friendship

Seven decades of poker evolves

A screenshot of Morley’s Minyan playing poker. Top row, from left: Al Hornstein, Larry Moscovitz and Carolyn Aronson. Middle row, from left: Lyall Levy, Murray Atnikov (the night’s big winner) and Macey Morris. Bottom left is Tony Aronson. Missing are Steve Bernstein, Joel Finkelstein, Marshall Cramer and Irv Sirlin. (image from Carolyn Aronson)

In 1948 or 1949, a group of Jewish students at the University of British Columbia started a weekly poker game. While none of the original players remain, the regular game has continued, with a few interruptions, for more than 70 years. Now, children of some of the earliest members are joining – and the “young” card players are themselves middle aged.

Murray Atnikov, now 97, joined the poker game around 1960. He enjoys playing, but it’s the kibitzing that keeps him coming back.

“The company is very, very jovial, to say the least,” said Murray. “We have a good time.”

The march of time means the faces have changed, but the endurance of the game has been remarkable. It started out as a weekly event, though it went to biweekly when the Vancouver Canucks joined the National Hockey League in 1970. Since the pandemic began, they have played via an online poker platform.

“The continuity is something that amazes me,” said Murray.

Lyall Levy, a retired family doctor who is 85, joined the group in 1964. In those days, the games rotated among the players’ homes. The players were all men and the wives would outdo one another preparing refreshments.

“It would be like going to a high-end Jewish restaurant,” Lyall said. His daughter, Carolyn Aronson, recalls having extra-special lunches the day after poker nights.

Carolyn, now 60, broke the gender barrier when she became the first female to join the men’s game. She is one of four members who are a generation younger than the other players. Her husband, Tony Aronson, also plays. Joel Finkelstein joined the game when his father, Norty, passed away, and Larry Moscovitz took the place of his late father, Bill. The others range from 81 to Murray, at 97.

As the players (and their wives) got older, they moved the games to the Richmond Golf and Country Club, to which they hope to return as soon as the COVID situation makes it reasonable to do so. When some wives complained that the men were driving home on dark winter nights, they moved the games to the afternoon, followed by noshes in the restaurant.

The group never had a name or any formal structure, but after Morley Koffman, a Vancouver lawyer who was a founding player, passed away in 2015 at age 85, they dubbed themselves Morley’s Minyan in his honour.

The players and their families formed tight bonds. Morley, a meticulous record-keeper, would hold back some of the cash from the kitty each week to put toward an annual group golfing and eating excursion in Seattle with spouses.

“I think that appeased the wives because they got to go to Seattle and go shopping or whatever,” speculated Carolyn.

While her husband joined the game in person before the pandemic, she came in only after it went online.

“They’ve never said no girls but there’s never been a woman in the game before,” she laughed. She’s not sure she’ll be invited when they return to live games.

“When we go back to live, she will be there,” her husband insisted. “The other guys will want her there, trust me.”

Her father foresees some potential gender conflicts, though.

“The problem with adding women is, I can think of at least two others whose wives are better players than their husbands,” said Lyall. Another issue, he said, is that some wives may not know how much money their husbands have been losing all these years.

It’s a friendly game – for the most part. Lyall shared tales of sharp competitiveness, referring to some players as “archenemies.”

His daughter downplayed the sharp elbows, insisting it’s all fun and games.

“It’s all fun and games to watch them get at each other,” her father retorted. “There was a lot of hostility between one player and the next. I could tell you some stories.”

“They like ripping each other,” conceded Carolyn, “especially my dad and Murray, they’re old friends.”

When Murray makes a big raise, Lyall studies his opponent’s face.

“I can tell – when his lip starts to quiver, he’s bluffing,” Lyall said. This puts Lyall at a disadvantage in the online game, where faces are obscured and quivering lips are undetectable.

screenshot - Morley’s Minyan as their avatars playing on Pokerstars — Morley’s Minyan as their avatars playing on Pokerstars. *(image from Carolyn Aronson)*

The Aronsons used to jet off regularly to Vegas to play the game. When Lyall invited his son-in-law to join about four years ago, he warned him that the group takes things seriously.

Tony acknowledged, “When Lyall first invited me to join, he said to me, ‘Tony, you gotta think about whether you want to play.’ I said, ‘I can handle it.’”

But joining a group already (long) in progress involves some adjustments.

