'You're lucky, Kid
Filbin, Diane
s zu..::tine€t vxc=:cc —E, THE LAST W O R D 'YOU'RE LUCKY, KID' Diane Filbin T he older of my two sons called from his job in New York to tell me he had just bought his airline ticket home....
...After her mother's death, I had a privileged conversation with Beebe...
...Commonweal 3 I June 18, 2004...
...For years as I watched them mature in a cultural terrain unfamiliar to me, I relied on Beebe for practical ad-vice and comic relief...
...Perlstein had become friends with McGinley...
...If he had thought at all about Easter, he didn't mention it...
...What about Easter...
...Beebe thrived on romance, but turned down marriage proposals...
...How could dinner and the long Easter Sunday afternoon compare with a chance to spend time joking with his friends...
...Didn't he want to keep up his contacts...
...Once, at lunch, when I marveled at her long-standing political commitments, I asked: "Beebe, have you ever thought of running for of-fice yourself...
...I convinced her that he would © ROSS / ROTHCOalways remain loyal to his friends, but that a Catholic environment would both reinforce his roots and, perhaps counterintuitively, expand his horizons...
...I loved her for many reasons, her Jewishness being one of them...
...When my older son left for college, she ex-pressed concern at his choice of a small Jesuit school in Connecticut...
...When I shared fragments of gossip like this with Beebe, I would indulge her weakness for any detail about the old high school crowd...
...I realize now my insistence must have sounded naive...
...Beebe could be circumspect...
...Eternal life takes on rich, varied forms...
...Her article on churchgoing appeared in the February 28, 2003, issue, and was selected for The Best Catholic Writing 2004 (Loyola...
...She especially liked the one about my sons teasing me at a confirmation about shaking hands with "the guy in the purple yarmulke...
...Many years older than I was (number never mentioned), she took me under her wing as a friend, a dear, a protege...
...She and I shared a friendship that was grounded in phone conversations and in getting together downtown for lunch...
...You really believe that, don't you...
...I was right about the multicultural aspects...
...Do I look crooked...
...She was the powerhouse receptionist at the office where I worked...
...But damn if she wasn't dead...
...His friends were headed to the Big Ten and the giant dorms of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan...
...I finally asked my son...
...Soon his calls to Chicago were filled with the tales of Sweeney, McGinley, and O'Day...
...By then, Stronberg had gone east to visit the cam-pus and had praised Sweeney on guitar...
...Her laughter would lift the nonsense into that rarefied private place that good friends recognize at once...
...Beebe enjoyed the anecdotes of his Irish reawakening, but was clearly relieved when he got back on track in his sophomore year...
...Beebe took my hand...
...My sons were "her boys," and they sensed a vivid connection with her...
...She was Jewish...
...She looked up from her soup and answered: "Why...
...She would be thrilled to know they remember...
...To allay my uneasiness, I used to seek Beebe's counsel on the phone...
...Diane Filbin is a freelance writer in Chicago...
...Sometimes my sons remind me that Beebe liked Frank Sinatra and even re-cited a line of "One for My Baby" as the greeting on her answering machine...
...She wanted to hear all the silly stories and then try to make them funnier...
...It was the only one, that ever veered near religious faith...
...You're lucky, Kid," she sighed...
...She would have liked the news about my son's holiday plans...
...An only child and devoted daughter, she cherished her father's memory and took care of her adored mother...
...Mom, by that time, Stronberg, Perlstein, and Woolman will have all left town...
...I paused, and thought of my old friend Beebe...
...I want to be there for Passover," " he said...
...I saw his point...
...Beebe regarded our friend-ship in similar fashion, and was always interested in my sons and their Jewish sensibilities...
...Beebe saw my sons only occasionally over twenty-five years, and I wonder now how we could have always been so busy...
...and Woolman had invited O'Day to stay with a friend's family in Vegas...
...We spoke of eternal life, and I eagerly assured her, as an Irish Catholic would, that she would one day see her mother again...
...Smart and very funny, she seemed to know everyone in Chicago, and could name-drop with the best of them...
...I met Beebe before my sons were born...
...Both my sons attended public junior and senior high school in a suburb that was predominantly Jewish, and even now the Jewish holidays remain prominent on their radar...
...She joked about their Jewish frame of reference but could not disguise her deep cultural pride...
...She was the only person who ever called me Kid...
...Growing up, when-ever they mentioned that they were Catholic, people just said, "Don't worry about it...
...Although I welcomed the opportunity to raise my sons in a Jewish milieu, after a few years I came to realize that without a few trappings of Catholicism, a kid can seem less...well, Catholic...
...Besides, I told myself, they have Mass in Manhattan, don't they...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 12
