The MWL was in the park playing hide-and-seek with spring. He was sitting on the top step of his ladder trying to tag each bit of sunlight and each tenuous whisper of a breeze that wanted to play. It was innocent enough, but he got such an indecent pleasure from it that it felt more like he was exposing himself, not simply to all the people in the park, but to half a century, or the border of a nation or Nature herself.
The lightness of the day knitted itself through and around him and he became part of its fabric. It happened to be the first real day of spring even though, according to the calendar, spring had come four weeks before. But until this particular day spring had played a different game, dressing in a pair of pants and a wig, and slouching around and passing itself off as winter.
And then in the darkness of the morning of that day, before one could get any inkling of what the day was going to bring, spring called to all who could hear it, 'ole ole homefree' or something of the sort, and people, like the MWL, who played those sort of games, got up knowing that spring, real spring, had come. And as he closed his eyes and compressed the warmth and forced it into the cracks that the freeze of winter had opened in him, he heard a voice call his name.
He looked down to see his friend, Reb Dunzel, stooped in sadness, staring at some tragedy he had put down near the bottom rung of the ladder.
"What's wrong?" the MWL asked as he reluctantly pushed himself down the ladder toward the tragedy, slowly, step by step.
"Oh,"said the Rebbe quietly, "a friend of mine, a close friend, closer, one of my best friends," his voice rising to touch the height of their friendship, "died."
"I'm sorry," the MWL said, "I really am." He pulled a cloak of unhappiness tightly around himself mostly to keep the sunlight out, but also to keep some of the warmth and joy of spring which had nested near him, close in.
"How did it happen?" he asked, hoping talking about it would lighten his friends heavy load.
"I don't know exactly,"said the Reb. "He died in California a year ago," he added.
The MWL rearranged the cloak of sadness that he had drawn around him so that it let in a little of the sunlight and spring laden air. "Well, a year ago," he said."That's a long time ago."
"But I just found out about it today," explained his friend, clinging to his sadness, "so for me he died today."
The MWL knew exactly what his friend meant. Inside of you a person always dies again and again, and the death is always slow, and painful and fresh.
"Just last week I was thinking about him. It's been a while since I've seen him. (At least a year thought the MWL.) I thought," continued his friend, "he'll probably drop in one of these days to visit, or maybe he'll call. We used to call one another from time to time. (Dial direct or call collect, a real long distance call now, thought the MWL.) "He traveled a lot," his friend concluded, as if it were an explanation.
"You didn't read about it. I mean his obituary," said the MWL.
"I never buy the newspaper," Reb Dunzel said. "Sometimes, when one of the boxes on the corner is open I read The Times, but even when they are free I never read the obituaries."
"Neither do I," the MWL offered, which wasn't true. He read the paper religiously, from the edition number on the top of the first page, to the advertisement on the last page. But he found himself trying to be agreeable this morning because of spring and because of his friend's loss.
"I knew a woman who always read the obituaries. In fact that's almost the only thing she read in the paper," the MWL added. "She would get up early in the morning, maybe five o'clock, sometimes on weekends, six, and she would jog to a newspaper stand which was open all night and buy The Times and jog home again. Then she would make herself breakfast, an egg and some crustless toast and juice in a little china glass. Then she would set a cloth napkin down, and a three tined fork she had stolen from a Swedish restaurant on the napkin. And then she would put The Times on top of it..."
"Get to the point," his friend interrupted, not seeing any sense in the details even of a truthful description.
"Well then she would pick up The Times and open it to the obituary page and..."
"And if hers wasn't there, she would have breakfast," the Rebbe interjected.
"Close enough," said the MWL.
"She was waiting for death to fire a warning shot into her eggs," the Rebbe announced triumphantly as if he had solved a difficult puzzle.
The MWL shrugged. "Who knows,"he added. "She would say 'the news changes as soon as the type is set, but obituaries are stories that never change.'"
"She always knew who was dead," he continued. "Being dead makes a person more approachable," she would say. "Nothing they could do would surprise you."
"A strange woman," the Rebbe commented.
"She had an odd belief that a person's death could tell you something about them that their life couldn't. She would say, 'In the face of death some of us grow sick and other give up all diseases but one, in the face of death some of us shit in our pants and others develop constipation, in the face of death some of us hear voices and other begin to listen to silence, in the face of death some of us whistle and others sing.' "But she said 'death has no preferences at all, no matter how you stand, you fall.'"
"She sounds morbid,"the Rebbe commented.
"No, she wasn't really. She was very clever and smart. But she avoided saying clever or profound things. 'Saying clever things kills your sex life,' she said once."
"That was clever," the Rebbe observed.
"Well, she wasn't really a happy person," the MWL replied.
"I met death once," the MWL said matter of factly. "It was in a Chinese restaurant. I was trying to decide what to order and he tapped me on the left shoulder. 'I'd skip the Moo Shoo Pork if I were you,' he said quietly. "It was what I was thinking of ordering," I said to him. 'I know, I know, 'he said to me. I looked at the menu again. He gave no such advice to a group of tourists a few tables away, who, while he was slurping his Sesame Noodles, gaily ordered Moo Shoo Pork all around. After we had all gotten our orders he called the waiter over and said something to him in Chinese and there was a commotion and he paid his check and left and 12 people who were sitting at the table in front of me grabbed their throats and keeled over.
"The Moo Shoo Pork I expect," Rebbe Dunzel commented.
"I believe so."
"It happens in Chinese restaurants sometimes," Rebbe Dunzel said matter of factly, "the Moo Shoo Pork isn't what it's cracked up to be."
The MWL saw that his friend Rebbe Dunzel was recovering from his depression. He noticed also that his friend's grief had attracted a shadow which lounged around them. Strangely enough, at the exact moment that he made the observation, his friend spoke up. "Let's move over there," he suggested, pointing to a bench down the path from where they stood which was soaking in light.
The MWL agreed readily, letting the cloak of sadness he had pulled around him fall to the ground. "Sometimes," he thought to himself, "you can't see the shadow you only you miss the light."
"Have you noticed," he said when they had settled down at their new location, he on the bottom rung of the ladder, his friend on the bench, "that the best part of us always dies in some childhood tragedy while the worst part of us grows up with two sets of parents?"
"No," his friend replied, "that particular fact escaped me. But," he added, with only a flickering concern with his sex life, "I have heard that sometimes winter comes in childhood and the ice doesn't melt until old age. Senility is the last stage of adolescence."
"That is a very sophisticated observation," the MWL commented. Both of them gave themselves over to the lightness of the day and thoughts of death had evaporated.
"Sophistication has the life span of a television season," Rebbe Dunzel commented.
"And wisdom," the MWL responded, "never lives longer than a generation."
They sat for a while in silence letting the day carouse around them "Our conversation has left me hungry," the Rebbe said suddenly. "Would you care for a croissant and coffee?"
"A great idea," the MWL replied.