before bowing out. (“I don’t rememb-ah any mow-ah.”) But having another Yiddish speaker in the mix triggered him. Suddenly it all came back. Suddenly he was that boy from Brooklyn, whose family owned the doughnut shop down the street. Suddenly our stranger wasn’t a stranger at all.

Good Shabbos, indeed.