What would you do if you were a sickly gay boy growing up in Chillicothe, in Southern Ohio in the 1960s? You might become a hairdresser in the big city- Columbus. And if that were not enough? You might move to Los Angeles and become a Jew. Unlikely? That's what my friend David Fyffe did.
When I first met him at Beth Chayim Chadashim, probably in 1986, when I first joined that temple for gay men and lesbians, David introduced himself. He told me I was handsome, and that he was HIV positive. He was blind. "Figures," I thought. Of course the one who can't see me thinks I'm handsome.
He eventually regained some limited vision through a new kind of operation. He walked up to me at the first service he attended after his operation and asked if I had seen the really hot guy in this month's Playgirl. I hadn't. "How did you know I was Barry?" I asked. " I just knew that's what you looked like, even before I could see you."
We couldn't be a couple. I had given up being gay a few years before , from pure terror about AIDS, and was just taking baby steps to come out again. And here was someone HIV positive talking to me. I visited his apartment on Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood, and it was even more chaotic than mine, with everything randomly strewn all over everything. Neither of us would be housekeepers.
In the early 1990s, when I didn't have a car, I would see David on the bus on Santa Monica Boulevard or Fairfax Avenue. We would get into long discussions about the nature of God, the reason for Good and Evil existing in the world, or sometimes just about friends, ex-lovers, and who had died recently. David was modest, but he did brag that he was the last survivor of two different AIDS support groups at temple. The threat of disease and death was hard, but the loss of so many friends in their twenties and thirties was devastating.
We both assuaged our consciences by volunteering to be parachaplains- rabbis without the title who would visit Jewish patients at smaller hospitals that couldn't afford to have a rabbi on staff. I visited Hollywood Community Hospital, just off Vine Street, for several years. They had a dedicated AIDS ward - mostly hospice care, until better meds came out and people stopped dying. David also volunteered at a hospital.
Arlan Wareham showed up at temple in the mid-90s. There's a long, interesting story about how Arlan came to BCC, and eventually decided to be a Jew. He was smart, handsome, funny. I thought we might be a couple, but something held me back. I just couldn't see us together. Then one day David came to me and told me he had a new boyfriend- Arlan. It all fell into place. Arlan and David. Of course!
They had a grand wedding at BCC- not in any way legal in the 1990s, but that didn't stop Rabbi Lisa Edwards from blessing their union, nor did it stop their many friends from celebrating. I remember mostly that they made their own chuppa or wedding canopy.
They settled in San Bernardino County, where Arlan came from, but drove in sixty miles to services every week. I should have apologized for laughing in their face when they told me in 2005 that they were moving to Israel. Arlan admitted that it seemed crazy. It wasn't.
I last saw Arlan and David face-to-face in 2007, when a group of us from BCC toured Israel and visited them at their home in Tzfat, a medieval town in Galilee, where most of the residents were Orthodox. David fit right in with his long unkempt beard, plain white shirt and navy pants. Even the tube for his insulin pump, if you didn't look too closely, could have been tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by Orthodox men. Arlan and David showed us where a missile from Lebanon had damaged their house.
They decamped for Eilat on the Red Sea, warmer and more resort-like than Tzfat. Arlan kept up a presence on Facebook and a blog. I didn't hear much from David. He was on Facebook, but didn't post much after 2011. This year, Arlan's posts grew more dire. David's mind and body were shutting down. David Fyffe died this week in a hospital in Beer Sheva, Israel. He was fifty-nine.
I remarked to Arlan a few weeks ago how fortunate they were to live in Israel, where medical care is better than in the United States, and covered by the government. They were blessed in their lives. I do sometimes go off into magical realism, where I attribute good events to God. David did that, too, but he also made good decisions - leaving his family in Ohio, becoming a Jew, falling in with many friends at BCC, finding and keeping Arlan. Despite being HIV positive for thirty years and suffering from periods of crippling depression, he managed to keep going when others didn't.
David was a holy man, a deep thinker, a crazy wonderful friend. He is survived by his husband Arlan Wareham and members of his biological family in Ohio. People who attended BCC before 2005, and other still remaining AIDS activists from Los Angeles will also mourn his passing.
