‘Sounds like some story’
FIRST PERSON

‘Sounds like some story’

Wherein our correspondent is very glad that he kept his yearbook

This is Lenny Mandel’s photo in his Stuyvesant yearbook.
This is Lenny Mandel’s photo in his Stuyvesant yearbook.

It was 60 years ago in June
Rabbi Lenny sang a lovely tune
Graduation then was right in style
In Carnegie Hall they walked the aisle
Stuyvesant High was much the best
To that all could attest
60 years ago they said goodbye

(To the tune of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)

Five Asian guys walk into a bar. One’s Cambodian, one’s Laotian, one’s Vietnamese, one’s Korean, and the last one’s a Filipino. The bartender looks up and says, “Sorry. I can’t let you in without a Thai!”

(Wait. Just wait. There’s a point to this.)

I was hired as the Jewish chaplain at Overlook Medical Center in Summit. I print out a list of the patients who identify as Jewish, and go from floor to floor, and room to room, identify myself as Rabbi Lenny Mandel, and ask if they have any needs, or if they want to chat.

Most visits only last five or 10 minutes, some are 30 minutes or more. I say a Mi Sheberach, I recite the priestly blessing. That having been said, there is the occasional no thank you.

I look down at my list of names and see a name that I remember from high school. It’s not a very common name, and a kid with that name graduated with me.

I walk into the room. He’s sitting in a chair, his wife and daughter are on the couch, and I say: “Hi, I’m Rabbi Lenny Mandel, and I went to high school with, let’s call him ‘Roberto Roberto.’”

“No relation,” he says to me.

His wife tells me that they grew up on Staten Island, and there’s no way I went to school on Staten Island, but that he went to a special school in Manhattan—Stuyvesant High School.

I start to laugh, “And you graduated in 1964,” I say.

“What’s your name again?” he asks.

I tell him but he has no recollection of me in high school. “Well, I didn’t have a beard back then, and I had lots more hair.”

He still didn’t remember me, and I have always said that if you went to Stuyvesant High School when I was there, and you don’t remember me, you didn’t really go there; trust me, I’m quiet now compared to what I was then.

“I’m going to see your boss real soon,” he said. “Wow,” I replied. “The CEO of Overlook Medical Center is coming to visit you?”

“No, no,” he said, “the BIG BOSS in the sky.”

“You mean everybody’s boss? Naah, that’s not gonna be for a long time. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to the 60th reunion in October together.”

We talked and laughed for about 15 minutes. I left his room, called my wife, and asked her to take a picture of Roberto from my high school yearbook and text it to me.

When I got the text, I knew that we weren’t just ships that pass in the night, we were friends in high school.

He signed my yearbook: “GOOD LUCK IN HARVARD, FROM THE S.I. HORSEMAN, ROBERTO.”

Of course he knew me, and of course we were friends. He knew that I wasn’t going to a college that even remotely resembled Harvard (our graduating class had more than a dozen who were accepted and attended Harvard), and it was the perfect chop bust.

He still didn’t remember me, but he commented that I was the first person he’d seen or spoken with from Stuyvesant, and that was 60 years ago.

His wife googled me when I left the room, and when I came back she was reading the article in the Jewish Standard that Deb Breslow wrote, called “Bringing A Final Measure of Comfort.”

It was my first day of making rounds at Overlook, and it was quite a day.

When I got home I took a shot of my yearbook picture and texted it to Roberto’s wife. She showed it to him.

“Holy ****,” he screamed. “Of course I knew Lenny Mandel. We were friends in high school.”

Roberto’s wife texted me: “Lenny, you brought light into a pretty dark day.” I wrote back,s saying that I hope my picture put a smile on Roberto’s face. “Definitely,” she replied. “He has told this story to anyone and everyone he’s talked to.”

We’ve been texting (and speaking) back and forth since his discharge, but I started this article the way I did because of one of his texts. (Neither one of us is Thai, nor were either of us wearing a tie.)

“…so here I was lying in a hospital room with brain cancer, and a rabbi walks into my room who I hadn’t seen in 60 years… Sounds like some story, huh!!!”

Cantor/Rabbi Lenny Mandel, who left the wilds of Manhattan almost 50 years ago and lives in West Orange, has been the hazan at Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson for the past quarter century.

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