“Are You Man Enough for My Mother?”

My parents divorced in 1979, and I used to tease my mother that I was going to run a personal ad on her behalf in New York magazine with the headline “Are You Man Enough for My Mother?”

I needn’t have worried. Mom was perfectly capable of finding men on her own.

As I have mentioned in this column, she passed away in December, and I’ve been reminiscing lately about the men in her life after her marriage to my father ended. I knew four of them, and there may well have been more I didn’t know about.

The first was her former brother-in-law, a fraternity brother of my father’s who had been married to my father’s sister. The ex-brother-in-law — whose name, conveniently, was Mike — passed away years ago, so I don’t mind sharing a little bit of his story.

Mike was a big-time attorney in Manhattan, and he was friends with the top people in the world of classical music — Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Leonard Bernstein. My mother loved classical music, so Mike would take her to parties where she would meet these amazing people.

She loved it.

At the same time, my mother was dating another man, whom she met when she was visiting me while I was studying in seminary in Jerusalem after college. They met when we did a glass-bottom boat ride in Eilat, in the south of Israel.

Dude got mom’s digits.

This gentleman, whose name I don’t recall, was going through a divorce at the time. When I was at my mom’s and the phone rang, it might have been either of the two men. Each had a distinct pattern. One would hear me say hello . . . and hang up immediately.

That was Mike. I called him Dr. Hang-up.

The other one would say nothing, but hang on the phone for about five seconds, and then disengage.

That was the guy she met in Israel. I called him Silent Sam.

So I would leave my mom messages: Dr. Hang-up called, or Silent Sam called. I thought that was pretty funny.

And then they faded away, and Mom met another guy somewhere, somehow — again without my help. I remember one time when we were all out at a rental house in the Hamptons, and this gentleman — his name escapes me too — asked me a question about the Mets, who at that time had a pitcher named Ron Darling. He asked me, “Who’s pitching for the Mets today, Darling?”

“I don’t know, Sweetheart,” I replied.

You had to be there.

Finally, there was a sober, almost somber investment banker who had two daughters roughly my age — one a squared-away investment banker, and the other a filmmaker trying her luck in Los Angeles.

I think we all thought the investment banker was out of my league, but there was some hope that I might marry the filmmaker and help her settle down.

Of course, that didn’t happen. My mother never remarried, and after this quartet disappeared from her life, I was not aware of any other gentlemen callers.

The point is that she made a new life for herself and she enjoyed herself.

I guess it’s true, as the cartoonist Allen Saunders said, “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” My mom enjoyed her life, and although she never wanted to marry again, she was attractive and fun and she had all the male companionship she desired, until she didn’t desire it anymore.

If you’re looking for a moral to this story, that’s it.