עטרת ראשינו

One of the things I learned as a rabbi's child is that people have complicated relationships with the rabbi's family that are related to their own relationships with God, with Judaism and with their parents. Adding to the complicating factor is the people who are part of your community are in many ways your bosses with the power to fire you at will.

My parents walked that complicated tightrope by being close and open mostly with one another and with family. They tended to be, as they put it, cordial but careful with congregants. That isn't to say that there weren't people in their congregation that they truly loved.

One of the people my mother really loved was Temi. Temi was both incredibly elegant and really down to earth. There was no one smarter about people and what made them tick.  Temi had no problem calling a spade a spade.

Often after dinner, Temi and my mother spoke on the phone. Those phone calls were punctuated by roaring laughter. I would hear my mother laugh as she sat on a tall stool in our yellow kitchen. I would hear Temi's laugh through the phone. Night after night I heard that laughter.

My mother would often tell us the funny stories, the wry observations that Temi had shared.

In the hours after my mother died Temi called and spoke to me in my mother's apartment. She talked to me about how hard it was for us being the children of a congregational rabbi, growing up as we did in that fish-bowl. I was so touched. I certainly had never spoken to Temi about what it was like to grow up in the public eye as we had. I am sure that my mother had never spoken of it. There were many words of comfort spoken to us during that hard time. Temi's call was deeply comforting and clearly memorable.

This June my husband and I visited Temi in Sarasota. She was as sharp-witted as mouthy and as funny as I remembered her being forty years ago. We sat in her apartment high over the water.  As I listened to her throaty Quincy accent I thought about how I wanted to bottle the sound of her voice so I could take it out and listen to it whenever I felt I had lost my mooring.

We sat in Temi's living room and talked and laughed and laughed. I felt at the moment like I was back in our yellow kitchen listening to those two smart and funny women talking back and forth on the phone with the peals of laughter traveling between the two houses a ten-minute walk away from one another.

Today Temi's daughter posted on Facebook that Temi had died.

Before we left Temi's apartment she packed food up for us. When I told her that we had a car and this was totally unnecessary she told me to shut up and she packed up soda and snacks for us. I shut up and accepted the tote bag filled with food that we ate for the rest of our time in Florida all while callign it Temi food. We drank Temi soda and ate Temi cookies and Temi crackers and Temi granola bars.  I realized that it wasn't just cans of diet coke and cookies that we were being given but something else entirely a message of love and friendship across many decades and across many simchas and also across terrible tragedies and losses as well.

As Temi scurried around putting together the bag of snacks she said, "I want you to know that nothing else matters in life, just be kind to one another."

After we left Temi's apartment I began to cry. My husband asked me why and I told him that I realized that this was probably the last time I would see Temi.

I wish there were a way for me to listen to Temi tell a story again. I wish there were a way to listen again to the sound of two friends laughing so hard on the phone.

I feel so fortunate that we had spent the day together in June.

Yehi zichra baruch-

May her memory be for a blessing