Arlan Wareham has a blog: http://www.arlansday.blogspot.co.il
Showing posts with label Beth Chayim Chadashim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beth Chayim Chadashim. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Highways
My friend Brian Jacobs posted on Facebook last week that he was attending the twenty-fifth anniversary party for Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. That brought back memories, and I pointed out in a comment that I had studied performance art there with Tim Miller, and performed as one of five in a piece called "Queer Hearts" in 1994. Mehmet Sander, a choreographer who frequently worked at Highways, and for a time was in the classes with me, greeted me on Facebook and we became Facebook friends.
In the early 1990s, I was living in a tiny Hollywood hovel. I wrecked my car in December 1989 when I rear-ended a car that had stopped to make a left turn. I was late for a scene rehearsal from my acting class and was trying to go over my lines while driving. It was a youthful indiscretion. I was forty. I was uninsured, not getting much work as a substitute teacher, and couldn't replace the car.
I read in the Los Angeles Times some time in 1990 about Tim Miller, a performance artist who lost his National Endowment For The Arts grant because Jesse Helms and a few others thought his work was obscene. The article said that California had stepped in with a grant to Miller, which would allow him to teach performance art at Highways. Tim had one class for gay men on Thursday nights and one Saturday mornings open to anyone. I signed up for both. I took the bus from Hollywood to Santa Monica, walking the last few blocks. If I wasn't the oldest in the group, I was second oldest. Brian and Mehmet were in the group as well as my friend Michael Richter. Gabe Gelbart, who appears earlier in this blog, was there, and maybe twenty or so other young men. The Saturday class had men and women, gay and straight. It had a different feel to it, more about the art than about a gay community. I loved both of these classes.
From these classes, I learned to tell stories about my life, learned to be brief (which I have forgotten on this blog), and became part of a group, working and sharing with others. At the end of the Saturday class, I wrote a piece about Israeli dancing, and how it saved my life. I taped a song from Israeli dance, changing the choreography somewhat, recorded my voice over the music, and danced while the tape played the music and my story. We were to get Tim's critique the week after, which would have been March 23, 1991. I missed that, because my father died March 17, and I went to Baltimore for the funeral and shiva.
Two of the youngest and most handsome men in the group died of AIDS during the months we were meeting. When the play "Rent" came out, I was anxious to see it, because I thought it would remind me of Highways. I hated "Rent." The death of someone from AIDS is a plot point in the play. Everyone just goes on afterwards as if it never happened. Real life hasn't been like that. I still remember one of the men telling us in a performance about his status; I visited the other one in the hospital. Nothing was the same after we lost them.
I tried to see most of the shows at Highways. For a long time, I volunteered as an usher so I could see the shows free. I remember Michael Kearns' drag "Camille" which moved me to tears despite the doomed heroine being 6'3" and having a hairy chest and a mustache. The young man who played opposite Michael in that piece performed a solo piece a different time, where he told about being a prostitute to pay his way through college. Hardly anyone came, but he gave a full-out performance that I still remember more than twenty years later.
My friend Kevin was in a Christian order of some kind and lived behind a 1920s mansion on Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles with his Brothers. I remember it was 1994 because Kevin lost the back wall of his room to the Northridge earthquake and had to move. Kevin recruited me to be in a piece about gay love, to be performed at Highways. I was the token older and ethnic person of the five in the group. Three were Mormons, and Kevin was ghostly pale with light orange hair. We each wrote three pieces about gay love, two short and one a bit longer, with a song. We added a few other songs. My long piece was about the mismatch between me and my first boyfriend, who had been the teen organist at his family's Baptist church in Pensacola before he went to music school in New Orleans, where we both lived. The others suggested we sing a Baptist hymn in harmony as part of the piece, and we did. I had suggested that we sing "Too Many Fish In The Sea," originally by The Marvelettes, between pieces, and Kevin went for that, over the objections of the younger members, who had never heard the song. I had never heard of The Smiths, but I learned one of their songs.
Our show ran close to three hours. We were on only two nights, Friday and Saturday. Two-thirds of the Saturday audience was people I had sent flyers to, members of my temple, Beth Chayim Chadashim, where most of the members were gay and lesbian. After our performances, someone asked when I was planning to do another piece, and I said the first thing that popped into my mind. "Never."
