Elana Centor at Funny Business posted a great comment on my earlier post on a Jew's View of Christmas. Elana, obviously a Bagel Sister, talked about flashbacks of the New Jersey Turnpike whenever she hears the Little Drummer Boy relentlessly on the radio. I too am haunted by memories of the New Jersey Turnpike, whenever I hear that redundant rumpa-bum-bum. y now the little drummer kid is probably 180 years old, but that's another story.
I got stranded by a blizzard, one Christmas Eve, with college buddies trying t make it to Florida for school vacation. It pelted snow so hard, they closed the road and we spent most of the night drinking coffee in a jammed roadside restaurant. The Drummer just played over-and-over again.
But Elana's touch into my memory bank touched another chord, one I've been thinking about a lot lately. Driving to Florida were four kids, two Jewish, one Protestant and one Catholic. In those days, we kidded each other a lot about each other's religion or lack of it. It was delivered-and received-in good fun back in the early 60s.
It was Like that growing up in New Bedford, Mass., in the 1950s as well. We used to have interfaith dances, at our Jewish Community Center, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO)annex and the local YMCA. Some of the best times of my youth were spent with buddies and sports team-mates of different religion. Some of the most exciting moments of my youth were spent with Christian girls in the back seats of those wonderfully large cars of the 1950s, but that too, is another story.
In all of it, there was a lot of kidding But there was a special shared respect. We went t each other's homes. I went to Midnight Mass several years in a row on Christmas Eve, after getting into my friend Robert Pacheco's family's spike eggnog. t was an annual high point. The Catholic kids joked about confession and we joked about our own fire and brimstone Rabbi. We were kids. We came from homes where both parents worked and the mortgage got paid but no one got ahead. We had more in common with each other than we did with the so called leaders of our religious communities.
But two things happened. We grew up for one, and as we did so, the world around us seemed to have become far less ecumenical and even further less tolerant. A lot us went off to college, nearly all being the first of their families to do so. Those who did not stayed in New Bedford. They remained good friends with each other but the rest of us moved on and scattered.
I'm still interfaith in my friendships. I'm still convinced that people of varied races, religions and hues are essentially alike at the core, but unfortunately separated by cultures. Ad cultures everywhere seem to me today more entrenched is staying separated than they were when I was hanging out with the guys outside Finni's Pharmacy on Roche Street in New Bedford, Mass.
I am currently living a better life than I have ever had. But in the sense that the ecumenism's, which so shared the attitudes I have today seems to me to be on the wane, and this time of year, it makes me particularly sad.
But in any case, Elana, thanks for the memory flashback.
Comments