“I said, ‘What games do you play?’” Tony recalled. “He said, ‘It’s dealer’s choice. You can play any game you want.’ I said, ‘Oh good, that’s nice.’ The first game I arrived at, it came around to me and I said, ‘OK, we’ll play Omaha.’ ‘No, no. We don’t play Omaha.’ So I said, ‘OK, how about Three-card Monte?’ ‘Nope, we don’t play that.’ I said, ‘I thought it was dealer’s choice.’ They said, ‘It is. Seven or five card stud, whichever one you want.’”

The games are not penny ante, but nor are the pots nothing. A hundred or a couple of hundred bucks may be at stake but the bragging rights are the real jackpot.

Recently, Murray had a big win.

Carolyn said, “I heard my dad talking to him two days later and he said, ‘I’m still walking four feet above the ground.’ He’s phoning everybody he knows to say that he won at poker.”

For the longer-term players, these connections constitute decades-long friendships.

“Some of these people he’s maintained the relationships with them for 50, 60 years,” said Carolyn.

Added Tony: “For the younger generation – Larry and Joel and Carolyn and myself – it’s just been an amazing way to connect with these people in a way that we probably couldn’t have before and it feels good that, during COVID, we have been able to put them together and give them the joy of something that they love that they couldn’t do.”

“It’s always an entertaining evening,” Lyall said, “no matter whether you’ve won or lost.”

Grateful for ability to play

Six members of the 35th Street Gang, with the author second from the left in the back row. (photo from Cassandra Freeman)

Sheena and I don’t recall why we were trying to measure the house with a ball of string. We just remember me holding one end of the string, throwing the rest down from my bedroom, and her running all around the house with the rest of it till she got back to me. We were 8 years old and we were part of what we proudly called the 35th Street Gang.

At a recent reunion, 43 years later, seven of us mischievous women decided that playing was a powerful thing. It was about athletic activity, creativity, community building, trust – and simply some of the funnest times we’ve had.

Fairly early in our lives, “we seven” decided we owned the block. That’s why we called ourselves the 35th Street Gang. For some of us, a rite of initiation to the gang was to climb with hands and bare feet up to the very top of the pole and touch the signs that read 35th and Maple, then slide right back down again.

Kick the can was one of our favourite games. It was a combination of tag and hide-and-go-seek. I remember shivering with anticipation in a neighbour’s garage, hiding from the girl who was “it.” Of course, she found me before the others, and we raced down the short hill and around the corner, each of us trying to be the one who would kick the can first. I’m betting that we ran faster than we ever did in phys ed class. (Some adults still play this game I discovered, and you can search for them on meetup.com.)

Roller skates were all the rage in the early 1970s. They attached to the bottom of your sneakers with a metal key. I can still feel the vibration from the wheels going all the way through my body from the contact with the cement below. And just skating in the middle of the road wasn’t good enough for us. One of us, Louise, created a song we all sang and did the motions to while skating. It went like this: “Butterflies fly, and so do I, and I like it, so I don’t sit, I fly … so do I.”

The most daring kind of play we did was tobogganing. Daring because we slid down a severely slanted sidewalk covered with snow and ice. The year I was 8, winter was particularly cold. That did not deter us and neither did the teenage boys who threw ice balls at us on the way down. We were determined to have a good time.

We had a regular toboggan that fit three of us, a red slippery carpet, and a small round “flying saucer” one that would go round in circles as you went down. The bump we all made in the middle of the run was the most fun. We would fly off that thing so high it took a few seconds to come back down to earth again.

One time, I was sitting in the middle of the flying saucer and flew off that bump and started spinning in circles. I still remember that moment when I realized – too late – that I was going to hit the huge chestnut tree at the bottom of the run. And so I did. Thwack! My back hit that tree so hard it took all the breath out of me. Realizing a few seconds later that I was all in one piece, I got up and marched back up the hill and slid all the way down again on someone else’s toboggan.

We did all of these things running in and out of my parents’ house. As a result, all of my friends still know about all the Jewish holidays and what a kosher kitchen is. They would even march in on Passover with non-kosher-for-Passover popsicles to torment my poor older sister who was trying to keep the holiday. Today, they remember my parents, Joyce and Bernie, as being their second parents growing up. One of us, Madeleine, even says that she became a war crimes prosecutor because she learned about the Holocaust from spending so much time in our house. (See jewishindependent.ca/working-for-human-rights.)

When John Fraser became a member of Parliament, we used his election signs to build a huge maze in the Frasers’ front yard. We crawled around until our knees hurt. We had such a great time until we learned that he and his wife would be leaving for Ottawa with their three daughters. We said our sad goodbyes and waited for the time we would see them again.

