I met my friend Mary Lou about a year ago, when Rich Ash, who I had hired as our medical director at Bayside Medical Group, who had lost his wife to cancer about a year after I lost my wife to Alzheimer's, invited me to walk around the 2.7 miles of the Lafayette Reservoir with him and two of his friends from his gym, Mary Lou and Marcia, every Saturday morning at 6:45 AM. It's pretty dark then in winter, and pretty light in summer. I said yes with trepidation – pretty early! But now I'm not only used to it, but it's a mainstay of my life. We walk at a 19 minutes per mile pace, we talk, usually paired off to me with Mary Lou and Rich with Marcia – rumor has it they talk about their dogs a lot. Early on I thought it would be great to eat breakfast afterwards, and we found Millie's American Kitchen in Lafayette, which opens at 8 AM on weekends and is perfect. It's an about 10 table restaurant, run by owners Victor and Aimee, intimate but well-lit and happy place and really good food. It's usually Mary Lou and me, Marcia is not a breakfast person, and Rich usually runs off to his puppy now become dog, but he's come I think twice. We're regulars, so Vic and Aimee expect usright when they open at 8, we have our table set up for us, and we order the same thing every week, and I think it's fair to say that Vic and Aimee have become friends. Just a few weeks ago when we got there Victor said that they had some news for us but he would let Aimee tell us, and she didn't say anything but just showed us the fourth finger on her left hand and there was a diamond. We congratulated them both – they were radiant – and Aimee said, well, it only took nine years. She's awfully cute, with a baseball cap and about 15 colored pens in her apron which seem to be gone by the end of the shift.
So Mary Lou and I sit there in our comfortable corner table and talk, careful not to stay too long if there's a line up outside, but it's not unusual for us to arrive at eight sharp and go around nine-thirty. That's usually the only time we see each other during the week, although once or twice we've had lunch on another day, and once I took her to the ballet and we had dinner first down on College Avenue at King Yen, where I have eaten for about 25 years or so. Mary Lou is really comfortable to talk to, we are both good at accepting each other for who we are, and there is much to admire about her. She is always busy, doing things for other people, Rotary Club, her church, giving to her daughter Kelly's 501 (c) 3 clothes and furniture and sundries recycling store at King's Beach in Tahoe, and she walks the reservoir maybe three days a week and works out at the gym which keeps her ultra-slim and healthy, and she's always doing something with community or church spirit.
We talk about this and that and you never know exactly where it's going to go. We had walked around the reservoir today, I forget what we talked about, it was just her and me because Rich was jet-lagged and Marcia had something to do, it was a gorgeous day and I felt so good and strong and not too heavy. I almost ordered something different from my farro oats and fruit on the side but I stuck with what I know and then got an English muffin just because I was feeling good. We were the only ones in the restaurant to start with and Vic and Aimee shared their distress at Biden's debate performance, and wondered what he would do not just a couple of months from now but for four years after that, and we agreed that he shouldn't have run again. Mary Lou spent all day yesterday writing and addressing get out the vote and vote Democratic postcards.
Eventually, after we finished eating and I was just sipping my decaf and we had talked about other things, I told her of a difficult phone call I got a few days ago. I told her, as a warm up, once again about how lucky I was to have such a great high school class at Lower Merion High (yup, Kobe went there after we did, a lot after we did.) We were smart, athletic, fun loving, compatible, school sports and pick up sports, and our poker games. Poker on the weekends, pretty much every weekend, at rotating houses, at our peak so many players that we need two tables. Mixed, Jews and gentiles, about half at the top of the class, all together in high school where we have started the second phase of life, having metamorphosed from being kids to being early or pre-adults, but enough adult that we remember so much of those days, while elementary school and junior high is more of a blur. We were all together, such friends! Such friends. Some didn't play poker, John Raezer didn't and Jon Gross didn't, but they were still friends, close friends. Lynn Sherr didn't, but she was such good friend. Barb Geyer didn't, but her, too. Half of us were in Special English with Mrs. Hay, the first real college type class where we sat in a circle and read Plato and Darkness at Noon, and Shakespeare and Tragedy and Freedom and Responsibility and John Stuart Mill and such other stuff, it was like college. Johnny Fish didn't play cards either, but he came to the games to be friendly, and when the game was at my house he sat over to the side and looked at our bird books – Fish knew all the birds – and my little sister Emily fell in love with him and hoped he'd wait for her.
