Falling Leaves

 

At a recent online meeting, the icebreaker question was "what is your favorite thing about fall?" There were shoutouts to hayrides and apple picking, football and Halloween candy.  My favorite? Hands down, it's the changing of the leaves and the riot of oranges, yellows, and reds that grace my neighborhood.

We are well past peak fall color here in DC so we've now turned to the raking portion of the season. When I was a kid, I was always looking for somewhere to hide when my dad pressed us kids into action to deal with our big front and back lawns.

Thankfully, the yard at my house is a fraction of the size of that at my childhood home. Plus the city vacuums up leaves left at the curb and while there are many kinks in that system, it certainly beats having to bag them.  

The garden crews that people hire to de-leaf their lawns almost exclusively use blowers to get the job done. Last year, a new ordinance was passed banning gas-powered blowers, in part because they use fossil fuels and pollute our air. But they are also incredibly noisy, something I didn't quite get until I was working from home during the height of the pandemic.

However, enforcement seems weak.  Unlike the parking cops who troll the neighborhood looking for cars that have outstayed their welcome, the key mechanism to get rid of the gas-powered machines is for neighbors to submit a complaint online. You need a lot of information to do so and it's not clear what kind of followup is done. The garden crews definitely prefer the older equipment which has greater power and gets the job done faster.

As with all things political, the neighbors seem quite content to voice their opinions with yard signs. 

As for me, I remain solidly on team rake and have the blisters to prove it.  In fact, I'd better get off the computer and go tackle the yard.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's a busy week for most of us but since I'm trying to stick with a regular routine of posting every Monday, I'd thought I'd pop in to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. The list of things for which I am thankful is quite long, not the least of which is a giant turkey inflatable.

Plus who wouldn't mind a cheerful seasonal greeting from Tigger?  Enjoy the turkey and pie and don't start a fight at the dinner table with your crazy uncle.

Thanks to Our Veterans (a little late)

Veterans Day was either Friday or Saturday of last week. Unlike other federal holidays that are observed on the closest Monday to the actual holiday, Veterans Day is always observed on the exact day itself -- November 11.  I'm confused though because while the 11th fell on Saturday this year, the federal holiday was observed on Friday but somehow the mail carrier still delivered our mail that day.

My confusion is not the point, though. We observe Veterans Day on the 11th of November because that's when the armistice for World War I went into effect, even more specifically the guns went silent at 11 am, making it final on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  And in my family, this is significant because both of my grandfathers served in World War I.

My father's father, Abraham B. Schwartz (or Beb as he was known from childhood) was 26 when the U.S. entered the war. He was a fully qualified physician and therefore entered the U.S. Army as an officer. Although I knew him well, his war experience was never something that we discussed.  Moreover, his military records were among many that were destroyed by a massive fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.  So what I know of his Army experience is pieced together from photos, other official records, and a few jottings in his handwriting and that of my grandmother.

After being inducted in Milwaukee in late 1917, he received his basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas. In August 1918, he boarded the Leviathan, en route for U.S. Base Hospital 82 in Toul in northeastern France. This was just about 25 miles from St. Mihiel, where a major battle was fought in September of that year.  Beb was not a surgeon so I'm not sure what his role might have been in such an engagement.

The rest of his service is a bit of a mystery, the only clues being the photo below which is labeled on the back "interviewing Russians at a displaced persons camp, 1919" and a note in his official Abridged Prayer Book for Jews in the Army and Navy of the United States, that he was a volunteer with Russian prisoners of war.  Perhaps the Yiddish spoken in his childhood home or phrases in Russian that his parents brought with them when they emigrated from what is now Belarus was helpful?

He was discharged in August 1919, returning to Milwaukee where he practiced pediatrics until he turned 80.

My mother's father, Sydney Freedman, had a different experience. He died on my 5th birthday so I only have a few memories of him but fortunately, I do have a few facts. In the fall of 1917, he was two years out of high school, working as a salesman for E. Kirstein and Sons, a manufacturer of optical products in Rochester, NY. (Two interesting footnotes here:  First, the company held his job and paid a portion of his salary throughout his military service. Second, the "sons" of the company title included Lincoln Kirstein, perhaps best known as one of the founders of the New York City Ballet and who also served in World War II as one of its Monuments Men, locating and retrieving artworks stolen by the Nazis.).  

He did his basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey where the Thanksgiving meal included both oysters on the half shell and roast loin of pork, items that certainly would not have been eaten in his Jewish home. In May 1918, Battery D 19th Field Artillery shipped out for Europe on a ship called Tunisian, arriving almost a month later.  New York State maintained records of soldiers in its own archive which is how I know that his unit engaged at Vosges, St. Mihiel, Thiacourt, and "Pogney Front", the last of these yielding nothing on a Google search. A lifelong joker, Private Freedman told my mother that he served in the cavalry and his job was to clean "the part under the horse's tail." 

