Like a detour on a familiar road, priorities have a way of quelling creativity.  I began this piece on Jan 7th, after spotting my old friend Paul “Petie” Crowley by the reservoir in Chestnut Hill where Marcy and I walk every few months.  Unlike the old neighborhood, or Lake Waban, it's circular and uneventful, but it offers us a place to go where the seasonal changes add both color and dimension to the measurements we take of our life together.

 

Generally, by the end of the 2nd lap dusk has fallen, and since the light is no longer camera-friendly and we are both tired enough and cold enough to call it quits; we do so, and leave for the car parked nearby, and home for a quiet evening in front of the 52” plasma TV, watching the drama in other people's TV lives or (preferably) a “vintage” episode of an old favorite, Mannix, The Saint, Kojak; or practically anything as long as there are no commercials.  I can’t take the rapid-fire assault of mindless promotion; it runs contrary to my need to relax after the endless hours talking to customers about Subarus, not to mention the simultaneous background noise generated by the nahreshkeit of my esteemed colleagues.  On a rare occasion we take a 3rd lap, and on this particular Sunday we did just that.  It was - after all - my once/a/month/Sunday/off, and still in the moment from the dreaded, inevitable and unavoidable returning of Max to his mother in L.A. the day before, we had a veritable smorgasbord of morsels to chew on.  So despite the cold and the darkening sky, we agreed to forge on for the 3rd and final time around the icy water, and to possibly weave another twist into our ongoing saga, and to the surprise reunion with an old friend long gone, and never forgotten, from 40 years ago.

 

I met Petie one day in 1970 when I must have been bouncing a ball in the driveway on Brackett Rd. and he appeared - a full head taller than me - out of nowhere.  Like a figure drawn by Norman Rockwell; lanky and freckled with blue/green eyes that closed into twinkling slits whenever he smiled. With his neatly cut whiffle; he was different than me in so many ways.  Friends have always come from far and wide, but in those days, rarely did someone just wander by. It just never happened in the suburbs of Boston; in Newton, in the 02158 zip code where I grew until my 18th birthday when I left for college, and a wanderlust lasting 32 years.  He was the only kid I knew who went to school in a tie and jacket while I was wearing bleached bellbottom jeans and Chuck Taylors. At 13 or 14, my only friends were Jews. The only non-Jews I knew were from Newton Corner, mostly 2nd generation Italian and 3rd or 4th generation Irish, mostly Catholic and working class, whom I had been wired into thinking, were nearly all-vehement and dangerous anti-Semites.  Petie was neither. He went to a parochial school and knew to stop when the nuns walked by on their way to Mt. Alvernia, their habits flowing as we played 1 on 1 in my drive-way; turning he would address them as sister.  

Petie’s real name was Paul, after his dad, a car-salesman who sold Chryslers while mine was doing research in the upper atmosphere.  (I still wonder why they didn't just name him Peter). My grandmother lived in an apartment overlooking the Devotion School in Brookline and spoke Yiddish “to protect our ears”.  His own grandmother lived on the ground floor of their house and spoke with an Irish brogue I barely understood. At a time when my hippie brother was the SDS spokesman on the Tufts campus, in my parent’s den, watching a ball game on the black & white Zenith, Petie would stand at the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.  Devoid of cynicism, he was the consummate all American boy at a time when I had an “Easy Rider” poster and a braless Jean Harlow taped to my walls.  He lived on my street in a blue shingled barn shaped house that bordered on the back of Mt. Alvernia, where in a small wooded area me and some of my buddies would park our sting-rays and hang out, smoking Tiparillos, carving our names in the trees, and boldly lying to each other about our intimate knowledge of the female anatomy.

 

After our walk that night I had difficulty falling asleep.  Since Marcy and I have been walking through our old neighborhood, we have watched his old house go on the market, and jokingly fantasized about moving back to the streets where we grew up together separated by 12 houses.  With a degree of fascination we watched as the new owner gutted and completely renovated the old house; following the construction on our frequent Friday walks. Over the years I had apparently and often dreamt of the interior of the old blue-shingled barn.  In the dream, I am walking up the stairs to the second floor of an empty house with bright white walls. Ironically, I don’t recall ever being beyond the kitchen or living room, but I do recall the distinctive odors that distinguished houses built from wood, to the more familiar, wall-to-wall shag carpeted Tudors occupied by most of my Jewish friends.  In those days, still, we played in the street. We rode our bikes. We didn’t generally occupy each other’s homes, and our parents never knew where we were.

