The sky in “sunny” San Diego was atypically cloudy as it drizzled on a family gathered last Friday to bury its 92-year-old matriarch in the southwestern city’s only stand-alone Jewish cemetery.
The mourners wore mostly black and dark-colored dresses and suits. Their attire stood out against the gray heavens like silhouettes.
The matriarch’s 15-year-old son had been buried there. The mortuary attendant placed a biodegradable urn in the excavated grave.
After the rabbi finished the service, the rain began to fall heavier on the men’s yarmulkes, the traditional head-covering worn by orthodox Jews and often donned by secular Jews on religious and woeful occasions. Her other three sons and their children each tossed a handful of dirt and flowers over the urn.
I became that matriarch’s middle son on the day my eldest brother died as the result of a car accident in 1972.
My wife and I had taken our daughters, ages 12 and 13, out of Meyerland Middle School on Thursday so we could fly from Houston to southern California to attend the service and the memorial to be held last Sunday. The government shutdown made the trip all the more nerve-racking.
When the Friday funeral was over, my wife and I decided to take our children to a Chick Fil-a for a comfort-food meal. They deserved it after spending two and half hours in the drizzle, sitting in silence as a rabbi spoke about the meaning of life, love, and death. They were exhausted from the trip and the growing line of adults whom they had never met but who each shared their condolences with the bewildered and weary teen and pre-teen.
We entered the carline in our rented 2024 Jeep Compass. Our children, sitting in the back seat, placed their orders for chicken nuggets and fries. My wife ordered a wrap.
“May I have a name for the order?” said the “team member.”
It’s a phrase my children have heard countless times, when Chick Fil-a might be a Saturday night treat or an improvised dinner on that rare weekday evening when their parents are too busy to cook a proper dinner.
“Jeremy,” I told her.
Once we completed our order, we inched forward to the drive-through window where the team member asked for the “name on the order.”
“Jeremy,” I told her.
“This is an order for Joshua,” she explained.
“I’m so sorry,” I offered. “But my name is Jeremy.”
“But the order is correct,” she insisted. “Please take your car around and park. We’ll bring you your order when it’s ready.”
After roughly 10 minutes had passed, all four of us remarked on how long it was taking to get our food. On the myriad occasions when we’ve patronized the brand, this never happens, we all thought.
When the team member, yet a third person with whom we interacted that day, arrived at our car after the extended wait, I rolled down the window.
“I have an order for Jew,” she said plainly.
“I beg your pardon,” I queried.
“It’s an order for Jew,” she repeated. “The order is correct. Do you want it or not?”
It was in that moment that I realized I hadn’t taken my yarmulke off. I was also wearing a black suit and a white dress shirt. My apparel wasn’t unusual for a secular Jew like me attending a family funeral.
But it occurred to me: Did I look like a Hasid? The black-clad and “black hat[ted]” orthodox Jews more likely seen on the streets of Williamsburg not far from where I used to live in New York City.
On any other day, I would have politely but passionately addressed all three of them and insisted that they apologize to my family.
But I couldn’t do that on the day I buried my mother.
My children, wife, and I had no other choice but to endure the humiliation of their taunt — their refusal to say my name.
For what must have been a window of 25 minutes, those team members had power over me and my family and they decided to use it like waiters and waitresses at a lunch counter in the Deep South of the 1950s.
Yesterday, two days after my mother’s memorial and four days after her funeral, I called the Chick Fil-a corporate office to complain. Their anodyne, corporate answer was an offer of free food that arrived via email around 10 p.m. last night.
I also succeeded in getting the restaurant’s manager on the phone, a reasonable person who took my complaint seriously. I sent him my credit card receipt and he confirmed that someone had written “Ju” (sic) on our order.
“I don’t know how you get to ‘Ju’ from ‘Jeremy,’” he concurred. “Something went wrong here and we are terribly sorry.” He said he would get back to me as he investigated the incident and addressed the authors of the insult.
As the girls ate their food, we talked about how we had just experienced something that our black and brown friends experience often daily. We talked about how our “white eligible” skin shields us from the indignities that so many members of our community must navigate.
I’m not an observant Jew. My wife is a Gentile and my children, while aware of their paternal and maternal families’ origins, have never practiced Judaism.
But on that day, the habits of grief — the black suit and the broad black yarmulke — had reduced me to a totem. Little did they know that I would rise up from my grief like a Golem.
In a few weeks, my wife Tracie and I are heading back to San Diego, without the kids. We’ll spend the weekend with my two brothers as we sort through my mom’s apartment.
The manager offered to have us in for a complimentary dinner. I declined his generosity. But I did suggest that he organize a meeting between me and the team members we interacted with that day. We’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, a yahrzeit candle burns on our dining room table. May my mother’s memory be a blessing.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.