The Fringes of Fall

The Fringes of Fall

We turned an important page yesterday. We wrapped up a whirlwind weekend actualizing and celebrating my youngest son Tom’s wedding to his new bride, Jenna. The wedding itself was on Sunday, which the cognoscenti will recognize as indicative that it was a Jewish ceremony held under a chuppah, a Jewish bridal canopy. Tom is not Jewish, but Jenna is. Tom was raised in a very open and embracing manner in Manhattan, where his best friends in his apartment building were Jewish (two of them Israeli transplants). He went to the Little Red School in the West Village, where inclusion and diversity are its most celebrated hallmarks, and he went to Cornell University, where even in my day there, the percentage of Jewish students (mostly from the concentrated Jewish community of metropolitan New York City) vastly exceeds the national concentration of Judaism in the United States, which stands at a mere 2.4% of the U.S. population. In 1930 about 60% of America’s Jewish population was in the Northeast, but today the diaspora has spread and yet still 40% still live in the Northeast. Cornell University, where both Tom and Jenna attended, has about 22% of its student body as Jewish. Like all religions these days, Judaism is suffering some reduced identification of its members. But I would venture to guess that the mid-Twentieth Century trauma to the sect, the Holocaust, has probably galvanized more Jews to remain connected to their religion than has been the general trend in other religions. I like to think that the marriage of Tom and Jenna represents a positive step in the evolution of both our families and for our spirituality.

Nature loves diversity and yet enlightened humans seek to bring down barriers and integrate with one another whenever they can. There is no one in our family that does not think this is a wonderful combination. The religious heritage issues seem little more than the differences of his urban upbringing and her suburban youth, or perhaps his right-brain tendencies and her left-brain dominance. They are different but they are alike. They yin and they yang, as was said even by the rabbi under the chuppah. This is all good and it feels like a natural moving on to me personally as I met my first Jewish friend in 1966 in Maine, Michael Feldman. He became my best friend in that unusual rural setting, due mostly to proximity, but also because he was an intellectual standout in an otherwise relatively barren wasteland of kids that spent more time hunting squirrels for food than pursuing the life of the mind. While high school in Rome broadened me internationally and exposed me to many interesting and diverse global sorts, it was my return to the States and attending Cornell that brought Judaism and the qualities that I quite frankly found more often in Jewish friends than in others, into focus. Those qualities were like Michael Feldman’s, they were a curiosity and thoughtfulness that were more like my own than many of the more brutish non-Jewish people around me. I understand the mistakes of stereotyping and I have certainly met uninteresting and unimaginative Jewish people, just as I have met brilliant and fascinating non-Jewish people, but there is something in the cultural biases of the Jewish population of the Northeast that I have encountered that is more like my own when it comes to intellectual pursuits and sensibilities than not. Despite all the rhetoric about the value of diversity, we tend to gravitate to those who think more like us and, stated quite bluntly, I seem to think, more like the Jewish people I know than not.

I know it is unwise to discuss, much less write about these issues of differences and similarities, especially in ethnic, racial and religious contexts, but I have never been too cautious in such things and I believe if your heart is pure, as I believe mine to be, it is better to say these things than to pretend to ignore them.

So as the unofficial summer season ends and the unofficial fall season begins, we have turned a page and Tom and Jenna are now wed and the Marins and Levine’s are now connected at the hip, which is a good thing. As Kim and I left the departure day picnic organized by Jenna’s lovely mother, Jamie, we got 15 minutes down the road only to realize that I had forgotten my all-important iPad on a picnic table. One call to Tom and a 15 minute return trip and we were reconnected. I think it was important that I made that mistake (how’s that for rationalizing a screw-up?) because a father must show vulnerability to his son to remind him that no one is perfect and that shit just sometimes happens. It also gave me one last chance to touch my youngest son’s hand and remind us both that he was now less my son and more Jenna’s husband, a very important reminder to us both. I still have my modern nuclear family (both of my ex-wives were at the wedding) and the Levine’s still have their L-7 (3 kids and now 2 kids-in-law), but there is a new game in town and it is the Marin-Levine or Levine-Marin game that begins with Tom and Jenna. That is a passage of the highest order.

As we drove down the Taconic Parkway from Beacon, heading toward the City and specifically, JFK, I was reminded of many things from my past. I lived in Metro-NYC from 1976 to 2020 with only a short two-year Toronto interlude when I still kept paying New York State taxes due to my house in Quiogue. That’s a long time and much of that time was for one reason or another (work and play) taking me through Westchester and Duchess County and on the Taconic and roads like the Taconic, with its stone bridges and leafy roadsides. I move on easily, but I remember easily too. If there is one thing I will miss most about the Northeast, it is the vibrant fall foliage that may start up in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, but eventually finds its way down the Hudson River Valley all the way to the boundaries of New York City. I know from experience that peak foliage time is usually around Columbus Day weekend in early to mid-October, depending on exactly where you are calibrating it and what the late summer weather has been. It really doesn’t start with the start of the month of September, but then again, it does a bit if you know what to look for.

One of the best places to notice fall foliage and the passing of the seasons that it represents, is along a roadway like the Taconic Parkway. As we drove away from the Marin-Levine wedding site, I started to notice it. There are the smaller bushes that scream their red colors. There are the vibrant yellows of birch that pop up here and there. But there are also all the maples, hickory, sumacs, oaks and hornbeams that stay green longer, but can’t help but start to show a tinge of color at the fringes. It is those stalwarts that cling to their vigor and chlorophyll until the last moment and the first frost that I tend to pay most attention to. Those signal that the summer is finished all but perhaps one last hurrah and then we will be in the most beautiful of seasons. Nature gives us the big autumnal show to keep us going through the bleakness of winter, but it also does so to remind us that the world is in constant need of refreshment.

All three of my children are adults now. They are all married and on their way to creating their own gardens. They are all spring gold and green. Roger has Valene and Pudding. Carolyn has John and Charlotte and Evelyn and Abe. And now Thomas (sorry, Tom) has Jenna and Hank. Meanwhile I have Kim and Betty. And that all gives me the right and the privilege to slide into autumn and enjoy the beauty of this season. I am happy to see the fringes of fall and I do not dread the winter, not just because I live in the warmth of San Diego, but because the world has to move to fall every cycle and that is the beauty of the process.