So it was Fish who called me this week. He lived in Bala-Cynwyd, and there was a little alley behind his house and just across the alley, maybe literally a stone's throw, lived John Bernard. Fish was about 5'7”, maybe he'd claim 5'8” but I'd dispute it, and Bernard was about 6'3” and bulky. They were athletic as were we all. Fish went on to be soccer captain at Brown, and poker players Ed Packel and Bill Strong were co-captains at Amherst, and they weren't even the best players on our team – they claimed that Tom Harrison was, but he wasn't part of our friendship, our group. But Fish and Bernard most certainly were in the heart of our group, Bernard an avid poker player. Bernard went on to Swarthmore and then Harvard law, came back to Philly and worked at Ballard-Spahr for decades. Frankly, for such a smart guy, although he had a fine career as a Philadelphia lawyer, I was disappointed in him – he was very smart, and an independent thinker. When we passed around our papers so we could read each other's in Special English, I thought that Bernard was a better writer than I was, and I vowed to do better, which I did, although it took lots of effort and years, years. But Bernard really was quite smart, and yet I thought maybe he didn't connect with a mission, although maybe I'm wrong there. His mission was often sports, and especially baseball. When it came time to retire they asked him to stay on and emphasized that he would make a lot of money, but he told me that he just really didn't care about the money, that he just wanted to go to baseball games and see his kids, and actually just after he retired he told me he had lost 50 pounds. I was in Philly for some reason and made a point of seeing him. We walked from somewhere to somewhere else and we were somewhere near Broad Street near the Ritz-Carlton where Ann and I tended to stay, and he did confide to me, as a doctor, that he wondered what he should do about constipation and I advised Metamucil. He was so healthy he took hardly any pills at all, which I was amazed at, because I take so many, along with Metamucil for regularity of the aging.
We had a great class, the class of 1959, a large number of us stayed in touch, if not actually, then in spirit, and since email appeared as a technology, about 10 or 15 of us are in email connection. I'm tempted to go into all that we achieved in life, which I'm very proud of, but I'll hold off. Lynn was a nationally known newscaster for ABC, lawyers (Bernard and Birkhead), and doctors (Fish and me) and two math professors (Packel and Gross) and writer (Seidman) and economist-financial analyst (Raezer) and professor of 19th century French literature at Sarah Lawrence (Angela Schrode), sports business person (Strong), founder of Pushcart Press (Henderson), initiator and godfather of the University of Michigan lacrosse program (DiGiovanni), and there was Ricky Shryock who was the best hitter you ever saw (Lafayette) and so loved by everyone, and other people and stuff I'm forgetting. I'm so proud of them. It reminds me of those movies where you see what became of them – Animal House, Stand By Me, American Graffiti.
So, I knew that Bernard had had his problems recently. Bernard and Gross and Raezer had been having periodic lunches and then Bernard came out with something that sounded pretty anti-Semitic and Gross is a religious Jew with strong Israel attachment and he said he couldn't associate with Bernard anymore and Raezer, ever the conciliator, tried to patch it up but couldn't. Then Bernard called Raezer a few times and Raezer said that Bernard wasn't making sense. Then Fish called me to tell me that he thought Bernard was getting demented. And then this last week Fish called me and said he had bad news and I braced myself and told me that John Bernard had died a few days ago. Norman Ezebil had been visiting him in a facility where he was and it was Norman who got in touch with Fish. We don't know what's up with Bernard's wife Esther, his second wife, another lawyer at Ballard Spahr, after his first wife had died, and we don't know if we'll hear about arrangements, about funeral, about memorial service. When my father died and we had a service just maybe two or four days after he died, somehow Raezer and Bernard got wind of it and just showed up, the two of them. Raezer had told Bernard, we should go. I'll never forget that, they just showed up, and afterward, it was such a moving event when all four of us kids talked and then others went up to talk, afterward, Bernard and Raezer came up to me, Raezer at 6'1”, Bernard at 6'3”, and they looked down at me (5'9”) and said how nice the service was, and they meant it, it was moving. Like you'd expect it to be boring, maybe some clergyman who didn't know him reporting on what surviving family had to told him. I'd love to somehow return some of the favor to Bernard, can't go to Philly now, probably, but at least do something, but probably won't be able to, because Esther keeps her distance, it looks like. Maybe Ezibil will know; we'll see.
