by Beth Poznansky Baum

By the time the downstairs bell buzzed for the third time, I was getting annoyed. Here I was, finally being productive for a change. I had finished writing an article and was editing it; on the table, cooling, were pots of liver, eggs, and onions, ready to become chopped liver for Rosh Hashanah.

The first buzz was my eleven-year-old son’s. “Can’t you use your key?” I said, buzzing him in. Now that he had got his begged-for key, he rarely used it.

He was breathless. “Can I visit my teachers at my old school?” he needed to know. His old school was across the street.

I sighed. “Jared, it’s late; they won’t let you in!” Then, remembering he often had to learn things the hard way, I told him to go ahead; I would see him in a little while. I predicted five minutes, since I was sure he wouldn’t get in. I resumed working. I checked the pots; nothing had cooled enough yet.

The second buzzer, ten minutes later, was his again. “Yes, Jared.” “They let me in, Mom! I saw some teachers!” I smiled at his victory. “Can I play with Kevin and Eliran?”

“Yes, but don’t stay out too long,” I told him. “Keep in touch.” I sat back down again to type, trying to regain my concentration. The buzzer again. Would I ever get to finish this? “What, Jared?” But it wasn’t Jared. It was Eliran.

“You’d better come down. Jared was hit by a car!”

I aged five years in the ninety seconds it took to fly down five flights of stairs and across the long expanse of hallway to the main lobby of our apartment building. I didn’t know what I was going to see; terrible pictures filled my imagination.

The first good sign was that the crowd was gathered on the sidewalk, not in the street; he was probably alive.

Alive he was, and mad, too, sitting on the brick façade in front of our building. He looked shaken as I studied him, my widened eyes panning up and down like a movie camera, trying to assess whether he had sustained any injuries. Miraculously the only damage I could see was to his elbow — which sported some scrapes — and to his ego. He fought back tears, as if he refused to cry at any cost. Closer investigation revealed that his leg also hurt him. This was where he had been struck.

“We thought he went under the car!” Eliran said. I winced. When I could finally speak, I asked him questions about his leg. Did it hurt here? If I touched it here (“Ow!”), did it hurt? It did. Someone had called an ambulance for us, for which we waited an eternity. After waiting forever in the emergency room, too, for him to be examined and x-rayed, we were told his leg wasn’t broken. This was indeed a fortunate boy.

At some point during the time we sat in the emergency room, a thought occurred to me: the three pots I had left sitting on the table were still doing just that. After having sautéed the onions just right, cooked and peeled a dozen eggs, and cooked the livers until they were done, I’d have to throw it all out. I wish I could say that this didn’t bother me; I’m embarrassed to say that it did. Even under the circumstances, I felt a helpless kind of frustration and futility, having done all of that for nothing — wasting both food and effort.

And words! How many words? “Be careful! Look!” And why? Because my son, who had been told thousands of times to be careful, had not been. Because looking at his friends across the street instead of at traffic, he had run out from behind a double-parked U.P.S. truck. “Y’know,” the U.P.S. man had told me, “if the driver hadn’t swerved, he’d be under that car.”

Cut to Rosh Hashanah. Those words haunt me, mingling with the prayers around me, as we sit in shul the first day. Jared sits for a time with his father, then goes off to play with the other children in the synagogue kitchen. (He’s always had “shpilkas,” never sitting for long in one place.) All of a sudden, it is time to blow the shofar. I frantically search for him, not wanting him to miss teki’as shofar. (Is he ever in the right place?)

He’s not in the kitchen. I weave my way past the women toward a spot where I can catch my husband’s eye. “Relax,” he mouths, pointing emphatically toward the front. I strain to see, and there Jared is, riveted, hanging on the rabbi’s every note. Notes that he almost didn’t get to hear, ever again. I watch him in awe, and I have to control my emotions.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” he asks me later.

“I thought . . . you would miss hearing the shofar,” I can just barely get out. “I didn’t know where you were.” My voice breaks. He almost didn’t get to hear it. He could have been . . . I shudder. “I feel like I got a new life, Mom! I got a second chance!” I’m nonplused; he can have such profound insight, but he can’t learn to cross the street?

Suddenly the full magnitude of what could have been hits me as hard as that car could have hit Jared. I had been dwelling on my systematic dumping of my would-be chopped liver, in denial of what could have now been my alternate reality. It had been less painful to think about wasted food than about a life almost wasted. I envision myself in the kitchen, exhausted, having returned from the hospital, hurriedly emptying the three pots into garbage bags; running out and dumping them — as if to quickly throw away the horror with the now useless food.

“Mom,” he says, seeing my expression of repressed realization surfacing.

“It’s all right,” I tell him. But I’m lying: it’s not all right. This is going to take awhile. I may never be the same. But then again, what in life is about staying the same? Don’t we, in fact, view Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, as an opportunity to reevaluate ourselves? Isn’t this the time of year that we determine what we ought to change so that we become better than we are?

Well, I’m still waiting to be better. I do, however, feel luckier. I had taken it for granted that my son would hear the shofar, as he always has. I’ll never take that for granted again. Nor do I think I will ever make chopped liver without the association of almost losing him. I’m sure it will now be impossible to hear “What am I, chopped liver?” without feeling irony for the question. Both the question and chopped liver (food that gets such seemingly low regard) now have new relevance in my life. Chopped liver certainly is important, even in its unmixed form. Yet as perfect as it would have been, there’s no contest. I will never stop thanking G-d that it’s all I had to say goodbye to.

Beth Poznansky Baum, a free-lance writer, lives in Brooklyn.