We've never really met.  I knew a Fred Cooper. He was a smart, wisecracking funny sort of kid.  We were in a few classes together throughout high school; Biology in 10th grade (I think) with Lynne Freeman the teacher who spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in land-locked Lesotho; she assisted the swim coach at 6:30 am at a pool somewhere I can't remember thanks to the way she would squat on the edge of the pool in her bikini, pubic hairs peeking through her bathing suit bottom.. (Excuse the digression)...

Fred was a kid who moved in indefinable circles and as such, was never close enough to me and my friends to fully embrace him as "one of us".  "We" were a tight-knit group of kids some of us having been friends since kindergarten, while others were annexed into our little kingdom in middle school.  By the time we reached high school, any of our relationships formed "outside" of the core group, could be perceived as threatening. They were friendships born not through osmosis like our childhood friendships.  The context of classes, clubs, sports teams served as the backdrop to our developing relationships, but looking back they were all the same territories that as post pubescent humans we carved out of the sprawling campus where for the most part we would hang out between classes, smoking cigarettes, pot and making fun of teachers and other kids who (just like us) were acting a lot bigger than we really were.

Into this climate of cliques Fred Cooper, an inimitable iconoclast, cocky and outspoken - a lot like me - emerged one day suddenly as the "boyfriend" of "one of our girls", and then, later on, with another and another and (lucky him) probably another.  Not only was he a phenom on the slopes where I watched him and distinctly remember thinking to myself "if I could only ski like that"; he had a talent for breaking down the fair maidens of our youth. He was a stud, evidently, and for that alone I certainly must have envied him.  Well into my 20s - I secretly envied a lot of people. Later on, I heard that Fred had re-taken his birth name, Joe, and that he was no longer known by "Fred". There have been times in my life when I have wished to re-name myself; to distance myself from the indiscretions of my youth, my early adulthood, my failed marriages, the strained relations I have had with far too many people...

Joe, if I may, it is finally clear to me, why when I contemplated crossing the country to spend 25th reunion weekend in Newton I was informed that I would not be welcome in your home.  At the time I made Kenny laugh with a knee-jerk reaction suggesting the flow of life's events being far greater than adolescent grudges. That was then. In 2000, I was still comfortably safe from the distant wrath of my peers for a callous act, which I don't honestly remember, but which was described to me a week ago today for the first time in graphic detail by our mutual friend, and of which I am deeply ashamed.

A few years back, when I first discovered email, I sent written apologies to several people to whom I carried tremendous shame for my actions with their (dis)regard.  Later on I learned that this is a common step to recover from alcohol addiction. No wonder. I would have gladly apologized to you then, Joe, if I had even faintly remembered the incident.  I've spent the better part of the last decade making apologies to people for random acts of insensitivity. While I've not spent the past 33 days of atonement in synagogue like many do, not a single Yom Kippur has passed by without some form of reflection.  Its in my DNA, along with my volatile nature and the experiences of a lifetime, where I come from, where I’ve been, what I’ve witnessed and how I was raised, reared, trained, educated or otherwise ...

 

My mother, Mrs. Rosenberg was a Hebrew teacher at Temple Emanuel.  Unfortunately, this made me an easy target for any of the (older) kids who were forced to sit in her classroom twice a week to be goose-fed the Hebrew alpha bet, Jewish ceremonies and pistol whipped into singing songs under an educational model conceived in post war/post holocaust America.  This made Hebrew school in leafy affluent any-town USA seem like a big waste of time to the kids, while for the parents - 1st generation Americans - an affordable and "righteous" way to keep their kids out of trouble with a possible benefit of teaching them about their tortured roots. I have often thought Jewish children had tacit approval to behave wildly in Hebrew school, for in "regular" school, these same kids were at the tops of their class.  Better they should run amok amongst their own... This is a common phenomenon and can be seen wherever ethnic groups (of any kind) gather.

Mrs. Rosenberg had two kinds of pupils as she called them; morons and fresh morons.  She was notorious. Unfortunately for me, many of the freshest morons were bigger and stronger than me and at any given time between the ages of 10 to 16 I was a target for (Jewish) bullies who had been tormented by my mother the Hebrew teacher - and any number of anti-Semites (I was warned) lurking behind every corner and for whose hatred I was fodder.

In the killing fields of the John Ward schoolyard one day in 1969, I was standing at the top of a hill when a 14-year-old boy with a Marlboro dangling between his lips approached me.  Beneath the wiry, red, blown-dry "jewfro" that gave a helmet effect to his oversized head, he had a prematurely square jaw and an Adam’s apple the size of a walnut. Walking within inches of me and blowing smoke in my face - picture young deer locking horns - he jabbed his palm into my chest without warning and sent me head over heels, down to the bottom of the hill where we were standing.  For (38) years I have played and replayed this incident like a broken record, and yet, despite the pain and humiliation "suffered" by me at the hands of the brute, I would welcome the opportunity to meet him today. Not unlike a drill instructor I had during basic training that took sadistic pleasure in running us fully geared up and down a small mountain in the middle of the night, carrying our beds, and yet today, I would welcome the opportunity to meet him.  I would revel in the experience. I would be happy to see either of these assholes, just to be over it. I would presume them to be grown men.

 

I “returned” to Boston, not.  I came “back” here not to pick up where I left off at 18.  If that were true then I would be a pathetic human being.  If that were remotely true I would never take a picture, write a letter, or be the parent I try more than anything to be.  If that were true then I would be stuck with the past without a present and no hope for the future. I left at 18 and never looked back with anything more or less than hindsight.  I visited here exactly twice during that time. When I moved here 6 months ago it was to be with Marcy, not to recapture my youth - whatever that means. The follies of my youth are something I have spent the past (almost) 19 years - my Ben is almost 19 – trying to mend wherever possible, process and archive for my old age when I can no longer create new experiences and all I am left with are dusty memories.

 

I was in the cemetery with my 82 year old mother and her 78 year old baby sister visiting the graves of family members long gone.  For a moment I looked around and saw a grave a short distance from where we were standing. Something inexplicable drew me to this grave; perhaps the modesty of the site, or the way it laid by itself disconnected to the other plots like homes in a neighborhood.  I looked down and read the engraving on the stone. It was the younger brother of the same bully that had sucker punched me on that gray wet day in the fall of 1969. For a split second I thought about it; how much I hated him for his action, and wondered whether the effect of my hatred had anything to do with his loss...

 

I am sorry Joe, for having hurt you in any way.  I am sorry Joe, for my children's sake, that this should be my legacy...

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