My son’s bar mitzvah is in less than a month now. All sorts of gifts are appearing magically. His godmother is making his guestbook. His school librarian is making his cake. She who keeps me from losing my mind is organizing the entire affair, because she rocks a party. And an old friend from high school and college is weaving his tallis.
That’s the one that most stuns me. We were very close then, but we lost track of each other more than 25 years ago. We both moved, I couldn’t remember her married name, and didn’t know who to ask. I thought her mother was probably still in Indianapolis, but I didn’t know her first name, knew my friend’s father had died and that her mom had sold the house and moved, and ran aground on the five pages of people with the same last name in the phone book. When I’d last spoken to her, she didn’t have any children. By the time a mutual friend mentioned her in passing and invited me to join them for lunch,, her daughter was grown and living on her own. She’s never met my son. But when she told me over that lunch that what she did now was weave custom prayer shawls and I mentioned that my son was becoming a bar mitzvah, she offered it as a gift. And having offered, she was determined to do it.
It made me uncomfortable. There was so much time between, though we picked up as if there had been a few months instead of all those years. I know both how much work goes into weaving and what such a thing costs. The other things are just as much gifts of love and creativity and the time of incredibly busy people. They are certainly just as treasured, but they were not a surprise. Hers was, and is.
I was talking it over with the woman who’s doing the party planning, saying I had no idea what I could have done so many years ago that would lead to such an offer. She looked at me as if I didn’t have much sense (and sometimes I don’t, I agree) and opined that it didn’t matter; whatever it was, the weaver remembers it, and it was important enough to her that it had no expiration date. It still matters to her. This is one of those times when all I can do is accept the gift, as I have accepted all the other such gifts, with immeasurable gratitude.
I am under no misapprehension. As much as they are gifts to our son, all of these are gifts to me as well. Truly, my friends are a blessing.
And the Bar Mitzvah came off without a visible hitch, and Joseph performed spectacularly well. What a Mechayeh to have been there, witnessed and been part of it!