By the time of these memories, in the early 1960s, when I was 6 or 7, the rural had given way to the suburban, with ranch houses and expanded Capes surrounding Lake Nelson. But in a cold enough season, when the shallow water froze and two-by-fours burned in trash barrels for warmth, my father retrieved his skates from the closet and headed for the ice.

The skates rose above his ankles, the laces ascending through 10 sets of eyelets and six pairs of metal studs. They were figure skates, toughened by black polish and the scalpel sharpness of the blade. I had a beginner’s skates with blades as dull as a pencil’s shaft.

My father, in his patient way, had taken it upon himself to teach me to skate. I was a good enough athlete when it came to touch football and swimming lessons at the JCC, but neither balance nor precision came naturally to me. So, my skates slapped at the surface of Lake Nelson and my legs splayed outward and my knees knocked and sweat popped on my forehead, even in the 20-degree air. Just beyond my wavering reach, my father skated effortlessly backward, calling out strokes to me like a coxswain, urging me forward to meet his grasp.

When I gave up in frustration, as I inevitably did, he took my halt as his cue. With a glance every so often over his right shoulder, he threaded his way backward across the lake, not a wasted motion in his strides, sometimes lifting one skate off the ice, perfectly balanced on a sliver of steel. I watched him in awe.

*    *   *

On a spring morning last year, we sat, my brother and sister and I, outside the hospice room where my father lay dying. Our vigil was into its second week by this time, and what preceded the vigil were 20 years of prostate cancer, two or three of advancing diabetes, and several months of kidney failure.

At one point in those last days, my brother sat beside my father, and my father spoke. “Give it to me straight,” he said, a ramrod voice emerging from beneath the morphine, a more assertive statement than he had issued in weeks. My brother, making certain this order wasn’t part of some delusion, asked my father what he’d said.

“Give it to me straight,” my father repeated.

“Everything?” my brother asked.

“Everything.”

My father heard a tenderly expressed version of everything, and the next day he drew his last breath. The three of us were gathered around him, watching him gasp for air, watching the very last beat of pulse pass through his carotid artery. Looking at his open mouth, looking at the tight, dry skin of his face, looking at the remnant of feathery hair on his scalp, I couldn’t help but think of a baby bird, waiting for its mother to feed it.

Because his death at age 89 had not come as a surprise, we children and my stepmother had spent the previous days talking about what kind of funeral to have. My father was a Jew by heritage and an atheist by fervent choice. His anarchist mother and father, the renegade offspring of a rabbi and a cantor, respectively, were the sort who feasted and danced at Yom Kippur banquets. My father rarely spoke the noun “religion” without affixing the adjectives “materialistic” and “sectarian.”

Yet he had approved a Jewish funeral for my mother decades earlier and done the same for his eldest brother in 2006. He had maintained a membership for 40 years at a Reform temple. Its rabbi had visited him in the hospice. There were people in our nuclear and extended families—myself, several cousins—who found meaning in observance.

So, my siblings and stepmother and I struck a compromise to oblige the dead and solace the living. We would hold a secular funeral for my father, presided over by the Ethical Culture Society leader who had married him and my stepmother, while those relatives who yearned for a religious form of leave-taking would be free to do so in a private way.

*   *   *

One Sunday during the years when I played Little League baseball, my father took our family to the ballet. As we sat in the balcony at Lincoln Center, gazing down onto the stage, my father whispered to me of the male dancers, “They’re in better shape than Mickey Mantle.”

Devoted to baseball and its heroes, I could not comprehend then what I know now was perfectly true. My anarchist father was a student of the body, including his own. He lived in his skin as much as he lived in his mind.

When he skied, he cut parallel turns with the precision of the machinist he had been. When he played catch with me, his fastballs stung my palm through the mitt. Even at bowling, by appearances so sedentary a game, he exuded muscle. He would loft his 16-pound ball so that it seemed to hang in midair like a planet. Then it would fall to the polished alley, flirting with the gutter, until its wicked rotation sent it crashing into the 1-pin, scattering the other nine sideways with destruction. I, the failed acolyte, struggled for spares.

When I reached my teens and saw my father adding some pounds to his middle, I once tossed out the boast that I could beat him in a race. He dared me to prove it. So, we drove over to the track of a nearby college and lined up for a 440, one full lap. I went out fast and heedless and by the second turn, as I was straining for air, he cruised by me in a controlled, steady pace. He was waiting for me at the finish line, and I said nothing all the way home.

