Five Asians walk into a bar- a Cambodian, a Laotian, a Vietnamese, a Korean and a Filipino. The bartender looks up and says: “Sorry, I can’t let you in without a Thai!”
I was hired as the Jewish Chaplain at Overlook Medical Center. 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, if they want to chat or…
Most visits only last five or ten minutes, some are 30 minutes or more, I say a MeSheBerach, 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 in the room 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 New York City—Stuyvesant High School. I start to laugh—“and,” I continue, “you graduated in 1964.” “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 attended 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 Shelly, 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 an acceptance to 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: 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. “HOLYSH*T,” 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 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 with whom he has spoken.
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, and neither one of us is Thai nor were we wearing a tie!! “…so here I was lying in a hospital room with brain cancer, and a Rabbi walks into my r