We've gone different ways in the last twenty years. Brian Jacobs was a young teacher when
i met him. He worked under an insane principal at a little alternative school near Arlington and Venice. I subbed there sometimes. He has moved on to AP classes, I think in history. He's taken kids on "The March of the Living" where they visit both Auschwitz and Israel, and he has won many awards for his teaching. Michael Richter, despite an Ivy League education, was working as a clerk at The Jewish Federation. He went back to UCLA for a degree in dance and is a choreographer. C. Jay Cox, one of my costars in "Queer Hearts," wrote the screenplay for "Sweet Home Alabama, " starring Reese Witherspoon, and directed "Latter Days," a film about gay Mormons.
Brian, Tim, and Michael all had issues more recently with immigration. All of them had boyfriends who could not maintain legal status in the United States. Michael moved to La Paz, Mexico to be with his mate, Iram. I think he is flourishing there. Brian and Tim were able to marry their boyfriends legally in California, and with the fall of The Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, obtained citizenship for their loved ones. Mehmet told me last week that he had moved back to Istanbul, his hometown, with his American-born boyfriend. His dance troupe performs frequently in England, and I saw pictures on his Facebook page with a large, loving family.
I learned a lot about art and life from my time at Highways, and while I've lost track of many of the people there, I keep in touch with a few. I decided to learn to sing better, and sang for High Holidays for seven years, and most Friday nights for three. At Highways I learned writing and performance, but also compassion, friendship and fearlessness. I got back to my spiritual roots. Those days inform who I am today.
In the early 1990s, I was living in a tiny Hollywood hovel. I wrecked my car in December 1989 when I rear-ended a car that had stopped to make a left turn. I was late for a scene rehearsal from my acting class and was trying to go over my lines while driving. It was a youthful indiscretion. I was forty. I was uninsured, not getting much work as a substitute teacher, and couldn't replace the car.
I read in the Los Angeles Times some time in 1990 about Tim Miller, a performance artist who lost his National Endowment For The Arts grant because Jesse Helms and a few others thought his work was obscene. The article said that California had stepped in with a grant to Miller, which would allow him to teach performance art at Highways. Tim had one class for gay men on Thursday nights and one Saturday mornings open to anyone. I signed up for both. I took the bus from Hollywood to Santa Monica, walking the last few blocks. If I wasn't the oldest in the group, I was second oldest. Brian and Mehmet were in the group as well as my friend Michael Richter. Gabe Gelbart, who appears earlier in this blog, was there, and maybe twenty or so other young men. The Saturday class had men and women, gay and straight. It had a different feel to it, more about the art than about a gay community. I loved both of these classes.
From these classes, I learned to tell stories about my life, learned to be brief (which I have forgotten on this blog), and became part of a group, working and sharing with others. At the end of the Saturday class, I wrote a piece about Israeli dancing, and how it saved my life. I taped a song from Israeli dance, changing the choreography somewhat, recorded my voice over the music, and danced while the tape played the music and my story. We were to get Tim's critique the week after, which would have been March 23, 1991. I missed that, because my father died March 17, and I went to Baltimore for the funeral and shiva.
Two of the youngest and most handsome men in the group died of AIDS during the months we were meeting. When the play "Rent" came out, I was anxious to see it, because I thought it would remind me of Highways. I hated "Rent." The death of someone from AIDS is a plot point in the play. Everyone just goes on afterwards as if it never happened. Real life hasn't been like that. I still remember one of the men telling us in a performance about his status; I visited the other one in the hospital. Nothing was the same after we lost them.
I tried to see most of the shows at Highways. For a long time, I volunteered as an usher so I could see the shows free. I remember Michael Kearns' drag "Camille" which moved me to tears despite the doomed heroine being 6'3" and having a hairy chest and a mustache. The young man who played opposite Michael in that piece performed a solo piece a different time, where he told about being a prostitute to pay his way through college. Hardly anyone came, but he gave a full-out performance that I still remember more than twenty years later.
My friend Kevin was in a Christian order of some kind and lived behind a 1920s mansion on Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles with his Brothers. I remember it was 1994 because Kevin lost the back wall of his room to the Northridge earthquake and had to move. Kevin recruited me to be in a piece about gay love, to be performed at Highways. I was the token older and ethnic person of the five in the group. Three were Mormons, and Kevin was ghostly pale with light orange hair. We each wrote three pieces about gay love, two short and one a bit longer, with a song. We added a few other songs. My long piece was about the mismatch between me and my first boyfriend, who had been the teen organist at his family's Baptist church in Pensacola before he went to music school in New Orleans, where we both lived. The others suggested we sing a Baptist hymn in harmony as part of the piece, and we did. I had suggested that we sing "Too Many Fish In The Sea," originally by The Marvelettes, between pieces, and Kevin went for that, over the objections of the younger members, who had never heard the song. I had never heard of The Smiths, but I learned one of their songs.