 

In the 2nd week of January I returned to work with my batteries fully charged after a few quality days with Max.  It had taken 3 days to finally unwind from the pressure cooker that is the/final/days/of/the/year in the car business.  I went back to my routine after a streamlining of my sales processes, including the ability to ID every incoming call to my smart-phone and with this information don an appropriate hat.  I’ve always known that “information is power”, but I’ve never been fully satisfied by any single method of managing it. For the 1st time since this new life began 2.5 years ago - while I have been successful to a degree - it has never been because I set goals or expectations.  Fear of success might as well be fear of failure and for the past decade having experienced the fear of both - for the limitations placed on my ability to fully control the universe - I have chosen to concentrate on each day as it comes, without looking beyond the week in front of me and/or worse, the prospect of an unfulfilled expectation.

 

In recent weeks, on my 36 hours away from the dealership, I’ve been attempting to recreate some of the routines that once marked the 20 years I lived in Tel Aviv.  With a 6-day workweek, and ordinances that mandated the shutting down of businesses during the Sabbath, (in those days) there was a race against the clock in preparation for the Sabbath.  Everything had to be completed by sundown. “Everything” could be anything of immediate importance, from milk in the fridge, to paying a bill at the post office. “Anything” could be … anything; what you do when there is nothing more important on your agenda.

 

For me, nowadays, that mad dash around town occurs once a week, between Thursday afternoon and Friday; just long enough to pick up a Challah at what was once Hanna’s bakery in Newton, drop off a pair of shoes to be re-soled, have any number of medical conditions addressed by an equally alarming number of specialists, see Shelagh at Supercuts, for a number 3 with a fade, pick up a fresh batch of half-sours at Baza on Needham St., have a walk with Marcy, talk to my sister or mother or both… the list can be daunting, especially since my free time; just like Shabbat in Tel Aviv is packed into the tail end of one day and into the next.  It is a few hours of ritual, to which I defer any type of extracurricular (car sales-like) activity.

 

I’ve taken to eating tahini lately, and until very recently I’ve been able to find it at Baza amongst the other canned delicacies.  They ran out, and fortunately or not, I’ve had lesser indulgences that needed more of my attention, and (not unlike the story being told here), the finding of the tahini had to be delayed… Life does have a way of getting in the way of itself.  That being said, I assigned the task to my beloved, to search high and low - in all of Metrowest, New England, on the Internet even – for the sacred batch of crushed sesame seeds, and pushed it out of my mind.. Poof, just like that.

 

At the near end of a very long cold and gray January day; after sucking wind from both ends primarily answering phones for other salesmen and being stroked by a few “walk-ins”; and after finally squeezing the final drops of juice from a fruitless day, I began writing an email to Petie.  I had hoped we might get together, but mostly wanted him to know what his friendship had meant to me, and how over the past 40 years I have often regaled some of the highlights: in the Summer of ’71, after seeing John DeSimone riding my stolen 26” Raleigh at the corner of Sargent & Center, it was Petie who stood with me as we surprised the DeSimone’s during their Sunday lunch and I politely asked for the return of my bicycle, and the baskets that had been stripped from it’s shiny red frame.

 

In the life of a Subaru salesman the slowing end of another long, quiet day, can be exacerbated by the stillness of the glistening new cars poised like dioramas in a museum.  With the end of the day in sight, instead of reading and re-reading the breaking news collecting dust all day I began writing an email to my old friend. Like the many photos I take of the old neighborhood; the casual observations of the inconsequential, meeting Petie the way we did; on the darker side of a melancholy day, recognizing him with his back turned, 40 years heavier than the last time I saw him, and from a distance of over 100ft… well, here I am as if by design; and just as I began delving into these casual recollections, my smart phone rang with the promise of a deal, but even more a sign of how things occur in threes; just as I begin to tap the first few words of the email, channeling 40 years of memories, I receive a text from Marcy, and it reads: “got tahini”.