TASK #14: MY MAN
“McCabe’s Law: Nobody HAS anything to do with ANYTHING”. Charles McCabe
This is a tough day, writing-wise. First, it’s Easter, so the article I wrote that starts with the phrase “why does a dog lick it’s balls…” will have to wait ’til next week. And I’m not going to try and fool anyone, although I do spend an inordinate amount of time trying to goof my wife and kids on April 1st, and when I actually trick them I am happy for days (although the April Fools gag I pulled a couple of years ago, in which I led my wife to believe that I was having an affair with her best friend, worked a little too well and she–my wife, that is–gave me shit about it for months).
From that day forward, til right now, I have judged the men around me by asking myself: Would that guy be my Lennie? Does this guy have fortitude and firmness of purpose? Is he fundamentally decent?
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So I decided to write about the Yiddish word “Mensch”. I first heard the word when I was in college. The guy two rooms down, Chuck Rosenfield, was a Jew from Cleveland. His old man owned a diner on the east side, and Chuck worked there during the summers. Chuck was a good guy but that particular college wasn’t for him as he kept kosher. There was nothing kosher about our cafeteria, which served food that Gentiles like me found disgusting, let alone the nephew of a Rabbi.
Chuck lasted until the second quarter of our sophomore year. It wasn’t the food that got him in the end, it was a bad fall. He smoked a joint that was laced with TCP, rolled out of his bed, which happened to be the top bed of the bunk bed in his room and landed on his head. He got a concussion and one eye went crooked and he never returned.
But long before that terrible accident he told me the word Mensch. He used it one time to describe a guy that he knew from high school. He said, “Lennie Miller was a mensch”. I remember that I first asked him how the last name Miller was Jewish and Chuck said that it was a common Jewish name, which I didn’t know, but then again, there was a lot that I didn’t know when I first went to college because I had grown up in such a hick town that things like Jews
and their culture just weren’t talked about.
But I digress. I asked Chuck why his friend Lennie Miller was a mensch. Chuck said that his father had once said, “Chuck I want you to paint the outside of the diner next Saturday.” Chuck didn’t want to paint the diner and he especially didn’t want to paint the diner that particular Saturday because he and a bunch of guys, including Lennie, had tickets to see the Indians play, which was a big deal when you were 14. Chuck’s dad didn’t give a shit about the Cleveland Indians, so Lennie was out of luck.
That Saturday, as Chuck morosely stood outside the diner with a paint brush in one hand, a bucket of blue paint in the other, and a heart as heavy as an anvil in his chest, Lennie walked up and said that he would help. Lennie missed the game to help, and even more impressive to Chuck, Lennie never brought it up again and didn’t ask for anything in return. He just did it. He missed the game and helped his friend. He was a mensch.
From that day forward, til right now, I have judged the men around me by asking myself: Would that guy be my Lennie? Does this guy have fortitude and firmness of purpose? Is he fundamentally decent? Could I trust him to treat my wife as a friend, and treat my daughter as he would treat his own daughter, or my sister as he would treat his own sister?
I have found such men in my life. There is a mensch that bailed me out of jail with his rent money, who backed me up in a bar fight, who commiserated with me when a girlfriend ran off with my postman; there was a guy who co-signed a car loan for me; and none of these guys EVER asked me for anything in return.
TASK
Be a Mensch! Is there someone who needs your help? Someone who needs a loan? Someone you can help get a job? Someone who needs a ride to work? Someone who is reaching out for something and you know you can help but you’ve just ignored it? Help someone out! Be a mensch!
Photo courtesy of the author