I attended a memorial service this year for my friend Rich, who died of cancer at 72. I didn’t know him well. I had never been to his apartment, and he had never been to my house. I often saw him around the neighborhood. He liked hanging out near the public tennis courts, where he would sometimes see me as I walked to or from a match. “How’d you play today?” he would ask. He broached the same topic at synagogue, where he was a regular. “It’s nice out this week. Think you’ll play some tennis?”
I don’t know what Rich’s disability was. He could read, although with some difficulty. When called for an aliyah, the honor of saying the blessing before the Torah reading, he would chant the transliterated Hebrew, garbling some words, but no more than so many of us do. He had held jobs, including at his late father’s business and, for a time, at the Pez candy factory in nearby Orange, Conn. He had a sense of humor, too. He got jokes, and he made them. He had a driver’s license.
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