The Martin Luther King Mitzvah by Tekulsky Mathew;

Author:Tekulsky, Mathew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2018-08-30T16:52:32+00:00

Chapter Nine

The next day, Mr. Roberts asked me and Sally to tell our English class all about the Pete Seeger concert. Mr. Roberts then told us about Woody Guthrie and how he had traveled across the United States and met with the poor workers and tried to make their lives better. Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that everybody knows.

On the way home, I told Sally that I still hadn’t decided what kind of mitzvah I was going to perform for my bar mitzvah.

“You mean that good deed thing?” Sally asked.

“It’s something you do to make others feel better, I guess. I’ve got to talk about it during the ceremony.”

“You’re nice to me,” Sally said.

“It’s got to be more than that,” I replied. “It has to be a moral good deed, something that makes the world a better place.”

“Oh, you mean like a charity,” Sally said.

“Something like that. I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll think of something,” Sally said, waving as she turned onto Willow Avenue and I continued on to Oak Avenue.

That night, I watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, and I saw images of American warplanes dropping bombs on Vietnam, and wounded soldiers being carried on stretchers. I remembered what Pete Seeger had sung during his concert and I thought, Maybe I should do something about this. I turned to my father, who was reading his copy of the Beachmont Times.

“Dad,” I said, “I think I’ve found a mitzvah.”

He kept reading without looking at me, and I wasn’t sure if he had even heard me.

“Good, Adam,” he replied absently.

I decided to talk to Grappa about it. When I got to Grappa’s house, he was putting a bumper sticker on his Buick Riviera.

“I may lose some clients,” he said, “but I feel like I have to do this.”

“Is it a mitzvah?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he replied, standing back to admire his sticker: Save the country, stop the war.

“Grappa?” I said, “do you think I could do something to stop the war, for my mitzvah?”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Your parents may not be too happy about it, but you are becoming a man now, and you have to do what you think is right. What did you have in mind?”

“I was thinking about handing out some anti-war flyers at school,” I said.

“That’s a great mitzvah,” Grappa said. “I’m proud of you, Adam.”

When I got home, I told my parents about Grappa’s bumper sticker, but not about my mitzvah idea.

“He’s crazy,” my father muttered. “Stick your head out of a hole, and you’re gonna get it shot off.”

My mother called Grappa on the telephone and tried to persuade him to take the sticker off his Buick.

“It’s not our battle, Leonard,” she said—when she was mad at her dad, she called him by his first name. But Grappa wasn’t going to change his mind.

I went to bed thinking about what Pete Seeger and Grappa stood for, and I figured I’d talk to Sally about it the next day at school.

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