A Little Boy and a Man

Hotel Montefiore      

Jerusalem

One of our best friends is a prize-winning journalist, novelist and poet, who lived in Israel for about 30 years.  Her first visit to Israel was in 1973, when she covered the October War.  She found her colleagues so biased against Israel that she decided to settle here.  With her she brought her youngest child.  He was ten years old.

That’s a tough age for a child to move to foreign country, whose language and culture he must now learn, and for a while he acted out against his forcible transfer.  Some of his new friends seemed in his mother’s eyes to be on the border of juvenile delinquency.  When he started playing ball with our son, she knocked on our door to check us out.  And that was the beginning of a long and deep friendship, facilitated by our proximity.   She and her son lived literally around the corner from us for decades.  We watched him grow up.

Last Friday we met him and his wife for lunch.  The father of three, he is now a well-regarded medical doctor, a lecturer at the Hebrew University School of Medicine, and a researcher whose work takes him abroad several times a year.  He was always a good-looking kid and as a grown man he's handsome.  The signs of his aging – gray hair and small wrinkles around his eyes  – have only enhanced his good looks.  For a man so busy it was extremely kind of him to make time for us, but then he always struck me as kind.

He and his wife speak beautiful English and that was the language of our conversation.  As we talked I tried to picture the little boy that he once was, but I was unsuccessful.  What I saw was the distinguished adult he’s become.  If he’s the way I was at his age, I thought, he’s on the cusp of the most productive period of his research career, a notion that made me both happy and sad.  I was happy for him, but I felt a melancholy in the knowledge that my own research career was well over.  That the little boy I knew was now a middle-aged man reminded me how very old I’ve become, an awareness reinforced when he had to help me up from the deep banquette on which my wife and I had been seated. 

I dropped the torch that he now carries.  I’m not sorry I dropped it – in the interval I learned what else I could do - but this vivid reminder of time’s passing was saddening, knowing as we all do that the older we become the closer we are to the end.



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