Offshoots

When I told a friend about the ancient elm tree in Prospect Park that a recent tornado had damaged, she sent me the following story. The so-called "Mother's Day Blizzard," of May 1977, destroyed or injured many trees in Greater Boston, because the trees had leafed out, and the snow was wet and heavy. Among the casualties was a maple tree in my friend's back yard. She decided not to cut down the vertical half of the tree that remained standing, since it was posing no danger, but to let it alone. "Within a year," she wrote, "a little sucker at its base was ten feet high, and as it continued to grow, it wrapped itself around its mother, like a living crutch. The mother put out a limb on her broken side, and together they looked as if they were doing a stately tree-dance. Now mother is old and increasingly arthritic, but her daughter's embrace is poignant and lovely."

I'd like to think that this story serves as a metaphor for our own passage through life. Each of us creates offshoots - children and grandchildren, of course, but these are not the only ones. Our behavior influences our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, our students, indeed all those with whom we interact, even if the encounters are brief, perhaps never to be repeated.

"If I look angry and scowl," said the young man who was displaying a T-shirt on the corner of a busy street, about whom I wrote in a recent post, "no one will approach me. But if I smile and look pleasant, passersby might stop and talk to me." Has a stranger ever told you that he or she liked your hat or your jacket or some other item of your apparel? Didn't it brighten your day? And hasn't an interaction with a sour, uncooperative functionary sent a cloud across your sun? I remember watching two children frolicking on an Aegean beach. As we were leaving the scene, my wife whispered to their children's mother, without waiting for a response, "your children are lovely." I'll bet their mother remembers the tribute, but even if she doesn't, it will have made an impression on her, if added to others. Our influences on others may be profound or trivial, long-lasting or momentary, but even tiny influences can create a cumulative effect, like that of the proverbial bird that sharpens its beak on a mountaintop once every thousand years, until the mountain is worn away.

Many were the students who repeated to me something I had said years before, a remark that made an impression on them. "Do you remember when you said such and such?" they would say, and half the time I'd have no memory of ever having said it. I stopped attending religious services immediately after a member of our congregation, during a discussion of the week's portion, asserted that we should omit anything from our prayers that we don't believe. He was referring to the phrase chayot hakodesh or holy creatures, whose meaning is unclear, but his remark made me realize that I didn't believe any of the prayers I was saying. When the King of Norway invited our friend to a reception at the royal palace, His Majesty could not have known that the sequence of events that flowed from his invitation, about which I wrote in a recent post, would result in a happy marriage that lasted for close to sixty years. Small actions can have large effects.

Because "no man is an island, entire of itself," each of us influences the others with whom we come in contact. We many not know the outcome of our actions, but that they exist is as certain as the offshoot from my friend's maple tree.