Friend #1 - Ami and Vered

My dad's friends from high school

I thought for a while about how I would capture 52 different stories without making it too much about me. I considered something more “Bourdain” style, another friend suggested a concept similar to Humans of New York. What will eventually come of this, I’m not entirely sure, but the objective of the “experiment” remains the same - to raise awareness for loneliness and depression. 

Ami was one of my dad’s first friends in Canada. My father immigrated to Toronto at 17 with his family and met Ami in ESL at high school - both of them quickly connected as Israelis. Ami is loud, my father is quieter. I can imagine the sort of friendship they would have had over 40 years ago. 

My journey to connect or reconnect with 52 friends begins in Miami when Ami and his wife Vered invite me over for Shabbat dinner to their beautiful Sunny Isles condo. 

I’d seen them at parties over the years and they’d attended my major life events but I can’t say I ever really remember conversing with them. 

“Your father was at our wedding and our daughter was the flower girl at your parents’ wedding,” Vered reminds me. 

Ami and Vered met at the end of high school and married young - long before my parents did. Ami remembers seeing Vered for the first time when she was 16 and he was 18, he had a girlfriend at the time but still pursued her for a year until he finally got a date. 

“I would call her house almost every day,” says Ami. 

“I feel like that’s romantic but people would think it’s creepy these days,” I say. 

“My mother would say - who is this guy? Just call him back already,” smiles Vered. 

My parents met through a Jewish matchmaker long after Ami and Vered. My father was 31, my mother 21, but both looking for the same kind of love and marrying within the year. 

“If you watch their wedding video, you can see they both look so innocent,” I mention. 

“I know, I was there,” says Vered. 

“I just want to find someone like my dad,” I say. 

“If I talk about your father, I’ll cry,” she finishes. 

My father is famously the nicest man in the world. When he dropped me off in Miami at the beginning of October, he packed my fridge with food, changed all of the lightbulbs, and calls me daily to make sure that I’m eating. He taught me math as I cried over the kitchen table, how to race cars, and he’s a brilliant businessman. 

“Do you know the singer Enrico Macias?” I ask Ami. 

“Of course, he’s like 100 years old,” he jokes. 

“My dad and I want to go see him in Paris in April,” I tell him. 

I’m open with them that I am coming out of a season of depression. We talk about the American healthcare system and I remind them that my appendix burst just before I arrived in Miami. I remember waiting hours hunched over in the emergency room in Toronto. 

“I didn’t learn this until my 30s, but the greatest love you have in life is the one you have with yourself,” Vered says. 

I tell her that she reminds me of the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. First, because she speaks in a similar manner but mainly because I remember her giving the same advice in her book, The Woman I Wanted to Be - I’d forgotten it. 

I call my dad after saying, “Vered must have always been very confident.”

“She was,” he says.