Sometimes we measure our growth by our different reactions to like events.
Thirty-nine years ago at OSU I developed a girlfriend. The watershed event came when she actually introduced me to her friends back home; it gave me (I thought), credibility.
One of them, however, was quite vocal in her opinion.
“She doesn’t think you’re for me,” The Jersey Girl whispered, as I slunk into my Plymouth Duster.
My feelings hurt, I angrily sped west on I-80, sing-shouting to Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” my anthem for the summer.
Homeward bound.
(Not for one solitary (?) moment did it occur to me that Gayle was right. A high school majorette from the metropolitan New York area and a naïve “nice Jewish boy” from the mean streets of Ohio: Grace Slick in the same picture with Bobby Vinton?)
Never.
The more things change, however, the more they stay the same.
As the first Seder wound down just last Wednesday the kids got to the C material. Stacy, who’s been in Cleveland recently had met one of my dates.
“She is very, I mean VERY pretty,” said Stacy. Then, with a twinkle in her eye she continued: “I kept thinking ‘What is she doing with Dad?’”
Ouch. Was it really such a juxtaposition? If you prick me, do I not bleed?
It took the Jews 40 years to get from Egypt to Israel; in that same time I have moved maybe two miles. Still, today there is no anger, no hurt. I am OK with myself—at least this week. What others think of me, at some level, is none of my business.
When dinner was over I hopped in my Toyota and drove home sing-shouting to The Killers and “Mr. Brightside.”