Ike and I often had lunch at the Dark Horse restaurant near the campus and B&P. I began to learn more about him. He had a dismal outlook on life but he was always entertaining. He had opinions on everything from marriage to the decline of civilization – and how those two were related. He was on his third marriage; his current wife being the first non-Jew. His parents expected him to marry a Jew even though they were non-observant and they were still alive when he married his first wife. She divorced him because he didn’t want to raise their two daughters to be religious. He hadn’t been raised to believe in the supernatural and he didn’t want his daughters to do so either. His parents had died by the time he married again but he still felt them watching even though he didn’t believe in an afterlife. They divorced because of money and sex: she overindulged in both but not with him. He married the current wife because they liked each other, although he didn’t say that in so many words. She had good taste in clothes and dressed him appropriately but by mid-morning he usually looked rumpled and casually put together. Once I had a big exam coming up in a Literature class so I said I needed plenty of prayers to get me a passing grade. Ike replied that it didn’t do any good to pray because there was no god to hear, but if I needed to pray, I’d better pray in Hebrew or God wouldn’t understand. Probably an old joke but it said a lot about Ike’s beliefs. He claimed to be solidly based in the world of the five senses but there seemed to be something else about him. He had no use for religion but he never put down people’s beliefs.
