A vrumi was a “free spirit.” That was his explanation to me. He “had to have his space.” Which would have been fine except for the inconvenient fact that he was married and the father of a wailing six-month-old baby.
“If you were single you could run off to Tzfas for two days without telling anybody!” I wept when he came home from his little outing after I’d spent a sleepless night with little Moishy.
Avrumi didn’t have any good answers for me. He stood there looking pale and a bit ashamed but he gave no assurances about the future. And soon he was off again to the kivrei tzaddikim in the north or hiking in the Negev and one time he even popped over to Uman. It was all on the spur of the moment whatever struck his fancy.
The more escapades he went off on the more I realized how incapable he was of keeping a commitment to one place one home and one young mother who by this time had two babies.
