Until forever
Sometimes — often late at night — the name of an old acquaintance will pulse through my head like a beacon from a past life. Last night, it was Noah Tapper — I think that’s his name, at least. Once upon a pre-pubescence, we were campers together at a Jewish sleep-away camp in western Massachusetts. Noah was tall for his age, dispiritingly good at basketball, and, as such, popular with the girls. I, on the other hand, was short, dweebish, a reliable underdog for any unit-wide game of knockout, and, therefore, a social pariah.
Noah must be close to 30 now (as am I). Maybe he looks a little older than his years — hair thinner, a bald spot, tall still but with slight beginnings of a paunch. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s a lawyer, or a tech entrepreneur, or a rabbi. Maybe he’s even got a kid. Or maybe he’s dead. Chas v’shalom — God forbid it! — my Granny Norma would have said, if she were still around. I don’t mean to be cruel; I have friends who aren’t.
“Our dead are almost beyond counting,” Roger Angell writes in his essay “This Old Man.” But so are our living. Once in a while, I’ll amuse myself by trying to calculate how many people I’ve met in my life (really met — handshake, hug, a friendly line). It’s a bit like the cliché of an interview question — how many golf balls can you fit in a 747? — but in my version I prefer to see the faces.
“Our dead are almost beyond counting,” Roger Angell writes in his essay “This Old Man.” But so are our living.
There’s Vicky Squires, cropped blond hair and a Cockney accent straight out of the movies. When I was eight or nine, Vicky would pick us up from school in our family minivan, then ferry us to music lessons or tutoring. Often, while driving, she’d bellow out the window, Why do the bad drivers always follow me?, and we’d ponder this mystery too. Occasionally, Vicky would stay with us overnight, invariably changing from street clothes to a frumpy pink bathrobe as soon as the sun set, then patrolling the house with her steaming mug of Lipton.
I don’t mean to be mawkish, but I’m not sure I’ll see Vicky Squires again. Or Pasquale, our childhood barber who kept back orders of Playboy in the waiting room and liked to drink red wine as he worked. Or Roberto, his svelter brother who’d played semi-pro soccer back in Italy and kept a yellowed team portrait on the wall to prove it. Suddenly, a memory: The reason we stopped patronizing Pasquale’s — those many years ago — is that the state yanked his license. Apparently, he’d gotten dragged into an only-in-New-Jersey corruption scheme involving high-end haircuts for the country’s mental hospitals. Or no — when the news broke, we’d gone back one more time. As Roberto cut my hair, Pasquale sat sadly in the corner, red wine still in hand, waiting out his sentence.
Pasquale, Roberto, Vicky, Noah. How strange it is to think that, numerically, the vast majority of our world — our wake of supporting cast members and extras — are ghosts to us, and we to them. To think that, of all the people we’ve known — the barber who told you that funny joke, the waitress who flashed you a charitable smile, that old man in western China who offered you a cigarette which, for reasons you couldn’t explain, you accepted — of all these people, so few exist in the present tense of our lives.
How strange it is to think that, numerically, the vast majority of our world — our wake of supporting cast members and extras — are ghosts to us, and we to them.
“Open, closed, open,” Yehuda Amichai once wrote, describing a life. The opening happens all at once; the closing takes time. When we are children, each person we meet is a permanent addition to our web of connectedness. Our best friend in fourth grade, a doting neighbor, a first love — we can’t imagine that these people will, at some point, fall from our firmament of relations. Until they do.
We begin to close. We begin to pair off. One day, an old friend sends you an email, and you choose not to respond. Or it is your email that is met with silence. For a while, the absence is deafening. And then it is barely audible. And in this closing, we open too.
After spending the past month on a work trip in South America, I bought a box of cookies for the old doorman who guarded the entrance to the apartment building. We hadn’t spoken much during my time there, but we’d traded a smattering of life details — the names of our hometowns, the ages of his kids — and, since I’d never been given a key to the front gate, I’d relied on him to unlock the door every time I wanted to leave the building. He’d also taken a palpable delight in calling me jóven — young man — every time we met, and I appreciated this geniality.
He accepted the box from me, and then reached to shake my hand.
Hasta luego, I said. Until later.
Hasta siempre, he replied. Until forever.