Long after such Oedipal battles stopped mattering, I loved walking with my father, whenever my adult life and working schedule put me in his vicinity. He went out for three or four miles every morning, legs snapping briskly, as much the image of physical efficiency as on the Lake Nelson ice. Now we moved in tandem, and perhaps, though he never said it, he was proud that into his 60s and 70s he could keep pace with a son 34 years his junior.

*    *    *

In the hours after my father’s death, we in the immediate family made the funeral plans. The ceremony would take place four days later, no concession to the Judaic tradition of burial within 24 hours, with a luncheon at a nearby hotel to follow. Meanwhile, the observant portion of the extended family made our plan to stay at the gravesite after the others left to say kaddish. But I already knew that prayer alone felt somehow insufficient. By then, my father would have been reduced to ashes, having requested like my mother to be cremated. I could feel nothing for ashes.

So, the idea took shape with my fiancée and a cousin to wash my father’s body, to fulfill the ritual of tahara. We arranged to do it on the morning after he died, in the funeral home where his body then lay. It was not a Jewish funeral home, and in fact the funeral director in his private life was a church deacon. Maybe because of his own faith, though, he understood and respected the imperatives of ours.

On a damp and raw morning, well-suited to our somber task, we arrived. My cousin had brought an ArtScroll volume of funeral and burial liturgy, as well as a set of tahara prayers he had printed off the Internet. I knew much less than he did. But I was answering to some imperative I did not yet fully understand, something even more specific than being Jewish and being a son.

The funeral director led us from his office through several empty salons to a room in the rear where my father’s corpse waited on a stainless-steel table. My cousin and I put on white robes, almost like lab coats, and rubber gloves. The funeral director opened the cold-water tap of an industrial sink. My fiancée read from the prayers and began to weep.

*    *    *

Nearly a decade before he died, my father began to severely limp. He had already undergone one hip replacement, quite successfully at that, but now the other was afflicting him. Or so his doctors informed him. My father came up with his own diagnosis, irrespective of the evidence: He decided he had bone cancer in his spine.

Instead of having the hip-replacement surgery, he walked less and sat more. His legs, those legs that had skated and walked and beaten me in a race, began to atrophy. When I asked about getting the hip replacement, he shrugged me off with vague assurances. He told my stepmother he was fearful of dying on the table from the anesthesia, something that had happened to one of his childhood friends.

Ultimately, years too late, he consented to the operation. It turned out he didn’t even need full anesthesia, just the half-measure called twilight. He did his designated week or two in rehab and then skipped almost all of the outpatient follow-up sessions. Back at work, as founder and board chairman of a biotechnology company, he moved around its office hallways and factory floor in a golf cart. When he flew on vacations, he required a wheelchair to get from the ticket counter to the gate.

My father’s mind remained undimmed, a fact that I savored, especially after having seen his older brother disappear in a fog bank of Alzheimer’s. But I could not fathom how such a physical person could surrender his physical self. Never before had I seen him give up—at anything. Why this? I realized, at a certain point, that I did not just need him to be physical for himself; I needed him to be physical for me.

*    *    *

As I washed my father’s body, I looked upon it. I saw his foreskin, uncircumcised in his anarchist parents’ wish. I saw how hairless his skin was, the result not just of age but the female hormones prescribed to stave off prostate cancer’s advance. I saw the scar on his abdomen from the burst appendix that nearly killed him in his early 20s. I saw the seared flesh on one calf where he’d leaned against a motorbike engine on a trip we’d taken together to Bermuda decades ago.

His body was nothing like the body described in the verses my cousin chanted from the Song of Songs: “His head is burnished gold, the mane of his hair black as a raven … His arms a golden scepter … his loins the ivory thrones … his thighs like marble pillars. Tall as Mount Lebanon, a man like a cedar.” And yet to see his body, to touch his body, to watch his body, brought the person back to me.

I remembered that trip to Bermuda well. I was 16, my father 50. We had been fighting a lot, and my mother had suggested a short vacation together, father and son, as balm for our wounds. One morning, my father proposed that we walk the main road along the southern shoreline, 10 miles from our hotel to another one, where we would have lunch. Fit as I was, I worried we would never make it. My father, glad to be with me, needing nothing to prove, flagged down a cab after six or seven miles. We drank beers together at lunch, the sharp effervescence mixing with the dried sweat on my lips.

