Page 558 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
I had only two: (1) DON’T KILL EACH OTHER and (2) KEEP AWAY FROM MY STUFF (which I might have referred to with a different noun).
All in all, it was a wonderful experience to be with the children at Church Lane South, especially after they integrated with Scarsdale. In relatively short order, after Dan’s broken ankle healed and he entered middle school on crutches, he stopped telling us how much better Great Neck was than his new community, how the kids in Scarsdale don’t play in the streets as much as the Great Neck kids do, and how he had no doubt that it snowed more on Long Island than it did in Westchester. He went on to be the captain of the Scarsdale High School baseball team. For his part, David won the only award that was given at his high school graduation, an award given, essentially, for being the best human being in the class. One of the enduring examples of David’s integration into the community is that of the scene in the back of our station wagon, where he was seated with his black friend, George Samuel, and one of his Asian friends, Taka Hino, returning from a bar mitzvah, and they were all loudly intoning “Baruch atah Adonai. . . .”
Kathy and I remember the dinner table fondly, both inside the house and outside under the awning, with every combination of Danny Y., Peter, Dan, Dave, and Rachel, where laughter dominated our discus- sions, and we really did have discussions (sometimes, when dinner was in the kitchen with PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on), especially, that is, when the kids stopped reciting jingles from commercials.
Also on the big-picture side of things, we remember fondly the incredibly beautiful performance that Rachel gave at her bat mitzvah in 1991 (even more beautiful for the fact that she was always concerned about the tensions that she perceived between her parents); watching Rachel and Peter in their shows (and even David, who played, appropri- ately enough, a young boy in The Music Man, a walk-on part that Peter undoubtedly obtained for him); Christmases that we spent with Dan, Dave, and Kathy’s family in Washington or, on two occasions, in our home in Scarsdale; the weeks during the summer when we would visit Kathy’s folks in Martha’s Vineyard; our camp visiting days at Shohola
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