Our show ran close to three hours. We were on only two nights, Friday and Saturday. Two-thirds of the Saturday audience was people I had sent flyers to, members of my temple, Beth Chayim Chadashim, where most of the members were gay and lesbian. After our performances, someone asked when I was planning to do another piece, and I said the first thing that popped into my mind. "Never."
We've gone different ways in the last twenty years. Brian Jacobs was a young teacher when
i met him. He worked under an insane principal at a little alternative school near Arlington and Venice. I subbed there sometimes. He has moved on to AP classes, I think in history. He's taken kids on "The March of the Living" where they visit both Auschwitz and Israel, and he has won many awards for his teaching. Michael Richter, despite an Ivy League education, was working as a clerk at The Jewish Federation. He went back to UCLA for a degree in dance and is a choreographer. C. Jay Cox, one of my costars in "Queer Hearts," wrote the screenplay for "Sweet Home Alabama, " starring Reese Witherspoon, and directed "Latter Days," a film about gay Mormons.
Brian, Tim, and Michael all had issues more recently with immigration. All of them had boyfriends who could not maintain legal status in the United States. Michael moved to La Paz, Mexico to be with his mate, Iram. I think he is flourishing there. Brian and Tim were able to marry their boyfriends legally in California, and with the fall of The Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, obtained citizenship for their loved ones. Mehmet told me last week that he had moved back to Istanbul, his hometown, with his American-born boyfriend. His dance troupe performs frequently in England, and I saw pictures on his Facebook page with a large, loving family.
I learned a lot about art and life from my time at Highways, and while I've lost track of many of the people there, I keep in touch with a few. I decided to learn to sing better, and sang for High Holidays for seven years, and most Friday nights for three. At Highways I learned writing and performance, but also compassion, friendship and fearlessness. I got back to my spiritual roots. Those days inform who I am today.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Los Angeles
I lived in Los Angeles more than twenty-five years, from September 1984 to January 2010, when Joe and I moved to Crescent City. I was almost thirty-five when I moved there, and past sixty when we left. We came to Morgantown in July 2012. When people in Morgantown say things like "Aren't you glad to be closer to home?" (I was born and raised in Baltimore) if I'm honest, I'll say "Home is Los Angeles." If I'm less than honest, I'll say "Yes, it is, " or going halfway, I'll say "I no longer have family in Baltimore, but it's good to be near my sister, who lives just outside Washington."
So we were back in Los Angeles from July 15 - 22. I guess the first thing you notice is the backed-up traffic, then the beautiful weather, the two things Los Angeles is most known for.
We stayed with six different friends in seven days, all close friends of mine from the time I lived there. We stayed in Altadena, north of Pasadena, with my friend Jim Potter and his wife, Michelle Huneven, then the westside of Los Angeles,with my dance partner Reva Sober, the east side of the San Fernando Valley (still in Los Angeles City) at the home of my longtime buddy Jeffrey Bernhardt, near downtown LA with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife Tracy Moore, two nights in Alhambra,
just south of Pasadena with my friend Greg Miller, and finally, with friends Dave Parkhurst and Maggie Anton Parkhurst, near the airport, southwest of downtown near the Pacific Ocean.
I had three places I wanted to be during our week: Israeli dancing at Wilshire Boulevard Temple West, Friday night services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I first met, and where we later married, and the weekly hike in Griffith Park with my former crew of middle-aged gay men. I accomplished all of that and more. We ate at Moishe's Middle Eastern Restaurant in The Farmer's Market, where the three ladies who worked there recognized me,from when I was a regular, and we visited the new Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. With our friend Jay Jacobs, we lunched at The French Market Place, a coffee shop in West Hollywood where Joe and I had our first real date in December 2005, then saw a film called "It Got Better" the last day of Outfest, LA's LGBT film festival, about celebrities who have successfully come out. George Takei and Jason Collins, featured in the film, were on a panel after.
