A CHILD IN HIS FORTY-SECOND YEAR

"Standing on the corner, minding her own business,
Sadie Cohen was waiting for a trolley car.”

Back in Atlanta, having left behind a congregation and a career in Charlotte. I impulsively hum the nonsense ditty my mother would sing me in earliest childhood. Halfway into my forty-second year, I stand waiting for the #136 bus down the block from my parents' house. I am wearing my best Brooks Brothers suit, the one I bought five years ago in honor of my second wedding and ensuing failed marriage. My pants well creased, my tie well tied, my shoes well shined, my umbrella well rolled, my portfolio well packed. I am the very picture of self-satisfied in-town renaissance gentry.

Not. I feel what I dare not let anyone else know I feel: I am a little kid all dressed up by his very proud Momma for his first day of school. I rehearse ingratiating phrases to impress my list of prospective employers like an apple for the teacher from the good little boy who so desperately just wants to be liked. I wait dutifully at the corner for the school bus, milk money knotted meticulously in the corner of my freshly pressed handkerchief. Momma, who promises she will be waiting that afternoon to hear all about her big boy’s new adventure, only vaguely allays my apprehensions.

I realize that something deeply unconscious has prompted me to resort to public transportation for the first time in sixteen years, as I leave my shiny gray Volvo behind in my parents' driveway. It is the last remaining symbol of the temporal prosperity I once knew. It and that damned Brooks Brothers suit.

Once upon a time, I was a wunderkind. A prodigy. The first and the best. I had a profession. And a career. And respect, too. And I had abundance. A big house. Nice furniture. Royal Doulton china. Grand Baroque sterling. And radiant faces of family and friends around the dinner table as we blessed the Sabbath in its coming and going, and greeted the New Year, and rejoiced in the Passover.

It has all evaporated. Now, I live with my parents. I have my old bedroom back, haunted by reminders of my childhood that my mother has fastidiously kept intact. I try to superimpose an aura of self-sufficient adulthood on my bedroom by setting my kids' pictures all around and by the fax through which I beg newspapers here and there to pay attention to something I have written.

But I know it is an illusion. I know that whatever remains of my heretofore noteworthy life is imploded into the four walls of a bedroom that is and isn't my own. I know it every time my dad and I bicker about which channel to watch or whether it's hot enough to turn on the air conditioning. I know it every time my mother presses a $20 bill in my palm as I leave to take my kids to dinner.

I have come home nominally to care for my parents. But I am only too aware in heart of my heart that they are the ones who have provided me a refuge -- a respite from a collapsing adulthood whose facade of success belied an interior riddled by insecurity and profound personal weakness.

This would all be an intolerable exercise of self-pity had I been the victim of abuse or hard knocks or tough breaks or any blamable circumstances beyond my control. My life is, rather, a study in the cumulative effects of poorly pondered choices, errors of judgment and prudence and broken trust, delusions of omniscience, the misbegotten priority of placing prominence and vainglory above values and ideals that truly endure. This, I think, is the only redemptive lesson for any of us to learn from a man/boy who discovers sobering humility by lying awake in his childhood bedroom pondering the consequences of a life heavy on sound and fury but woefully lacking in inner strength and the courage of one's convictions.

I watch my mother grieve each time she sees me referred to as a "former" rabbi. And I grieve more for her grief than for my own. But it's true. Ma. There is no going back.

Do you remember, Ma, how I cried when I went off to school that first day not wanting to leave you? Do you remember how I cried when I saw that you were still there to greet me that afternoon? Do you remember how you hugged me and told me that everything would be all right? So now I look after you and Dad. I make sure that the mortgage is paid and that the Medicare claims are filed. But you know and I know that little else of lasting value has really changed at all.

I turn around for one last wistful glimpse of home as I board the #136 bus. And I realize that the only blessing of deja vu is getting another chance to make everything come out all right.