Looking back, I am thankful I was involved in an old-fashioned kind of play that created lifelong friendships. Now, at our reunions, we become kids again and laugh our heads off for hours.

Cassandra Freeman is a freelance writer and teaches improv games for parties and performance.

The search for a friend

Finding Fukue follows Jessica Stuart’s journey to Japan to find her childhood friend.

To what lengths would you go to find a childhood friend whose letters stopped coming decades ago? When online searches proved fruitless, Vancouver-born, Toronto-based musician Jessica Stuart headed back to Japan, and her journey is recorded in the CBC Short Docs film Finding Fukue, which was produced with Real Stories. Since posted to YouTube last November, the charming and moving documentary has been viewed more than 3.6 million times to date.

“When I was 9 years old, my parents got English teaching jobs and moved us all to Japan for a year,” shares Stuart as the film starts. Among the images we see are clips of home movies from that year, 1988. “I was a blond kid, and that made me of interest to all the Japanese people because they had never really seen a blond-hair person before,” she says. “They would point at me or my sister, touch my hair, talk at me; I didn’t understand anything yet. The day after we arrived, I went to school for the first time and then that was crazy. I didn’t feel that anyone was interested in getting to know me, except for one person, and her name was Fukue, and we became best of friends.”

The Stuarts – Wendy, Ron and daughters Fiona and Jessica – settled in Saku, then a small rural village with no foreigners. Now, however, Stuart has to start looking for her friend Fukue in a city of 100,000 people. She visits the elementary school they attended and gets a yearbook, where she gets Fukue’s father’s name and an address from the year 2000, but this leads her to a new development, where she and her translator (for the more complex encounters) meet some women who remember her family but can’t help with finding Fukue.

At Saku City Hall, a press contingent meets Stuart and she gets the word out on television and in print. Finally, a clerk at City Hall manages to find a phone number for Fukue’s sister, who connects the two friends. The reunions – first by phone and then in person – are quite emotional. The two fall into a familiar comfort and get reacquainted. They have kept in touch since.

The approximately 21-minute film can be found at youtu.be/ZVlZMOB-Sq0.

Story about friendship

Penny Sprackman receives the special shoes on her 60th birthday, in 2006. (photos from Shirley Barnett)

Some things just happen and, before long, they become a tradition. In 1987, Harvey Shafron, while working at Freedman Shoes on South Granville, came across a rather clunky pair of women’s shoes on a top shelf and gave them to his sister, Rhoda (Shafron) Brickell.

Brickell, in turn, presented them to her friend Lola Pawer for her 50th birthday. Since then, the shoes have been passed from friend to friend among a group of Vancouver Jewish women on birthdays that end in a zero or five.

“It just happened,” said Shirley Barnett, a two-time recipient – on her 60th and 70th birthdays. “It became kind of fun to say, ‘Oh my God, it’s the shoes again.’”

The pair is not casually delivered; the recipient is formally presented the shoes at a celebration, usually at a restaurant, in front of the assembled pals.

“I really believe, as they were passed around, that it’s a story about friendship,” Barnett said. “When you reach a special age of some sort, everybody seems to say girlfriends are really important. It doesn’t matter if you’re divorced or widowed or you’re still married. At a certain age – and that could be 60, 70, 80 or 90 – a light seems to go on in women’s heads that says girlfriends are important. They are the ones you call in the middle of the night – maybe not, maybe you call your kids, I don’t know – but there seems to be an unwritten code that the older you get, you just need a few good girlfriends.”

photo - The “traveling shoes” — The “traveling shoes.” *(photo from Shirley Barnett)*

The size 8C shoes have fit every recipient, Barnett said. A ceremonial walkabout by the birthday celebrant is a part of the ritual.

Leslie Diamond and Pawer have received the shoes five times. Sylvia Cristall and Darlene Spevakow have received them four times. Karla Marks is a three-time recipient and Carole Chark and Penny Sprackman have gotten them twice. Others who have been honoured with the pair are Maja Mindell, Shelley Lederman, Anita Silber, Sandy Magid, Esther Glotman and Cynthia Levy.

At the start, the names of the recipients were written on the soles of the shoes but, as Dorothy Parker said, time wounds all heels, and the inscriptions have become mostly illegible.

What has remained indelible are some of the remarks made by recipients over the years. Barnett, who is sort of the informal archivist of the group, has collected words of wisdom shared over the years.