After our Griffith Park hike, complete with L.A.'s signature perfect sunny warm, dry weather, and a gorgeous sunset, a group of us went out for Italian food. This was the time I missed most since our move: twenty-five middle-aged gay men out at a neighborhood restaurant, eating and gossiping. I haven't been able to replicate that experience anywhere else.
We also found time to visit three of Joe's classmates from rabbinical school, Rabbis Sara Goodman, Dalia Samansky, and Deborah Goldmann. The three of them at graduation were not available for jobs outside of Los Angeles. They are all not entirely happy working several part-time jobs to keep afloat. Deborah and Dalia each now have two small children, all four adorable and smart, but limiting their career choices.
I see from my visit the result of choices we all have to make. Dalia and Deborah, young, bright and ambitious, are trying to have families and careers and finding that difficult. I could have stayed in Los Angeles and maintained my single life, but I know that Greg, Richard, Jeff, and Jay, all creative and successful people, feel they should have someone with them. I could have put limits on where Joe could work, or let him go off on his own. My choice was to go with him and hope that a town with a Reform synagogue that accepted a fifty-six year old gay rabbi with a partner would be somewhere I could get used to.
We attended the Men's Havurah (group of friends) Garden Party from our temple Sunday afternoon. I don't think anyone was under fifty. I knew many of the people there from the 1980s. My friend Steve, who always liked older men, met a guy who was fifty-five when he was thirty-five. They are still together, but the older man, now eighty, is in poor health and couldn't attend. I know the coming out stories, the past lovers, dead and still living, of these men. I knew the middle-aged guys when they were young and pretty, the happily married when they were on the prowl. There was a time at temple when there was a special group for men over forty, who felt uncomfortable with the young men who were active in the temple. Now the mainstream group is over 50, and the minority group is those in their twenties and thirties, who have a special coed social group (unthinkable in the old days) for themselves.
These men have been my friends for up to thirty years. I could have stayed in L.A. with them until we were all in nursing homes or dead. Instead I found a somewhat younger man who was starting a new career, looking to the future and not the past.
I loved being in Los Angeles. I was happy to see my friends, note how old everyone has gotten without saying it, as I'm sure they did for me, and hang out in the old places. There are incremental changes: the temple has a new building , our local Trader Joe's was torn down, the Fairfax Cinema is closed, the hikers go to a different Italian restaurant, but among the oldsters things aren't that different. And they never will be.
I asked Joe if we could visit a cemetery in East Los Angeles where three of my old friends are buried. He agreed, and brought a Bible, so we could read psalms at the gravesites. We visited my best friend Fred Shuldiner, a teacher at Orthodox Yeshiva High School, who died from AIDS at 49 in 1994. We stopped at the grave of Sol, orphaned at an early age and nearly blind from birth, who always spoke of how grateful he was for God's blessings. Sol died of hear failure at 65 in 1997. Sue Terry has a spot for ashes in a wall. She was a crazy dog and cat lover, a self-described "helpaholic" who always cleaned up after temple events, making sure to be the last to leave. Her dementia went unnoticed because she was always off a bit. She died in a care facility at 74 last year. We did not attend because we were in Morgantown. Joe didn't question my request to shlep across town to see dead people; in fact he acknowledged that this was a mitzvah, a good deed, or a fulfillment of a commandment. Sue was a friend of his; he did not know Fred or Sol, except from my stories. It was in the cemetery that I knew again, for sure, that Joe was the right man for me.
I don't know if we'll be back again. I can't stand flying any more, and we are building new lives here. Still, if anyone asks where my home is, I'll say "Los Angeles."
So we were back in Los Angeles from July 15 - 22. I guess the first thing you notice is the backed-up traffic, then the beautiful weather, the two things Los Angeles is most known for.
We stayed with six different friends in seven days, all close friends of mine from the time I lived there. We stayed in Altadena, north of Pasadena, with my friend Jim Potter and his wife, Michelle Huneven, then the westside of Los Angeles,with my dance partner Reva Sober, the east side of the San Fernando Valley (still in Los Angeles City) at the home of my longtime buddy Jeffrey Bernhardt, near downtown LA with Rabbi Lisa Edwards and her wife Tracy Moore, two nights in Alhambra,
just south of Pasadena with my friend Greg Miller, and finally, with friends Dave Parkhurst and Maggie Anton Parkhurst, near the airport, southwest of downtown near the Pacific Ocean.
