The Prodigal’s Bar Mitzvah Speech

I was on the front lawn just coming down from a dangerous drug when my parents passed by in their formal dress and reminded me of the speech I was to give in a couple of hours. They continued across the, lawn and, with the swoosh of my mother’s gown, entered the family car.

I looked down at my suit, then gasped: When had I put it on?

My parents had clearly spoken in that combined tone of expectation and admonition that wasn’t any easier to dismiss after my two years’ absence. No, it wasn’t difficult to assume that there was something I had forgotten.

But what was it they expected and what was it I had forgotten?

I looked up, just as an unspeakable realization began to emerge through the layers of psychedelic dread:

A speech.

My brother’s bar mitzvah speech.

My brother was being bar mitzvah’ed that morning and I, no doubt with a first-born’s unfailing fidelity, had promised to give a speech honoring him.

I rode over to the synagogue in the back seat, pressed between my corseted aunt and my coarse-suited uncle, feeling trapped and scared. The countless hairs on the car’s upholstery stood up like a tropical forest somewhere in which I was desperately lost. I who, just a short while ago had looked forward to the long trip home (the trip!) with an innocent’s anticipation (yes, I remembered, I had even written down my brother’s bar mitzvah at the top of my itinerary). But now my amusing vision of endless talk and jumpy music and funky relatives was had been transmuted into something terribly...