|
|
|
By Larry Gordon
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ALL OF A SUDDEN it was twenty seven years ago and I was sitting in the
back seat of my father's car and he was driving me to the Port Authority in
Manhattan to board the bus that would take my brother and myself to camp.
As we drove along I was thinking two things to myself.
One was that I really didn't want to go to camp and the second was that it
looked like I really didn't have any choice.
My parents said that it would be good for me, that a
teenage boy like myself shouldn't be wandering around the city in the summer.
I must have put up a little resistance but quickly relented because I
basically liked the Catskill mountains during the summer. I was there
for as far back as I could remember. There are so many
memorable summers that are now easy to reflect upon on and even relive in
forums like this from time to time.
At 15, I was somewhere in between what I like to think of as being a little
boy and a big boy. I think I was a CIT which means a Counselor in Training,
nothing at all to do with the practice of law but rather lots to do with
helping out what looked to me like Graduate Counsellors chase a lot of little
kids around. I was post-Bar Mitzvah that summer and was beginning to get
concerned that I didn't seem to be growing as fast as I thought I should. My
older brother was nearly six feet tall and my parents didn't seem too short,
either. I saw some guys in camp who I hadn't seen in almost a full year that
looked like someone was either watering them or they had giants for parents.
What a bummer, I thought to myself.
I read about "growing exercises" in a
magazine and tried them once. It felt like I was about to break my back.
What good would doing growing exercises do me if in the process I cracked my
spine, I figured. Instead, I took to doing a lot of reading that summer,
magazines periodicals, sports publications and some fiction by authors like
Bernard Malamud and Kurt Vonnegut. I was touched by Malamud's Jewishness and
Vonneguts very dry sense of humor. I was a proficient baal Koreh (Torah
reader) as a result of the bar mitzvah lessons that were drilled into not too
long before, so I helped a couple of kids practice their Torah portions gratis.
That summer, the New York Mets were making a remarkable
comeback. It was also the summer Charles Manson killed a bunch of people in
California. Mass murder of that sort was still kind of strange and, if you
can believe it, even shocking. It was the summer in which my suspicions that
life was not supposed to be so blissful was finally confirmed. My
grandfather passed away in the middle of August and suddenly, like other
people, I was going to attend my first funeral. It was painful for me to
watch my father endure the shock of his father's sudden passing. I comforted
myself, however, by thinking that since he had lost his mother some 20 years
before, he had sufficient experience to navigate his way through this crisis,
too.
After the funeral I returned to camp but it was no longer the same. I
had a heavy feeling that I just couoldn't shake and kept my Zaide's face
fixed in front of me. All around me were other kids running and playing,
seemingly without a trouble or problem in the world. But there I was feeling
like I was trapped inside of some kind of emotional bubble that I only later
discovered would ultimately subside with the passage of a little time.
As the summer was nearing to an end, and I wasn't much of a camper
anyway, I asked my father if he wouldn't mind driving up a few days before it
ended to bring me and my brother home a little earlier. I didn't consider
that it was a very tiring thing to drive up and back from the mountains in
one day or that he had already had a very emotionally draining couple of
weeks. I just asked him if he would do it and without hesitating he said he
would.
It was the night that we were going to leave just after the evening or
Maariv service. The rest of the campers were eating dinner and I was waiting
at a window that overlooked the camp's long driveway waiting for my father's
burgundy Buick Lesabre to make that wide turn leading up to the camps main
entrance. It seemed that I had to wait for an eternity and a half and that
he just wasn't coming. Car after car with headlights shining brightly made
that turn. As each car made its way up the drive I anticipated that it was
my father's car until they got close enough for me to realize that no, it was
a different color or different shape than his car was.
I waited and waited. I thought that maybe he just left the city later
than he said he was going to leave or that there was a lot of traffic that
was delaying him. It was 1969, there were no beepers, no car phones, just
anxiety and more anxiety. I paced and I thought that maybe something
unthinkable had happened. I dismissed the thought thinking that we already
had enough tragedy this summer so I just pushed the idea out of my head.
At last, a pair of familiar headlights were headed in my direction. As
the car neared neither the shape of the car nor its color this time betrayed
me. It was my father who remained true to his word sitting behind the
steering wheel. I watched as he pulled over and parked the car. He exited
the car and I could see that his face was drawn and that he was tired. He
spotted me and smiled. His face still bore the stubble that was part of the
30 day mourning process he was observing for his father. As he pressed his
face against mine I could feel the needle like facial hairs stick into my
skin. "How are you, Labela," he said as he kissed me. I went to tell my
brother that Daddy was here.
We had already packed our small bags as our trunks were going to be
trucked home. My father was ready to leave, despite the fact that he was
exhausted from the long ride, almost immediately. I went to tell my
counsellor and a few friends that I was leaving, that my father had come to
pick me up. I was overwhelmed with joy that he was here and that he was
taking me home. I thought what a beautiful parental gesture it was and that
if I thought he was actually going to make this long round trip that perhaps
I may have been better off not asking.
But I did and he was here and that was all that mattered. We were going
home. And now its 27 years later and I not only long but hunger for those
moments. As I sit here thinking about those days I don't only remember them
but actually relive them. I can smell the scent of my fathers car, the
lights on the highway driving to New York and the 10 minute nap he took on
the shoulder of the highway just before the toll booths of the New York State
Thruway.
Now I'm driving along on the Belt Parkway and two of my boys are sitting
in the back seat on the way to the bus that will take them to the same
Catskill mountains and summer camp. They have their hockey sticks and
baseball gloves, school assignments and seforim. Unlike me I think that they
are genuinely looking forward to going to camp. These two are never
homesick --- they are too deeply submerged into the sports and the round the
clock fraternization with their peers. And besides I never told them that I
disliked camp or the reasons why --- so what's not to like?
As we speed along the highway I become conscious of the position of my
arm and how it grips the steering wheel of my car. To me it looks just like
my fathers fingers gripping that wheel and then I arch my shoulder the way he
used to always do when he was driving us. And that's what did it, it was
suddenly 27 years ago in an instant with one exception. I knew that these
two with me were not going to call me up and ask me to drive up to bring them
home just because they felt like it. But I also knew that if they did I
wouldn't hesitate for a moment and do as they wished. I might object and try
to say no, you're coming home with the bus like everyone else, but I know in
my heart that in the end I would give in and go get them. I just wouldn't be
able to say no.
How could I?
Jewish World Review June 16, 2000 / 13 Sivan, 5760
A summer's magic relived
JWR contributor Larry Gordon writes from Long Island. Comment by clicking here.
