Falling Petals

Last Shabbat, we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a ten-minute walk from our home.  It was a warm, sunny day,and almost all the visitors to the garden were smiling with pleasure from the loveliness of the spring day and the spectacular display of flowering plants all around us.  My wife remarked that it reminded her of the public’s reaction to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “wrapping” of Central Park, “The Gates” project, which installed thousands of orange fabric sheets  through the park, several years ago in February, the year’s most dismal month, when you think spring will never return.  Walkers in the park were delighted.

There also was much to delight the crowds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden: azalea, wisteria, lilac, dogwood, crabapple, and cherry were in bloom, the bluebells had begun to blossom, and the peonies were as large as cabbages.  Most of the cherry tree varieties had passed the zenith of their colorfulness, and so we walked under a light rain of cherry blossoms, with drifts of silky petals all about.  The falling petals reminded us of the day of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.

That was in November of 1995.  We were in Oamaru, New Zealand then, conducting research for a book on Mark Twain’s world lecture tour of 1895-6.  He had performed in Oamaru 100 years before and we were staying in the same hotel.  Shocked by the news of Rabin’s assassination, my wife and I took a long walk through Oamaru’s botanic gardens, where chestnut trees were in bloom.  We walked under their falling blossoms, which increased our sense of elegy and sadness.

We felt a similar sadness the day after our visit to the Botanic Garden, at a performance of Dan LeFranc’s new play, The Big Meal.  It takes us through four generations of the same family, with the roles assumed by younger players taken by increasingly older ones.  The effect is something like that of watching a time-lapse film.  Here we see in the space of ninety minutes, young people morph into the generation of their parents, then their grandparents, and finally their great grandparents, with the actors assuming multiple roles.  At the end, the great grandmother, whom we had first seen as a young woman, declares that it all happens so fast.  

Her comment reminded me of my grandfather’s telling me more than once, “it’s all a dream.”  I didn’t understand him at the time, but now I do and all too well.  Spring succeeds winter, the blossoms fall, our children succeed us, and it all happens before we can turn around, before we know what's happened.  Still, if we’re lucky we’ll see another spring. We’ll return to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, walk under the falling blossoms, and think both of “The Gates” and that morning in Oamaru.  But we don’t have to wait for next spring to be grateful that we’ve seen so many springs until now.

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