A new appreciation for life

Harvey Garmeder and Miriam Roth are a play-it-safe sort of couple.

The septuagenarians’ lives follow a predictable routine. Mondays are for karaoke at a Northeast Philadelphia bar near their neighborhood, Thursdays are for lunch at the Golden Corral on Street Road.

If they venture to Atlantic City, they always stay at the Resorts Casino Hotel. Garmeder rarely feeds more than $20 into a slot machine. Wagering so little — 10 cents per spin — he never risks losing big.

On Jan. 31, after a brief Atlantic City getaway, the couple decided to stop, on their way back home, at another familiar spot: the Four Seasons Diner on Cottman Avenue.

Garmeder, 79, tucked into a booth, and ordered chicken soup and a burger. Roth, 71, hit the salad bar and sat across from him. And then an explosion, somewhere outside, rocked the diner.

Roth leaped up to see what happened, as a small metal object shot through a diner window, whizzed past her, and struck Garmeder above his left eye. Blood started dripping down his face. As he dived under the booth’s table, Roth threw herself on top of him.

“I thought,” Roth later recalled, “he was shot in the brain with a bullet.”

Televisions inside the diner soon cut to the news: A small jet had taken off from nearby Northeast Philadelphia Airport, and then crashed near the Roosevelt Mall, less than 600 yards from the diner, leaving seven people dead.

Garmeder had been struck by an oxygen tank valve that had ricocheted from the crash site. He escaped serious injury, needing only a tetanus shot and four stitches.

Two months later, Garmeder and Roth are still reckoning with an experience that proved to be a visceral reminder of a universal truth: Life is unpredictable. The couple are now trying to make the most of their time. Music lovers, they have drawn up a list of dream destinations — the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Elvis Presley’s former home, Graceland, in Memphis — and have started making travel plans.

“I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the face of the Earth, because if that [valve] would have hit me head on, I don’t think I would be here,” Garmeder said during a recent interview.

“I want to tell you something: This is not a dress rehearsal, life. If your parents are still around, I would cherish them. If you have siblings, spend more time with them. If you have children, love them to death and spoil them.”

Notions of fate and chance are peppered through the long arc of Garmeder and Roth’s relationship.

Both are first-generation descendants of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Garmeder’s father’s family fled pogroms in Ukraine, and ultimately settled in South Philly, where he met Garmeder’s mother. They married and moved to Northeast Philly, where Garmeder’s father sold fur coats from a shop in Mayfair.

Roth’s parents were young adults, living in Poland when Adolf Hitler rose to power. During the Holocaust, each lost everything that was dear to them.

“My father’s wife and two children were killed,” Roth explained. “My mother was a newlywed. They killed her husband.”

After surviving a torturous existence in concentration camps, Roth’s mother and father, who had known each other as kids, reconnected in Poland. They later forged a new life in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, where Roth was born in 1953.

Roth’s family moved, in 1971, to a gently curving block of ranch houses in the Northeast, at the intersection of Benton and Castor Avenues. There, Roth met their new next-door neighbor: Garmeder.

He was a student at Temple University; she was 17. The two went for an occasional bite to eat, but didn’t pursue a relationship. Roth later moved away from Benton Avenue, and married.

Garmeder, a self-described alta cocker (Yiddish for “old fart”), never married, though, he said, there were “a lot of close encounters” with women he dated.

Thirty years later, Garmeder spotted a familiar face in his Rhawnhurst neighborhood: Roth. Her marriage had fallen apart after she lost her only son, Andy, 16, to cancer, and she moved back in with her mother.

One day, Garmeder asked Roth to dinner. They went to an Old Country Buffet in Bensalem, and soon began dating.

“You know that Neil Sedaka song, ‘I’m living right next door to an angel?’ That’s her,” Garmeder said.

Theirs became a relationship defined by quirks. After more than 20 years together, they still prefer to live separately, albeit in side-by-side houses.

“I like bananas,” Garmeder said. “She hates them. So I can’t eat bananas in her presence, because it nauseates her.”

“He’s frickin’ brilliant,” Roth said. “But he’s clueless. He doesn’t read a room. He doesn’t understand people or jokes.”

They focus more on the things they share: a fondness for microwavable meals, American Idol and The Golden Bachelor, and Tastykake Kandy Kakes after dinner.

“I love him to death,” Roth said.

Every week, Garmeder, Roth, and their old friends, Herman and Beverly Fox, head to Randi’s Restaurant & Bar in the Grant Plaza Shopping Center, where a 60-and-over crowd assembles for karaoke.

The longtime bartender, Jimmy Jagiello, surveyed the mostly nondrinking crowd with an affectionate smile on a recent Monday night. He doesn’t charge regulars for soda or iced tea, he said, unless they “go crazy and order it all night.” Garmeder’s go-to is birch beer.

Behind Jagiello sat a sign: “FRIENDS: Therapists you can drink with.”

Garmeder took a turn at the mic, and began to sing a swaying song about a guy who can’t stop searching for a girl who stole his heart.

The track, “Donna,” was released in December 1958.

Less than two months later, the song’s author, Ritchie Valens, 17, finished a performance in Iowa, and climbed into a small plane with two other musicians — Buddy Holly, 22, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, 28 — and a young pilot.

Shortly after taking off amid high winds and poor visibility, their plane crashed in a snowy cornfield. All four were killed.

While that 1959 plane crash has been dissected for decades in news stories and songs, much is still unknown about what caused a Learjet medical transport to plummet from the night sky over Philadelphia in January.

A preliminary National Transportation Safety Board report found that the Learjet’s cockpit voice recorder likely hadn’t worked for years, depriving investigators of critical insight into the flight’s final moments.

The impact of the crash ignited fires in the surrounding neighborhood, and sent large pieces of debris — including an 800-pound plane engine — into some homes.

Inside the Four Seasons Diner, Garmeder initially feared the explosion on Cottman Avenue was part of a terrorist attack. He felt a thunk and a sharp sting to his forehead.

Hunkered under the table, Garmeder pressed a fistful of napkins to his wound. Roth tried to speak — but couldn’t find any words.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” she said, “like it happened, but not to me.”

In the days that followed, Roth found that she couldn’t eat or sleep. “I just kept reliving it, and shaking and crying,” she said.

Ever since, certain images and sounds leave her overwhelmed: a plane flying low over Roosevelt Boulevard, red-and-blue dome lights on passing police cars, Amazon delivery trucks that beep while backing up on her street.

“I get dizzy,” she explained, “and I have to sit down.”

Security footage of the valve striking Garmeder, knocking off his black baseball cap, went viral, turning the retired elementary school teacher into a recognizable face of a public disaster.

Sometimes strangers approach him and ask about the crash; the conversations reinforce the couple’s desire to live more adventurously.

“I eat what I want. I drink what I want,” Roth said. “Because you don’t know, in a minute, things can change. So if you think, ‘Should I have that cookie?’ Have it. Big deal.”

Roth, a former X-ray tech and retired nursery school teacher, hopes to revisit Canada. She and Garmeder will pursue their bucket-list trips, and maybe tack on a vacation cruise along the way: “I’m gonna get off my tuchas,” Garmeder said.

“Whatever I got left in my life,” he added, “I’m going to really live it up.”

One thing is certain: They won’t fly anywhere.