Articulating a Life

We met as I was walking home from Classic Produce up on Fairfax late one afternoon. The broccoli, bananas, apples and spinach sat comfortably heavy in my nylon backpack, my long white cane held out before me to warn strangers that, although I might not yet be totally blind, my vision is severely impaired.

I passed the cramped strip mall with the bagel baker, the fast-food sandwich place, the carpet store, the Latino tailor, the Korean tailor, the white stucco place on the corner whose bright red doors I’d seen open only twice in more than 10 years, both times with a line of pretty young women waiting outside, probably responding to a casting call. As usual, the place was closed up tight.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, an elderly man fell into step beside me and just started talking. Taken by surprise, I looked him over as well as I could. He was a small man, clean shaven, dressed in an open-collared shirt and a nice sport coat, with the kind of fedora my father wore to the office, when the Rosenbergs got the chair, when Larry Doby made his spectacular outfield catches for the Indians in the 1954 World Series.

My new companion spoke with the Yiddish accent of people who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe decades ago. After the briefest exchange of civilities, he launched into a monologue that was a mishmash of autobiography, grand pronouncements and personal revelations. I listened, sensing in him an urgent need to tell and retell a life’s worth of stories while time still permitted.

His name was Tibor. “Can you say that?” he asked.

“TEE-bor,” I said. “Right?”

“Very good, very good,” he said with an approving nod. “Some people, they can’t understand it.”

He’d been born and raised in Hungary. But then came the harrowing, dislocating years of the Holocaust, and he fled through many countries, first to escape extermination, and then in search of a new, safe home, which he ultimately found here in Los Angeles. We passed the bead store, the shoe repair, the big Unocal station with several thirsty vehicles suckling at the gas pumps. I found myself wondering if my white cane had somehow invited Tibor to approach me, or at least to do so with less fear of rejection than he might have felt otherwise. If so, he had chosen well.

Vision impairment, after a life of normal sight, has made me feel as if I’m inside a fish bowl made of one-way glass. I’m visible to others, but I can’t see them seeing me. I have lost the ability to initiate or simply anticipate most random social encounters. As a result, I now permit, even welcome, many intrusions I would reflexively have fended off just a few years ago.

The monologue segued into religion. Tibor’s Orthodox Judaism was not only the foundation of his life, but its roof, walls and windows as well. Every morning, every evening, he told me, he attended worship services at a shul near his apartment. In between, sometimes late into the night, he participated in study sessions, where he and other men from the congregation analyzed biblical commentary and debated the fine points of Jewish law under the guidance of their rabbi.

A block more, and we turned up my street, which was his street, too, as it happened.

“Your English is very good,” Tibor suddenly remarked. “Very beautiful.”

“Thanks, but I was born here. It’s just natural.”

Which was not exactly the truth. I thought of all those weekend afternoons my parents, immigrants themselves, drove me to Miss Wittenberg’s house for group elocution lessons. I remember a class performance, a stage, a suit and tie. I think I recited an original poem about Hopalong Cassidy, my ‘50s television cowboy hero.

“I would like to speak English like that also,” Tibor said. “Do you think you could teach me?”

“You speak very well,” I assured him. “I understand everything you say.”

“No,” he said. “It is not that. Languages, I know. Six of them. But I want to speak English without the accent. I’m an old man, yes. But I would like to learn.”

Tibor, I know now, was at least 75 years old that day. Both common experience and neurological science confirm that until approximately the onset of puberty, we can acquire languages with minimal difficulty, complete with the inflections of native speakers. After that, even though we can learn to communicate in another tongue, we are unlikely ever to sound as if we were born to it.

Which is not so tragic. My world would be the poorer without the sinister, fawning German inflections of Peter Lorre, the macho-hysterical Cubano outbursts of Desi Arnaz, the irreplaceable musical voices of my friends from other countries.

“No, I don’t think that would work,” I said, expecting him to object, and readying my explanation. But Tibor discarded the notion without argument.

“OK,” he said. “Fine. It was just an idea.”

It was as if wishful thoughts like this came to him all the time and, unlike most of us, he allowed himself to speak them aloud before letting them go in deference to reality.

We had reached my place. “This is where I live,” I told him. “It’s been good talking to you.”

“It is my pleasure,” he said. “Such nice English.”

I shook his hand. “Take care of yourself.”

“Zei gezunt,” he replied, the Yiddish for “be well,” and walked on up the street. Several months later, once more in the late afternoon, circling, clattering news helicopters swarmed overhead, as in a Vietnam vet’s flashback. I turned on the radio. Minutes after taking off from the Santa Monica Airport, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza had lost its powers of flight 3,000 feet above Tibor’s address and dived straight down through two floors of rental units and into the building’s parking garage. The building exploded in flames as if hit by a bomb. The pilot and passengers, of course, were obliterated upon impact. Apartment occupants were horribly burned, rendered homeless, traumatized in the extreme.

Tibor was the only tenant reported killed. His rabbi, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, supposed Tibor was trying to get some rest after joining in a late-night Shavuot holiday study session and then rising early for a long sequence of morning prayers, before returning yet again for the next round of worship that evening. So there he’d been, exactly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Agnostic as I may be, I never would deny the power and reality of another person’s fervent vision of the universe, including Tibor’s. And one thing I know: If Tibor is where he would have expected to be now, whichever of his six languages he may be speaking, every syllable of his every utterance is absolutely perfect, exactly as it is.