In the funeral home, when my cousin and fiancée and I were done, we dressed my father in the burial shroud and covered his head in a cloth hat and hoisted him into the cardboard coffin that would be transported to the crematorium, an odd choice indeed for a Jew of his era.

I am of a generation that has accepted as an unquestionable truth the premise that a corpse cannot look lifelike and that anyone who tells you so is either a mourner lying or a mortician selling. But on that dismal morning last spring, as I washed my father’s body in tahara, I was thankful beyond words to see that he did look like himself.

The purpose of tahara, we are taught, is spiritual. We purify the body to purify the spirit, make the literal into the metaphor. Yet for me the process ran in the opposite direction. Through the spiritual I sought to reclaim the physical—the tactile, inch-by-inch evidence of my vigorous, vibrant, virile father.

*   *    *

When I went to college in Wisconsin in 1973, I asked my father if I could have his skates. Winters were long in Madison, and there were lakes and canals and rinks for skating. So, he let me take them.

For my first two years of school, I continued to flail away, untrained. Finally, as a junior, I signed up for a no-credit class in skating. That winter and spring, I leaned how to stride and to push. I learned how to execute crossovers. I learned how to skate backward.

Living in New York for the past dozen years, I haven’t skated much, except to accompany my children as they took lessons. By now, the black polish has worn off my father’s skates. The blades are brown with rust. The inner soles have cracked. Meanwhile, my year of saying kaddish is ending. My father’s first yahrzeit falls on the 10th day of Iyar, May 14 by the civil calendar. The next day, our family will unveil the headstone for his grave.

To be honest, those skates never fit me right. My father wore a size-9 shoe, and I’m a 10½. Whenever I put on the skates, my feet start to cramp. One thing I’ve come to realize, though, is that a 10½ skate feels too big on me. And a hockey skate, as most men wear, feels too slippery. It’s only in my father’s skates, on the Lake Nelson of my bereaved soul, that I can imagine being able to catch up to his outstretched hand.

In the very next sentence of the monologue, Simon dispels that grave and nagging question with a punchline. Feeling the fever of puberty, knowing there is dessert waiting downstairs in the kitchen, Eugene cracks, “Actually, I’d give up writing if I could see a naked girl while I was eating ice cream.”

The bracing challenge and expedient retreat contained in that one short moment reveals a great deal about Neil Simon’s own gifts, anxieties, defensiveness, and ambition. The question Eugene raises is not rhetorical. It is the same one critics often asked of Simon as he became a Broadway staple and commercial phenomenon with comedies like The Odd Couple, Chapter Two, and The Sunshine Boys. And just as Eugene humorously deflates the issue of creativity and misery, so did Simon for the first 30 years of his career pull back from darker material to the default setting of getting lots of laughs.

As a matter of historical fact, though, Simon never needed to wonder if he had suffered sufficiently. His own youth in a turbulent home during the Great Depression supplied more than enough. The question was when, if ever, he was going to plumb the personal depths. The trilogy of memory plays first produced over a six-year period in the 1980s—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—provided the answer, an answer that evolved with the progression of the plays themselves.

Now, Simon’s longtime producer Emanuel Azenberg is reviving the first and last of those plays in repertory. (Brighton Beach Memoirs opened on Oct. 25, and Broadway Bound starts previews on Nov. 18 and has its opening night on Dec. 10.) These productions, under the guidance of the acclaimed young director David Cromer and with Laurie Metcalf heading the ensemble cast, show how Simon struggled with and ultimately faced up to his memory’s demons. Taken together, Simon’s portrayals of the Jerome family deserve to stand with the work of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller as definitive theatrical treatments of the American Jewish family in extremis.

Born in 1927, Simon is a full generation younger than Odets and a dozen years younger than Miller, and the distinction matters as more than trivia. The two older playwrights went through most or all of the Depression as adults, and came of age during the Popular Front era with its fervent left-wing politics. Simon experienced the Depression as a child, and its depredations coincided with the upheavals in his parents’ marriage.

So while Odets and Miller reckoned with the Depression very much in political terms, as a failure of the false god of capitalism, in Simon’s household financial calamity was conflated with familial collapse and marital betrayal. But it took him a long, very long time, to tell that story.