I had three places I wanted to be during our week: Israeli dancing at Wilshire Boulevard Temple West, Friday night services at Beth Chayim Chadashim, the temple where Joe and I first met, and where we later married, and the weekly hike in Griffith Park with my former crew of middle-aged gay men. I accomplished all of that and more. We ate at Moishe's Middle Eastern Restaurant in The Farmer's Market, where the three ladies who worked there recognized me,from when I was a regular, and we visited the new Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. With our friend Jay Jacobs, we lunched at The French Market Place, a coffee shop in West Hollywood where Joe and I had our first real date in December 2005, then saw a film called "It Got Better" the last day of Outfest, LA's LGBT film festival, about celebrities who have successfully come out. George Takei and Jason Collins, featured in the film, were on a panel after.
After our Griffith Park hike, complete with L.A.'s signature perfect sunny warm, dry weather, and a gorgeous sunset, a group of us went out for Italian food. This was the time I missed most since our move: twenty-five middle-aged gay men out at a neighborhood restaurant, eating and gossiping. I haven't been able to replicate that experience anywhere else.
We also found time to visit three of Joe's classmates from rabbinical school, Rabbis Sara Goodman, Dalia Samansky, and Deborah Goldmann. The three of them at graduation were not available for jobs outside of Los Angeles. They are all not entirely happy working several part-time jobs to keep afloat. Deborah and Dalia each now have two small children, all four adorable and smart, but limiting their career choices.
I see from my visit the result of choices we all have to make. Dalia and Deborah, young, bright and ambitious, are trying to have families and careers and finding that difficult. I could have stayed in Los Angeles and maintained my single life, but I know that Greg, Richard, Jeff, and Jay, all creative and successful people, feel they should have someone with them. I could have put limits on where Joe could work, or let him go off on his own. My choice was to go with him and hope that a town with a Reform synagogue that accepted a fifty-six year old gay rabbi with a partner would be somewhere I could get used to.
We attended the Men's Havurah (group of friends) Garden Party from our temple Sunday afternoon. I don't think anyone was under fifty. I knew many of the people there from the 1980s. My friend Steve, who always liked older men, met a guy who was fifty-five when he was thirty-five. They are still together, but the older man, now eighty, is in poor health and couldn't attend. I know the coming out stories, the past lovers, dead and still living, of these men. I knew the middle-aged guys when they were young and pretty, the happily married when they were on the prowl. There was a time at temple when there was a special group for men over forty, who felt uncomfortable with the young men who were active in the temple. Now the mainstream group is over 50, and the minority group is those in their twenties and thirties, who have a special coed social group (unthinkable in the old days) for themselves.
These men have been my friends for up to thirty years. I could have stayed in L.A. with them until we were all in nursing homes or dead. Instead I found a somewhat younger man who was starting a new career, looking to the future and not the past.
I loved being in Los Angeles. I was happy to see my friends, note how old everyone has gotten without saying it, as I'm sure they did for me, and hang out in the old places. There are incremental changes: the temple has a new building , our local Trader Joe's was torn down, the Fairfax Cinema is closed, the hikers go to a different Italian restaurant, but among the oldsters things aren't that different. And they never will be.
I asked Joe if we could visit a cemetery in East Los Angeles where three of my old friends are buried. He agreed, and brought a Bible, so we could read psalms at the gravesites. We visited my best friend Fred Shuldiner, a teacher at Orthodox Yeshiva High School, who died from AIDS at 49 in 1994. We stopped at the grave of Sol, orphaned at an early age and nearly blind from birth, who always spoke of how grateful he was for God's blessings. Sol died of hear failure at 65 in 1997. Sue Terry has a spot for ashes in a wall. She was a crazy dog and cat lover, a self-described "helpaholic" who always cleaned up after temple events, making sure to be the last to leave. Her dementia went unnoticed because she was always off a bit. She died in a care facility at 74 last year. We did not attend because we were in Morgantown. Joe didn't question my request to shlep across town to see dead people; in fact he acknowledged that this was a mitzvah, a good deed, or a fulfillment of a commandment. Sue was a friend of his; he did not know Fred or Sol, except from my stories. It was in the cemetery that I knew again, for sure, that Joe was the right man for me.
I don't know if we'll be back again. I can't stand flying any more, and we are building new lives here. Still, if anyone asks where my home is, I'll say "Los Angeles."
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