“It is the friends we meet along life’s way who make the trip more fun,” said one birthday celebrant.

“Friends make good things better and bad things not so bad,” said another.

“Being older sets you free,” reflected one. “You care less about what other people think, you no longer need to question yourself. You have earned the right to be wrong and not think about what could have been or what will be.”

On one birthday, a friend declared: “Remember, growing old is a privilege and old friendships are rare. So, when your ‘old’ friends reach for your hand, grab it.”

Another gem Barnett has collected: “The better the friend, the less cleaning you have to do before they come over!”

A once in 30-year occurrence

Take a seasoned children’s book author like New York-based Jane Breskin Zalben – who has created more than 50 children’s books and is an abstract painter – and pair her with Mehrdohkt Amini, an illustrator of children’s books who lives in the United Kingdom, and the result is a charming book about interfaith friendship for 3-to-7-year-olds – and older readers.

In A Moon for Moe and Mo (Charlesbridge Publishing, 2018), Moses Feldman and Mohammed Hassan meet in a Flatbush, Brooklyn, grocery store, where the storeowner mistakenly takes them for twins since they both have curly dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin. They are shopping with their mothers for their up-and-coming holidays, with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of daylong fasts that marks the giving of the Qur’an to Muhammad, overlapping – something that happens only once every 30 years or so.

The two boys become friends, including going on a picnic, which brings their families together. That same evening in their homes, both boys see the first sliver of the new moon.

In an interview, Breskin Zalben said she was shopping with her granddaughter in a store in Brooklyn when she met an Arab mother with her child and the two children began to interact.

“After being invited to speak at many international schools, in counties where I visited mosques and old synagogues, doing this book was a natural outgrowth of those broadening journeys to other cultures,” she said.

Although Breskin Zalben was art director at Scriber Publishers and illustrated most of her other books, she knew that Amini was from Iran, saw her portfolio and wanted her to do the illustrations for this book. Amini has created beautiful acrylic, marker, ink and photo-collage artwork, which was then assembled digitally.

In the back of the book is information about Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan, notes from the author and illustrator and two recipes.

Said Breskin Zalben, “I am excited to share the diversity and the similarity of Moe and Mo…. I hope maybe this book, in any book’s small way, finds an audience. It was six years in the making and so much hard work and passion goes into every book.”

This is a very special book for children and their parents to read at Rosh Hashanah.

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, lecturer, book reviewer and food writer in Jerusalem. She created and leads the weekly English-language Shuk Walks in Machane Yehuda, she has compiled and edited nine kosher cookbooks, and is the author of Witness to History: Ten Years as a Woman Journalist in Israel.

Stressing action over just being

Rabbi Deborah Waxman, PhD, president of Reconstructionist Judaism, recently released a statement about rebranding. Instead of calling the rabbinical college and umbrella congregational movement the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Jewish Reconstructionist Communities, the header now is “Reconstructing Judaism.” The tag line below it reads, “Deeply rooted. Boldly relevant.”

Why do this? Well, in Rabbi Waxman’s statement, this sentence jumped out: “A critical path forward is shifting from a focus on ‘being’ Jewish – important but insufficient for providing substance and structure – to a focus on ‘doing’ Jewish.”

This is of central importance as we reshape 21st-century Jewish life. If you’re modifying Jewish by saying Reconstructionist, or Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, etc., you define your Jewish identity as a state of being. That is, “this is who I am.” It is akin to saying “I have brown eyes” or “I have freckles.”

However, in an era when people aren’t participating in group or congregational activities as often, it’s useful to go back to our tradition itself. We practise Judaism. Judaism doesn’t rely on a theological belief system as do some evangelical Christians. Or, as my husband jokes, when somebody needs a 10th body for a minyan, no one asks what you believe. There’s no extended questioning or exam. In that moment, we’re defined by what we do – the person showed up when needed, ready to “do Jewish” in a Jewish space.

If you’re wondering why anyone should care about this, it’s because Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founding thinker of Reconstructionism, significantly affected North American Judaism as a whole. His concept of Jewish peoplehood affected every form of 20th- and 21st-century Judaism. Kaplan, while raised Orthodox, was a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative movement) until he retired. His son-in-law founded the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. So, even if you don’t consider yourself a Reconstructionist, many aspects of how North American Jews understand their belonging to the Jewish people stem from Kaplan’s mid-20th century work, which was conceived of as “radical” at the time.

