While I was growing up I was a good kid but a confused kid. I was the kid who asked himself: “what is the meaning of life?”

I grew up outside of Boston in a town called Newton, Massachusetts. It was a very wealthy area. But I was living in the area next to Waltham, which was probably the least wealthy parts of Newton. In this particular area there weren’t many Jews. There were a lot of Roman Catholic Irish and Italian families.

From a very early age I experienced a lot of prejudice. Kids didn’t like me; I was picked on a lot. I really couldn’t understand it until many years later when I reflected that the types of issues I was struggling with were very different than the kids around me. So I think that due to my own confusions it was probably very difficult for kids to relate to me. So consequently I was not well liked, I was picked on. The more I wanted to be accepted the more it set up a vicious cycle.

On one hand I felt like I had a very happy childhood playing with my friends in the summers and doing a lot of sports. But there was also a lot of being picked on, being misunderstood, and being judged.

But I think what became of this was that knowing how much it hurt my feelings to be the kid who was picked on I became very sensitive to the feelings of others. I knew what it was like to get my feelings hurt so I had type of compassion and not wanting to cause harm.

The issue I was dealing with was a lot of death.

By the time I was ten I had lost my brother, my best friend, and my grandfather. My best friend lived across the street from a, my grandfather lived downstairs for me and my brother and I shared a room.

So I was actually a very religious kid. I went to temple all the time and wore a yarmulke and I studied a lot. I wanted to know what the meaning of life was. My first realization of death came when I was four years old. This was before my brother, my best friend, and my grandfather had even died. I was writing in the back seat of my parents’ car one day. I’m not sure where it came from or why but all of a sudden I had this realization that death could come at any moment, and that I was going to die.

I shared this realization with my parents and they tried to reassure me: “don’t worry Bobby. It’s not going to happen for a long, long, long time.”

In that moment I knew that they were just saying that to try to make me feel better. I didn’t feel offended. I didn’t feel angry that they were lying to me, but I knew what the truth was because I had had my realization.

By the time I was ten my younger brother had been born with a terminal illness called Tay- Sachs disease. We shared the same room together and I watched him slowly get sicker and sicker and finally died. Then I lost my best friend and my grandfather who lived downstairs. From a very early age a lot of death had impacted me. It made me want to question: “what is this life?”

When I look back on my childhood I think I was probably a very strange kid to some degree. It was like I was shell-shocked. I was thinking about other things. Even though I was playing there must have been some affect that I just live with. And, I was a Jew in a very non-Jewish area. When I was five years old I remember going home and asking my parents: “what does ‘kike’ mean?”

I was being called names that I didn’t understand. I was being hated by people who didn’t even know me. There was just a lot of perplexity. “you don’t even know who I am and you’re calling me names and hating me!”

I was the oldest kid in the family and what I used to do every day after lunch was go out and ride my bike and play with my friends in the neighborhood. One time my parents got a babysitter outside of the family. Usually my grandmother or my aunt or my cousin would come over and watch me. But this was the first time they ever got a babysitter outside the family. My parents told her to let me go outside and play after I had lunch. That’s what I did.

I was riding my bike around a corner and I didn’t happen to see a car coming. I smashed my right leg with a compound fracture. I remember being so excited because I got to ride to the hospital in the front seat of a police car with the siren going. I had broken my leg severely and was in the hospital for six weeks.