made their children sit through the long prayer service are particularly grateful for a more relaxed outdoor activity, and the park by the stone arch bridge that connects the college and the suburb looks like an unusually leafy elementary schoolyard. The children run about, laughing, shrieking, blowing their little shofarot, some real, some made of plastic. A group of elderly people shelter on the wooden seats by the clump of trees, chatting in Yiddish. The college on the other side of the river looks magnificent in the afternoon sun, and my heart beats fast at the sight of it, but I don’t know whether it is with pride and gratitude or with anxiety and foreboding.
Freddy Katz is one of the first people who notices me; he greets me very warmly and introduces me to Rabbi Ostrowicz, the youngest of the three rabbis I saw at the service yesterday, and Cantor Young, a handsome man in his early seventies who grins at me above the din made by the children and tells me that he retired six years ago and that tashlikh is his last remaining challenge. Freddy explains who I am and bounces off, I assume to find his wife. Rabbi Ostrowicz, looking straight past my face, asks me whether I am “a beginner.”
“Oh, no, not quite,” I stutter and wonder whether I could possibly explain to this diffident young man (well, he must be my age, but he seems younger) about Anshel the Yeshiva boy. “Well, my family is not very observant, but—”
“And a Yankee,” Cantor Young decides in lugubrious accents. “We have another one of your sort.”
It takes me several mortified moments to realize that he is teasing me, and I feel a right klutz for being so slow. Freddy returns with his wife and Mrs. Ostrowicz in tow. I do not have the impression that Margalit Katz is in any way interested in making my acquaintance, but perhaps I am being unfair. There are five little Katzes to rein in, the eldest bar mitzvah’d last summer. And she is about to make associate professor at the Music department. Maybe I don’t much like her, either.
Everyone is davening and watching the children and listening to the shofar players—one of whom is proficient, the other one sucks but has a sense of humor about it. I go in for a minute of soul-searching to see whether all these little kids make me wish that one of them was mine, but I cannot in all honesty identify such a wish. Karen’s unborn baby comes to my mind, and for her I pray:
We ask for a piece of sand
And God gives us a beach.
We ask for a drop of water
And God gives us an ocean.
There is the occasional glance into my direction, one or two smiles, but one man is staring at me in a way that makes me uncomfortable. He seems to be there with his wife and young son, and I wish I didn’t have the feeling that he is more interested in me than in them. I turn my back to him and concentrate on the bread crumbs in my hand.
Our sins float on the waters of the Ouse, only to be engorged and digested by the ducks and swans that have congregated by the embankment.
Staring Guy appears next to me at the railings and stares again. And grins.
“What?” I snap, as if we were waiting at a bus stop in New York.
He flinches a little, but the grin on his face does not waver.
“Anna-Banana!” he says. “You still haven’t got any tits.”
Now it is my turn to stare.
“Oh, fuck off, Bernie!”
It is, as they say, as if we had never been apart.
Bernie, one year ahead of me, came to Ardrossan and did the prudent thing: he joined Temple Beth David. There he met Elvira, a recently divorced single parent; last summer the three of them moved into a new house together. I am not surprised that I didn’t immediately recognize him; he is one of those rare people who are more attractive as adults than as children. Pudgy Bernie has not quite grown to six foot, but he is very fit and evidently takes care of himself.
“Ah, you found each other!” Cantor Young comes toward us.
“Better than that, Avi—we already knew each other!”
Avi Young fully appreciates the little shtick—presented by Bernie and me as a comic double act—in which we sketch our history for him, Chinese burns and all, and soon we are standing in a little