{"id":33268,"date":"2025-10-15T09:32:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=33268"},"modified":"2025-10-15T09:32:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:32:25","slug":"my-roommate-ed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/15\/my-roommate-ed\/","title":{"rendered":"MY ROOMMATE ED"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\nMy roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he&#8217;s dead.<\/p>\n<p>Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man &#8212; a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.<\/p>\n<p>I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)<\/p>\n<p>Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn&#8217;t have, money he had or didn&#8217;t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.<\/p>\n<p>His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us \u201clived out of cans.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house &#8212; and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn&#8217;t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven&#8217;t since). Ed didn\u2019t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t see Ed&#8217;s obit in the <em>Plain Dealer<\/em> in 2006<em>. <\/em>But I googled him after I &#8220;saw&#8221; him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-33306\" src=\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/10-items-or-less-300x235.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"235\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/10-items-or-less-300x235.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/10-items-or-less.jpg 765w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he&#8217;s dead. Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man &#8212; a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33268"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33656,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33268\/revisions\/33656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}