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Forever
By Sidney S. Fink
We found our father's diary tucked into his night table draw as the note he left us told us. We never knew that he had, or even kept one. Certainly not since mom passed on several years ago. We now cherish it and have made copies for our siblings as they have asked us to do and to pass on to our children, their children's children and our future descendants.
I had to see her one more time before I….well, then she was suddenly in the bedroom and was sitting beside me on our bed. She took my hand and reach over for a kiss. Then she back off and smiled as she gazed into my eyes. I smiled back at her face and her green eyes and favorite green dress. Green was her favorite color …and then she suddenly was gone... I wrote this for all of you and now, now I will relax into my forever sleep as I go to join her…Love DAD.
II
Some men need an awful lot of women in their lives to make it a worthwhile, happy one and for some women, many men. For others like ourselves, it took just one. She was the right one and the only one that I ever needed and I the only one she ever needed. Oh, yes there had been others before, but somehow, somehow we both knew and felt it in our bones, as they say. It was the day, or perhaps I should say night that tomorrow came.
I was talking to a frat brother of mine as we were going to a class when I unwittingly bumped into her on a staircase and just uttered an "excuse me" and went on. Then I spotted her sitting in a class we both were taking and let it go at that, but that Saturday night at a party on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx we met again.
"Hello, we, I mean I bumped into you at the college on the stairs earlier this week…and then you were in a class I was also in. Now here we meet again. Seems like fate is bringing us together.
"So it seems." She responded. "Let's go talk, or do you dance? The music he has on is made for it. Ballroom style."
"Ballroom! We must be made for each other. I love it and so many I know just cannot ballroom. They just stay in one spot going in a circle at best be it foxtrot, rumba, or…"
."Do not know what they are truly doing. Let's try and see how we do."
And so we danced many times that night and the others just stared at us, or just plain got out of our way. I took her home. We kissed and said "goodnight". And have been together ever since…until I lost her.
In some ways I guess it was an unusual attachment, but then perhaps no so. I lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and she in the far off western Bronx near NYU's uptown campus overlooking the Hudson River. Somehow it did not faze us. It just seemed to bring us closer yet. We would go to sit on benches at NYU's site and make out as best we could. We did so in her family's kitchen when they slept and I would leave exhausted and go home on the IRT to Chambers Street and change to the BMT to get to my home base to go home to my family apartment and slip past my sleeping parents to my bedroom
We just could not stay apart.
At the first frat dance that we went to we danced and danced. The frat held the dance yearly at a Manhattan hotel and Jack Starr's band always played then. He was a frat brother and he made us a proposal at that time…"Look you, I was watching you dance and I have a deal for you two….that you accompany my musician group to weddings they were to play at and when the newly wedded couple are called upon to waltz to the Al Jolson's movie song that went "Oh how we danced on the night we were wed…." ….and they usually were not great dancer like you two… that you are to get on the floor to waltz and then each take one of the opposite sex, you the bride and she the groom and lead them around the floor as everyone watching to see and to cheer their newfound skill. For this I will pay a decent wage and I also promise you that whenever and wherever you y ourselves would wed we would play there for you without any cost as a wedding gift of thanks."
We agreed and did this for quite some time and it brought Jack's band a lot of newfound business. For we were soon helping the wedding guests do the foxtrot and rumba as well.
And so they then eventually did play for us when we wed after we graduated from college. And everyone who knew us had already felt our future in their souls. They did not play that waltz for us, but our favorite song from a movie we saw. It was called "MY FOOLISH HEART". It was ours forever.
It was fortunate that we had worked and saved what we had made dancing, her parents could not afford to pay for our wedding and mine did not want us to wed and refused to help. They came from the old world school of arranged marriages and had someone else in mind and a different idea of what my life should and would be than what I had in mind. I came from today's world, not yesterday's. I did not wish to be a small fruit store owner like my dad and that girl's dad had a small supermarket. I had never met or saw her. I only found out about college when I discovered that my then buddies were going to one. My parents never mentioned a word to me about it and I was able to go on a scholarship that I found out I could get from our school counselor whom I went to as seek guidance from after my parents just stared at me when I mentioned my plans
We got our marriage license and found a wedding hall we could afford on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx They found a rabbi we had never met to wed us and when he asked those words of us "Do you take…" our response as we looked into each other's eyes was "FOREVER."
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from the September-October 2007 Edition of the Jewish Magazine
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