Shaindy and Chaim make the move from Brooklyn to a new Lakewood development “with a very youthful vibe.”
New neighbors. Even the words made Nechama Stagler queasy, as if there were expectations she would go flying out with fresh apple pie and come back with a new best friend. As a child, she had been the perpetual new neighbor, moving three times before her bas mitzvah, her mother prodding her all along, “Look, they have a daughter, see the red bike?”
She got it. Her father had been a hospital chaplain, devoted to what he did, and each larger hospital was an opportunity to help more Jews. It was service, not unlike the military, he often told them, and in theory, she understood. Unasked, and not even articulated in the children’s own minds, was the question of what about service to them — his family — who wouldn’t have minded a little boring familiarity in a school, or hometown, for that matter.
One of Nechama’s kids had once called Reuven a boring father, and she had wanted to explain to them what a joy it was, how, as a child, she would have given anything for a settled, predictable pattern to life, but she’d been too exhausted to try.
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