Around the same time that I read about rebranding Judaism, I had a strange “blast” from the past. I was contacted by someone who had once been a dear close friend. How close? I’d lived with her for a year on a kibbutz in Israel. I ate dinner with her the night I got engaged. She stood up for me under the chuppah at my wedding – we were friends for 15 years. We often saw each other on a weekly basis, if not more often. This person was an essential part of my life.

As an aside, I’ll stop to say it’s just not in my nature to ditch a longtime friend or, as some say, ghosting. I wouldn’t disappear or ignore someone on purpose. I take to heart the part of Pirkei Avot (Sayings of Our Fathers) 1:6 – “Find yourself a mentor, acquire for yourself a friend.” While learning opportunities are a lifelong interest, I also understood the rabbis’ interpretation of “acquiring” a friend. You have to invest and work on friendship. It takes time and effort. You have to show interest and concern about friends, and try to “pay them” that attention so that they will like you back.

What happened with my dear friend? In 2003, she was going through some life changes, as was I. We had a disagreement. Instead of discussing it and resolving things, or even fighting, she just dumped me. She wouldn’t respond to me at all. For many years, it tore me apart. I missed her terribly, but, what’s more, I felt as though if I’d just done something differently or been a better friend, this wouldn’t have happened.

I sought her forgiveness several times. I tried to contact her on holidays and wish her well. I even emailed her brother to make sure she was healthy and OK, because the absolute silence and rejection seemed so unlike the previous 15 years of our friendship. In short, I tried hard to be her friend, to invest in repairing any wrongs, long after she’d left the partnership.

This was a painful life lesson. I eventually learned that no matter how hard I tried to fix things, friendships take two people. I couldn’t do it on my own.

At first, I was thrilled to hear from this person again. I showed my husband the note I’d received, and I responded eagerly. My husband was more dispassionate and worried about me. He showed me something I’d overlooked. While clearly she’d laboured over the note’s wording, it didn’t look like it was personally sent to me. It might have been sent to multiple people she’d wronged over the years. While a group teshuvah (apology) is sometimes necessary, it’s not the personal reconnection and friendship I’d craved.

My old friend is professionally affiliated with Jewish Reconstructionism. The rebranding of Reconstructing Judaism pushed me to reflect. One of her online statements says she embraces rachamim (compassion), gemilut hasadim (acts of lovingkindness) and ethical living – but there’s sometimes a distance between what we “believe in” and what we do. I’m impressed that Reconstructing Judaism has taken a strong, active step. They’re doing Jewish in an era when North America Judaism needs this leadership.

Corporations rebrand all the time. It boosts sales and changes their public images. It might be time that Judaism does the same. As for me, I’ve had an internal emotional rollercoaster – the loss of a long friendship perhaps made me a more cautious, distant person when it came to building new connections. I don’t throw myself into friendships with the joie de vivre that I did as a teenager. In my rush to respond, my note to this old friend was still wary, with clichés. “Life is long. It’s good to have friends.”

Relearning this Jewish notion of acquiring friendship helped me put this episode in perspective. I wish I’d included it in my note. Could we learn together, invest in each other, do right by people, and create a rooted and relevant future? If that’s what she’s up for, I hope she writes back.

Joanne Seiff writes regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Saying goodbye to a dear friend

Jenny and Zvika, 2002. (photo from Jenny Wright)

I am at Vancouver International Airport and U.S. Customs hands me a card asking the purpose of my visit to the United States. Is it business, pleasure, study? “None of the above,” I respond.

If I were to write a response, it would be: “To say goodbye to a lifelong friend who is leaving our world shortly.” Even at 65, it’s the first time for me to be traveling somewhere with a purpose such as this. And I never expected it to be Zvika (Irv Spivak), a childhood friend whom I have known longer than my husband.

At 15, we met at a rural boarding school in Israel. Two “misfits” or, should I say, creative souls, who had not quite grasped how to integrate into Israel’s society. Zvika was from New Jersey and myself, England. Our friendship flourished. Our mothers, both widows, also became friends.

Zvika was a natural comedian. He could imitate anyone. Presidents, cartoon characters, teachers and family members were only a few of the objects of his jokes. He mimicked accents and, when reciting a joke, it was told with such colour and credit, it became real.

Zvika loved to perform to an audience and I became his “informal” manager in Haifa. I introduced him to my good friends Ronit and Pini and several others and we became a close group. No party was complete without an hour or two of sketches. Nobody was ever excluded and tourists often made up half the parties we held. By midnight, we were laughing and crying uncontrollably, clutching our stomachs in pain. There were frequent complaints from neighbours and we were sure they thought we were drinking and smoking funny stuff but we were all high on pure laughter.