Instead, he honed his craft alongside Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and Larry Gelbart on the writing staff of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Turning to theater, Simon expertly worked the theme of conflict—with the newlyweds of Barefoot in the Park, the divorced men rooming together in The Odd Couple, the feuding vaudevillians of The Sunshine Boys—without ever plunging deeper and risking an unhappy ending. When he turned serious, in the wake of his first wife Joan’s death at age 40 from cancer, he did so in a schematic, grad-student kind of way, doing his version of Chekhov in The Good Doctor and the Book of Job in God’s Favorite.

The darling of a mass audience, Simon was the favorite whipping boy for cultural mandarins. His expertly crafted comedies received condescending sniffs, partly because of their expert craft, and his attempts at drama were smacked down with a ferocity meant to make him know his place. At one time in the 1980s, when August Wilson was serving on an awards committee of the Dramatists Guild with two other playwrights, he nominated Simon for a career-achievement award. The other two scoffed in such derision that Wilson later wondered what possibly could have caused such animus.

During the mid-1970s, though, Simon had written 35 pages of a memory play called Brighton Beach Memoirs. Aware that it was “a turn in style for me, probing more deeply into myself,” as he later put it in a Paris Review interview, Simon stuck the partial manuscript in a drawer for nine years.

If Simon could only tiptoe at that point into his family history, rather than fully immerse, then one can understand the reluctance. Simon’s mother, Mamie Levy, had been disfigured as a young girl, scarred inside and out when her dress caught fire. The man she married, a piece-goods salesman named Irving Simon, left the household “as least eight different times” for periods ranging from a month to a year, Simon recounted in his memoir, Rewrites. In his absence, Mamie gave up her bedroom in the family’s Washington Heights apartment to two tenants, butchers who paid half their rent in cash and the rest in unsold meat. She also ran card parties, essentially a small-scale gambling parlor, to make money.

On the occasions Irving Simon did return home, he specialized in a certain kind of emotional torment, not just to his wife but to Neil. He would buy fireworks for the boy’s birthday, then hand them all out to other kids, claiming he didn’t want Neil to hurt himself. His means of expressing tenderness was to tell Neil to pull a stick of gum or piece of candy from the stash in his overcoat pocket. One time, Mamie brought Neil to stand outside the apartment building of Irving’s mistress, so that the child could witness and even testify in court to his father’s infidelity. When Neil ran a high fever that his mother’s cold compresses couldn’t break, he recalled in Rewrites, “She would curse my father for his absence and run out to the hallway, banging on the doors of neighbors to help her find a remedy, screaming up to a God who had once again abandoned her.”

Even these public recollections did not come from Simon until the 1990s. The first inkling all but his closest friends had of his actual upbringing came with the autobiographical trilogy. And in the original production, the emotional honesty came fitfully. In a vivid and indelible way, Brighton Beach Memoirs does convey the fragility of subsistence during the Depression. Any bump or twist to the family breadwinners, whether an injury or a shop shut-down or a 17-dollar loss at poker, brings penury right to the threshold.

In the current revival, director David Cromer has raised the grain on the serious aspects of the play, and thus diminished the quaint ones, much as he did in his highly praised production of Our Town. And in this production, it is the beleaguered but resourceful mother Kate Jerome, indelibly embodied by Laurie Metcalf, rather than exuberantly youthful Eugene who commands the psychic center of the action.

Yet, as Simon himself later acknowledged, the Jerome family in Brighton Beach Memoirs was “the family I wished I’d had instead of the family I did have.” The father Jack, a garment worker, valiantly takes on second and third jobs to keep the household afloat. The mother Kate argues bitterly with her sister Blanche but reconciles. Jack’s cousin in Poland miraculously escapes with his wife and children and, at the play’s final curtain, the refugees are heading toward their waiting relatives in Brighton Beach. And the character of Eugene, especially as played by the young Matthew Broderick, put an infectiously charming patina on all the goings-on.

In ways that may have been precise engineering or may have been intuitive candor, Simon also wrote some passages in Brighton Beach Memoirs that would lay explosive charges for Broadway Bound. At one point in the play, for instance, Kate says to Jack about the bookkeeper in the garment factory, “Just promise me one thing. If anything ever happened with you and that Helene, let me go to my grave without hearing it.”

