It was not long before Shabbos Mincha, the afternoon prayer on the Sabbath day.
 
I had been experiencing many problems at home. My new “conservative observance” was causing quite the stir in my family. My wife was furious at me for my admittedly clumsy attempts to impose new and somewhat demanding rules of Jewish observance on the family.

She would have none of it.

Tension was high. Our differences of opinion had become a yawning chasm. The children sided largely with their mom. At the center of the divide was the issue of Kashrus, the Jewish dietary laws.

Shrimp salad, one of my wife's favorite foods, was just too good to give up. Though I meant that somewhat tongue in cheek, there is vastly more to a kosher lifestyle than merely following the prohibition against shellfish.

At the core of our disagreement was my refusal to acknowledge my wife’s growing exasperation with me. I balked at what was in fact the patently obvious truth, but I soon learned to my dismay that her threats to divorce me were not idle.
 
Her hurt feelings concretized into resentment. I persisted in deludingly reassuring myself everything
would work out for the best.

“Why … tell me why are you doing this?” I clearly recall her asking me that question. We had been invited over for Shabbos lunch to a friend's house whom I knew from my orthodox synagogue. They were my friends. My wife did not know them, but I wanted so very much to fit in. She understandably would not budge.

“So I’ll have something to do when I’m an old man,” I retorted, having my mentor, Mr. Parker, in mind. Some time later, when I reminded her, she could not recall my having said that.

I  sat along the side of our bed pleading with her to accompany me but she held her ground. It was, she feared, just one step down a road she did not wish to travel.

                            **********

So there we were, the two of us, Reb Isser and I, getting the food ready for "seudat shlisheet", the third Sabbath meal, I had already begun to feel close to Mr. Parker, at once my mentor and grandpa surrogate. As the "gabbai" of the minyan, it had become Mr. Parker's unofficial duty to ready the meal that we ate between the afternoon and evening prayers. We hit it off so well that I began assisting him.

 I decided I would ask him for his opinion and advice about my troubles at home. It seemed as good a time as any to seek out what I hoped would be his sympathetic ear.

“He’ll have the answer,” I reassured myself. We chatted while preparing the several plates of tuna fish, left over cake from the main sanctuary’s
Shabbat morning service, other assorted leftovers and fishballs.

Fishballs?

You know those quasi-spherical leftover bits and pieces from the gefilte fish factory. (Thankfully, we only occasionally needed to use the institutional
hand-cranked can opener, loosely bolted to the counter but when combined with the barely tolerable general untidiness, made working in that kitchen quite the challenge.)

“Nu, Mr. Busch. What’s on your mind?” he queried, sensing something was up.

“Eh, trouble at home. My wife, … you know,” I responded, hoping he would.

“No, I don’t. You want to tell me?”

“My wife is very unhappy with me. I spend too much time in shul, she thinks. By the time I get home Saturday night, now with spring and summer, it’s too late.”

“For what?” he asked attentively.

“She wants to go out, you know, a movie, maybe something to eat.”

Mr. Parker reflected for several moments. I waited ... hoping for a sympathetic ruling.

“Go home to your wife!” he rendered in his thick “Yinglish” accent which reminded me of the comedian Myron Cohen with whom I had become familiar years before from his many appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show.

He could not have said it more plainly, and I ...
I should have deferred to the advice of an older, wiser friend. I stuck to my path distinguished as it was
by an appalling dearth of "sechel", common sense.

Guess I had been hoping for a different opinion.

Alan D. Busch