Zvika loved flying and had developed a series of international airline stewardess skits performed in numerous languages. Eventually, when the repertoire was over, I’d lead a round of Hebrew and English folk songs into the wee hours of the morning, with harmonies added by Zvika.

We didn’t know at the time that these carefree days would end very abruptly. On Yom Kippur, a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack, knowing that the majority of Israelis would be in synagogue. Zvika had stayed over and we were preparing to go out when the shrill siren began blaring. We looked at each other in disbelief. Today? Yom Kippur? The holiest day? Turning on the radio, we learned that Israel had been attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. We headed to the shelter and remained there for several hours until the shorter siren indicated it was safe to leave.

Our lives took a different turn. I had been hired to perform on a cruise line heading to France and Zvika was planning to actualize his dream of becoming an airline steward.

Haifa’s port, however, was now closed indefinitely, so I offered to perform for the Israel Defence Forces military troops. Together with a magician and another musician, the newly formed Tsevet Havai Pikkud Tsafon (Northern Command Entertainment Troupe) was created.

Zvika was drafted as a medic and stationed somewhere near Nazareth.

En route to the Golan Heights after several successful performances, I realized we were passing army bases in Nazareth. “Stop, stop!” I yelled to the driver. “I want to visit my friend.”

Surprisingly, the driver complied and, moments later, I was hugging Zvika.

“Join us,” I said.

“Are you kidding? I won’t be allowed, even though I do very little here.”

“Let’s speak to your base commander,” I urged. Shortly after, we were performing our tunes for the commander and soldiers. With hearty applause, the commander understood how immensely valuable our music would be for the troops and permission was granted for Zvika to leave.

Our group performed in newly acquired territories: deserted villages surrounded by cattle and sheep, bunkers, and sometimes only a few miles from the bombings. We traveled to the Lebanese, Syrian and Sinai borders. The silent and somewhat eerie landscape filled with roars of laughter as Zvika carried out his sketches for the soldiers. We would learn later that, for some, this would be the last show they would see.

Eventually, Zvika was summoned to his base and I returned to Haifa to complete my previous plan.

Zvika moved to New York to become, you guessed it, an airline steward, and I moved to England. We’d reunite on special occasions. When I moved to Vancouver, my English friends threw a farewell party and Zvika flew over to attend and share all the skits with my friends. When he finally settled in San Francisco, we always stayed in touch.

Zvika’s larger-than-life personality drew people to him from all walks of life. Everyone felt that he was their best friend. He loved people, Cuban cigars and food and, before long, began selling diamonds at a Union Square store.

However, in 1989, he developed HIV and, with every visit, I began to wonder if it would be the last one. But, he overcame it and, in contrast, developed yet a larger tenacity with life.

He became a marriage commissioner, California-style. I was fortunate enough to attend Ronit’s daughter’s wedding and witness how eloquently Zvika created meaningful wedding vows. In 1997, he officiated more than 75 weddings and then branched out to do funerals, naming ceremonies, pet funerals and being the master of ceremonies at various events.

In March 2016, Ronit informed me that Zvika had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of bile duct cancer. He sent regular updates including this one: “The standard prognosis is four to six months or an additional year or two if chemo is successful. That being said, I was told 25 years ago that I’d be dead from AIDS after six months and we all saw how that prediction turned out. :-)”

I arrive at the hospice and my other lifelong friend, Ronit, is there to greet me. Zvika clutches my hand and I suppress my tears. In the days to come, he weakens. There are swarms of people coming in to say their final goodbyes. His friends move him to his house to die peacefully. I sing our old melodies to him. There are no harmonies. But, he is surrounded by love and care until his passing.

One of Zvika’s quotes was “My friends are my greatest blessing. I value honesty, loyalty and friendship. I love making new friends.”

Sixteen years ago, in a post-birthday note to all his friends, Zvika wrote: “If I were to die today … I’d die the happiest man ever to have lived and loved for knowing you. It has never been about the material things for me (hell, I’ve lost everything twice), it has always been about the memories of good times with each and every one of you. Your footsteps are indelibly etched in my brain. You are all my personal angels and friends.”

Jenny Wright is a writer, music therapist, children’s musician and recording artist. She also teaches creative writing and can be reached at [email protected].