As the final chapter of the trilogy reveals, she does not get such blissful ignorance. If Brighton Beach Memoirs was Simon’s equivalent to Eugene O’Neill’s sunlit fantasy of family life, Ah, Wilderness, then Broadway Bound was the closest thing in his oeuvre to A Long Day’s Journey into Night. For all of its lighter elements, most involving Eugene and his older brother Stanley starting to make it as comedy writers, Broadway Bound is surely, as O’Neill described his own masterpiece, “a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.”

Where Brighton Beach Memoirs opens with Eugene joyfully practicing his baseball pitches, Broadway Bound raises its curtain on Kate’s elderly father sneaking out of the Jerome house with the bedsheets he had soiled. That Kate discovers him in the act is the first indication that, in this play, the dirty linen will indeed be aired. The indomitable Kate of the first play, who assures her worried husband that “God has time for everybody,” is by now bitter and suspicious; the audience is told, as it wasn’t in the first play, that similarly to the actual Mamie Simon she “burned half the skin off her back” in a garment-factory fire.

As for Jack, the steadfast provider in Brighton Beach Memoirs has aged into an ineffably unhappy and serially unfaithful man. “If I’m not enough for you anymore, then tell me and get out,” Kate declares. A bit later, in as naked a sentence as he ever wrote, Simon has her ask, “How is it possible I could hate you so much after loving you all my life?”

Simon grants Kate a touch of redemptive escape when Eugene coaxes her into remembering and reenacting the high point of her womanly life—the time in a ballroom decades earlier when the movie star George Raft asked her to dance. This is no happy ending, though; this is the tragedy of unfulfilled life and shattered dreams; this is Mary Tyrone in her morphine haze recalling the doting sisters at her convent school, the one she left when she met the dashing actor James Tyrone.

The Eugene of Broadway Bound, 23 years old, intones some of the lessons about writing this his creator certainly learned, too. Writing a joke isn’t the same as writing comedy. And writing about the people you know sometimes means hurting them in the process. Eugene worries aloud that he is divided between “this nice likable funny kid” and “the part that writes, that’s an angry hostile real son of a bitch.”

Neil Simon kept that part of himself caged for a long time. When he liberated it in the trilogy, he set free part of his talent, too, the part that won the Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers. He didn’t lose the ability to entertain his audiences, but he did take a hint from something the grandfather says in Broadway Bound: “I don’t trust affection. Sometimes people give it to you instead of truth.”

More importantly to me, it provided some diversion from the grim duty at hand. My mother and I were heading toward a more proximate version of terra incognita, the summer camp where my sister Carol was being driven to despair. On this day, my mother would decide whether to accede to Carol’s pleas and bring her home.

Within days of Carol’s arrival at the camp two weeks earlier, we had received a string of desperate letters from her. There was, of course, no email then, no cell phones, no lenient rules about campers calling home. There were only those letters, coming day after day, filled with capital letters and exclamation points, the pages all but spotted with tears.

After enough of them, my mother could no longer ascribe the problem to homesickness. Besides, Carol had gone through a month at a different camp the previous summer without the slightest pangs. So my mother tried replying to Carol with advice for making friends, and she also placed a call to the camp’s owner, asking her to intercede.

None of it helped. The letters kept telling their tales of torment and ridicule—the cracks about her looks and her walk, the flashlights beamed at her sleeping eyes to force her awake. The camp director, evidently in response to my mother’s call, sifted through Carol’s footlocker, only to inform my sister that her clothing wasn’t up to par, as if to say the persecution was entirely justified. It was at that point my mother resolved to drive up and see for herself.

I went along only on the pretense of moral support. In fact, I felt complicit in Carol’s harrowing summer. On the day our family had dropped her off at a Westchester mall for the camp bus, my father got uncharacteristically lost making the last few turns. I’d been a reluctant party to this errand, and the prospect of any additional delay that kept me away from my friends and our daily Wiffleball games put me in the mood to punish.

As everyone in the family knew too well, Carol was a fragile soul. At 13, she was already five-foot-ten, full-breasted, and having her period. Maybe if she had been confident and assured, her early development would have been an asset. But she was epileptic, too, prone at unpredictable times to slip into petit mal seizures that we delicately called “spells,” and the rest of the time rendered vague and phlegmatic by the barbiturates that were medicine’s blunt instrument against her disease. So what could have been precocious allure came off as insecure gawkiness.