So, after Fish's call I emailed everyone on our list and told them and everyone wrote back immediately, it makes us all so sad, and Birkhead said he's the first one of the poker group to die. Which isn't actually true, because John Tracy, ol' Mother-man Tracy, died a few years ago, as we know because his ex-wife and classmate organizes our reunions, probably we won't have another but maybe we will, but anyway, it's what we live with now because we've made it to our 80's. Who'd a ever goddamn thunk it, sitting around the able and calling the game of Itsy-Bitzy-with-a-tiddle, which I think Bubble Leidman introduced. It probably wasn't Bumbo Bray, another in and out member of the group. Gosh we had a lot of guys who played, some core, some now and again. My parents saw them all; I think they were so happy to see this great group, what a high school class, they all knew my parents. I guess Jon Gross hasn't emailed, he had to be so offended by what Bernard said, although maybe it could be chalked up to dementia – that's what I'd like to do, but I really don't know. I think it's a valid attribution, I'd like it to be, but I wasn't there.
I sat there at Milly's American Kitchen as the time went by, it was probably about 9 by this time, and I started telling Mary Lou about it, about Fish's call and the rest, and when I said “John Bernard” I couldn't help it, for the first time, I cried. I told her that after I had emailed everyone I saw that Raezer's email had bounced back so I called him, and he had already heard. It was good I called him anyway, because his wife Sally had just had her successful lower abdominal operation and John was very happy for that. He's had a rough go of things, heart arrhythmia and two weeks in the hospital which has left him weak and his balance is unsteady and his beloved daughter Julie is coming to the end of her road with her brain tumor, so we're in very close touch and we reassure each other continually that we love each other. Mary Lou believes in an afterlife but I don't, I think it's just like before you were born, nothing, so all we can do is tend to each other while we're alive and be kind and help one another and be friends and do what you can do despite all your deficiencies and be grateful that we have life even if it's only for an instant, but I had to cry and Mary Lou put her hand on my arm and I couldn't help crying and it was good I did because holding it in isn't the healthiest thing to do. We assured each other, Mary Lou and I, that we each try to do the best we can, and I told her very sincerely that she is always helping other people and she assured me that I was, too. But I thought of those poker games, and how talented John was, although he was definitely more thinking than feeling, but with a good sense of humor. One time Bernard asked Fish how he felt about the President of Brown calling for reparations and Fish said that he didn't want to pay the money and Bernard congratulated him on his principled response and I still laugh about it today. But who couldn't honor a choice of baseball over continuing his legal career, distinguished as it was, and making more money. That obit cite, by the way, came from Lynn, who wrote her memoirs in Outside the Box and had a few pages on our class with the same pride and celebration and description that I feel, that we all feel.
Mary Lou said that it's funny, she grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the same Hannibal of Mark Twain, but moved to Naples, Florida for 11th and 12th grades and she knows almost no one from Hannibal but still has friends from Naples – where she was homecoming queen one year, I think, or some queenly honor like that. Sure, I said, it's high school. If you want to know where someone is from and they have moved around, ask them about high school, because that's really where we're from, those mid-teen years, that's where we're from. That's where we form ourselves, where we're first spending significant time away from parents, peer grouping, coping with maturing and fighting with our hormones as they push us one way and the other, playing sports and having class plays and finding things to do with each other and, significantly, playing poker. Where you're from is where you went to high school, and when you get older, you will increasingly suffer loses, until you yourself are one of the losses, and it will be a good sign of life if you can cry.
Budd Shenkin
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