A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

9 May 1999 - Shaken and Stirred

I don't know what prompted me to read the obituaries.

I don't pick up The Jewish Journal every week and, when I do, it's mostly for the calendar and for the personals. This issue was really the previous week's, which had come out on Friday, and which I got when I stopped by the library on the way back from my walk on Sunday morning. But Sunday had been hectic, with a jaunt over to Lonny and Lauren's for gaming, a lengthy phone conversation with Robert, and assorted errand running and I didn't get around to looking at it until Monday morning.

I read the paper as I usually do - a fairly coherent piece by Jonathan Kellerman (mystery writer and child psychologist) about Littleton, an amusing column about summer camp, the calendar, the personals. And then I glanced at the obituaries.

While I don't read them often, I do sometimes glance through, looking mostly at the ages of the deceased. My excuse for this is that I am looking to prove to myself that Jews are long-lived. Too few members of my family have died of natural causes for me to be able to judge how good my genes are, you see, so I am subtly trying to persuade myself that my father would have lived to 80 had it not been for his experiences in Dachau.

So I don't know why I happened to read the name and have the sudden shock of recognition. "Robert Perry Schloss died April 25 at the age of 42. He is survived by his wife, Rene; son, Steven; daughter, Jennifer; and brothers, Harvey and Monte." I had to read it over about 12 times before I could believe I wasn't hallucinating. We'd been out of touch for several years but Bob Schloss was one of my closest friends when I was an undergraduate.

What is even stranger is that I had happened to think of him just the night before, because of a thread on a mailing list about trees and graves. College is a time when people tend to experiment with their level of religious observance, of course. Bob had been raised in a fairly religious family but was trying out some additional practices. And one of those involved trees and graves. In order for this to make sense, I need to explain priesthood in Judaism. Kohanim (priests - kohen is the singular) are descendents of Aaron. Being a kohen is entirely an inherited status and has nothing to do with leading services in the synagogue. There are, though, certain rituals associated with being a kohen. For example, the first person called to the Torah during the Torah reading is always a kohen. And the kohanim bless the congregation on certain holidays. There are also several prohibitions, mostly involving marriage (e.g. a kohen is not allowed to marry a divorcee) and death. A kohen is not allowed contact with the dead and can't even enter a cemetary except for the burial of an immediate relative. Bob was a kohen and another kohen he knew had the minhag (a personal custom that is treated just like a law - another of those things that makes Jewish law complex) of not even walking under the branch of a tree that grew from a cemetary. When I saw a subject line of "trees and graves" I thought of a time when Bob was considering adopting this minhag himself and we were walking along Commonwealth Avenue to something or other in Brookline and it seemed like all we passed were well-forested cemetaries so he walked most of the way there in the gutter to avoid walking under the overhanging branches.

I hardly know what to say about Bob. He was absolutely brilliant - double majored in EE and Physics and got exactly one B all through M.I.T.. But he also read novels (in fact, he is the person who introduced me to Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth which he once lent me when I had the flu) and went to movies and generally did normal non-nerd things. A memorable event is the drinking contest he and I had on my 20th birthday. (For those who care, this was before Massachusetts raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, so it was even legal), which was an entirely stupid and uncharacteristic thing for both of us. We saw Rocky Horror together and danced at a disco and went to a punk rock club and played about 5 million very evenly matched games of backgammon.

My folks assumed he and I were dating, which was never the case, though I did have a fierce crush on him for about 2 years. (Interestingly, we had first met largely because I had a crush on his best friend's roommate. But then I was all of 18 and had a crush on a different guy about every 4 days. It didn't really mater how we met, since it was a definite case of instant rapport.) I eventually wrote him a note telling him how I felt and, while I was disappointed that he wasn't interested, he actually made some effort to continue the friendship once he established that was where things would stay. I didn't realize how completely over the crush I was until he told me he was getting married and I realized that I just felt happy for him and not at all jealous. (Incidentally, one of the main reasons I refer to Robert as "Robert" and not "Bob" was initially to keep from confusing my friends by making it clear I wasn't talking about Bob Schloss. Robert is inconsistent himself in how he refers to himself. I also admit to liking it when men use unabbreviated forms of their names, like Steven instead of Steve, Lawrence instead of Larry and so forth.)

I was in California by then and the woman he married (Rene) was someone I didn't know at all and then they had a couple of kids and, all in all, we lost touch somewhere around 8-10 years ago. Every now and then I'd think of trying to find an email address for him and getting back in touch but I just never got around to it. Now it's too late.

I sent Rene a card and I'll send a donation in his memory to an appropriate charity. (That sort of stuff is the consequence of having been raised to care about etiquette. I also write "thank you" cards and may be the last person in North America who actually uses the phrase "excuse me". But that's the subject of another rant.) But I still feel like I don't know what to do. All week I've been completely shaken. I'm only 40; my friends are not supposed to die, damn it!

To round out the week, an acquaintance was diagnosed with breast cancer and one of the Air Force officers I work with was assaulted at a bar on Cinco de Mayo. (He will be okay, but he's pretty shaken as he has no idea why this guy went after him. On the plus side, the police got the guy who did it.)

I have a litany of minor annoyances, but really my life is pretty good. It's the world that sucks. Please tell me next week will be better.