Most of the time, as the older brother, I had readily upheld our family code to protect her. Short and toothy, motormouthed among boys and tongue-tied with girls, I had enough anxieties of my own. The morning of the camp departure, though, I took aim. The latest of my sister’s indignities was a set of braces, and something in the metal turned her teeth an algae color. It happened only in a slender strip along the metal, invisible to any casual eye, but of course Carol imagined it being gaudy as neon to the world.

“Green teeth,” I started chanting in the car. “Green teeth, green teeth.” My father took a hand off the steering wheel to try to swat me into silence. Out of his reach in the back seat, I kept up the mantra, until Carol broke into sobs. By then we were finally at the mall, and the bus was ready to leave. The last I saw Carol, climbing aboard, she was still weeping.

By the morning of Apollo 11 and Zager and Evans, it was two weeks and a couple of days later, and my mother and I were pulling into the camp’s entrance. The owner met us and escorted us to Carol’s bunk. There she waited, along with her tormentors, who apparently had been summoned for the occasion.

I only needed one look at those girls to intuit what had happened. This camp was a Jewish camp, not in the sense of being operated by a denomination or a Zionist group, but in the de facto sense that most of the kids were Jews from New York’s prosperous suburbs. The girls had tans, and gleaming black hair, and tight bodies in their tennis whites.

My sister and I had always felt both inferior and superior to kids like that. We’d grown up in a Jewish family with radical yichus—grandparents who’d been anarchists, a father who marched in May Day parades, a mother who rejected her conventionally religious upbringing. We prided ourselves on knowing the lyrics to Tom Lehrer songs and subscribing to I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

The dividing line we drew wasn’t one of class, exactly. My father, to his own surprise, had grown into a successful capitalist with a company that designed and manufactured microbiology equipment. If anything, his financial success made us more adamant about not defining ourselves and our Jewishness by bank account and tax bracket and address. Being Jewish was about having politics, a certain kind of politics.

But faced with the reality of Jewish kids from the Five Towns or Millburn or Scarsdale, kids with social ease and fashionable clothes, my sister and I shriveled. Instead of disparaging their vapidity and materialism, we envied it. Or at least I did. A lot of times, I wished I could trade my class consciousness for a talent at flirtation. I wished I’d been one of those boys welcomed into the sanctum sanctorum of spin-the-bottle on the bar mitzvah party circuit.

As if they had been warned or prepped about our visit, the girls chatted amiably with Carol, making the summer’s woes seem nothing but typical camp pranks. I could see the insincerity of their show in about three seconds. I could also see, to my shock, those girls looking attentively at me.

I realized it was the sunglasses. The sunglasses, sea-green lenses and golden frames, were the only cool thing I owned, all the more so because they stood in on sunny days for the black horn-rim spectacles I normally wore. I dated my incompetence with girls to the day in sixth grade when the optometrist informed me I was near-sighted. All the camp girls knew, though, was that these sunglasses looked sort of like the ones Peter Fonda wore in Easy Rider.

I could have told those girls to leave my sister alone. I could have put my arm around her shoulder. I had this brief, flickering moment of status with her foes; they might actually have listened. Instead, I stayed silent, feeling that rare intoxicant of female interest in hapless me.

The visit ended and Carol walked with my mother and me to the car and we took stock. The girls didn’t seem so bad, my mother offered. Maybe things would work out now. Life is about getting along with all kinds of people. Carol didn’t press the case about going home. And, again, I said nothing on her behalf.

A couple of days later, the next letter arrived, every bit as heartbreaking as the rest. There was just one new twist on the degradation. Carol wrote us that, after my mother and I had driven away, one of the girls said, “You’re brother’s so cute. What happened to you?”

Neither my sister nor I remember if she was back home in time to see the lunar landing on July 20, 1969. We can only recall that our mother fetched her, so broken, sometime before visiting day.

A few months ago, I was sleeping in a hotel room when the clock-radio went off at four in the morning. Through my grogginess, I became aware of the sound of a song. It was “In the Year 2525,” and all the memories of that day at camp flooded back into my brain. On this day, the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind,” I do not think of humanity’s capacity for achievement and wonder and transcendence. I think not of being stellar but oh so earthbound.

Samuel G. Freedman, journalism professor at Columbia University, is the author of six books. This is his first article for Tablet Magazine.