When the armistice came, he was sent to be part of the U.S. forces supervising the evacuation of the Germans from Luxembourg, billeting with a family in Itzig, until his discharge in July 1919.  My mother-in-law's family came from that area and left aunts, uncles, and cousins behind, the descendants of whom the family remains in touch with to this day. It is crazy for me to consider that my grandfather, this short, portly Jewish fellow from New York, might have lived with the Catholic farmers related to my husband, and what they might have made of each other.

Syd's younger brother Ephraim also served in the army but never went further than Buffalo.

His future brothers-in-law, Sam and Joseph Cohen, were not inducted until May 1918, and they too never saw any overseas action.  Their basic training took place at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama and I imagine (although can't say for sure) that this was the furthest they'd ever been away from home.

Happily for their mothers, all these men came home in one piece (because if not, I would not be here at all). Sadly for all of us, World War I did not turn out to be the war to end all wars. 

What to Do at This Moment?

The world is a dumpster fire right now. The situation in the Middle East is heart breaking, both because of the human toll on innocent Israelis and Palestinians and because there doesn't seem to be a way forward. The war in Ukraine rages on. Drug overdose deaths are up 30 percent year over year. September was the hottest its been in nearly 200 years of climate record keeping. The polls suggest that Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican candidate in the 2024 election and he could very well become president again.

So what does one person do?

In my childhood home, Robert F. Kennedy's words from his 1966 speech at the University of Capetown were posted on the bulletin board in the kitchen, alongside the emergency numbers and youth soccer schedule.  The excerpt was this: 

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

I took note and taped these to the wall over my desk at my first real job on Capitol Hill, reminding me that there was a purpose to my efforts that was bigger than the daily grind of answering constituent mail. They spurred me on to a career focused on improving health care, particularly for those with low incomes.

But what to do at this particular moment when everything all at once seems to be headed south? I could write to my member of Congress, except as a District resident, my representative does not have a vote or much of a voice. I could consume a steady diet of news and opinion about all the world's ills and endlessly discuss my angst and my preferred solutions with friends and family.

To what end? I don't think anyone has noticed that I don't patronize Chick-Fil-A because its owners are big contributors to organizations that foster hate against the LGBTQ+ community, or that I stay away from The Wharf due to the unconscionable development deal struck by the city with property owners who cater primarily to the wealthy. I'd be kidding myself to think that these actions are resolving problems. Or that I have the power to affect all the world's troubles all at once. 

So then what?

These days my acts to improve the lots of others are small, one might say infinitesimal. They include filling up the Little Free Library at the transitional housing facility for families, sending weekly greeting cards to lonely nursing home residents as part of the Letters Against Isolation campaign, advocating for affordable housing in affluent Upper Northwest DC, writing get-out-the-vote postcards to folks in states with important elections, and selling pies to support Food & Friends, a local organization that provides nourishing meals to people dealing with chronic illness. 

Do these tiny acts send out the "tiny ripples of hope" as RFK suggested?  I've been thinking about this a lot and honestly, I'm not so sure. But in the end, I do these things not because I think they make a huge difference or even because doing them makes me feel better. Rather I know that if I did nothing, I'd feel as if I hadn't tried. And for now, that will have to be enough.

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As a postscript, I wanted to share a prayer offered by Rabbi Sarah Krinsky at a recent prayer vigil convened by the Washington Interfaith Network. I found her words both sorrowful and comforting, a combination that seems pitch perfect right now.

Eloheinu v’elohei avoteinu v’imoteinu - our God and God of our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah 

God of Jesus and his disciples, God of Muhammad and his descendants 

God of mothers. God of lovers. God of children, magical and  real 

God of fighters. God of peacemakers. God of peace.

God of those who call out, who cry out. God of those who cry

God of those who are angry at God. God of those at whom God is angry.

God of those who have lost their way, lost their faith, God of those who have abandoned and of those who have been abandoned. God of the godless

God who performs miracles. God of past and of present. God of an imagined future

God of the captives, of the un-free. 

God of those holding onto hope. God of those who are drowning in despair. God of those who are drowning and those who are thirsty and of those who thirst for something better

Our God, all of our God - to you we pray. 

We pray to you knowing that you are getting a lot of prayers these days. Prayers that are coming a mile a minute, language by language, prayers from a parent, then a child, then a parent again. Your divine ears, oh god, must be brimming, overflowing with the endless cacophony. Please, oh God. Please no, oh God. If only, I promise, just guide me, oh God. 

But we know, God, that you hear not just with ears, but with an endlessly expansive and capacious heart. A heart that does not just recognize words but that sees pain. A heart that doesn’t just listen to liturgy but that senses loss, or despair, of hope, or faith, or love. 

Hear us with that heart, oh God. Hear our yearning. Witness our connection. See that we’re trying. See that we’re crying. Hear us with that heart. And help us to hear, to witness, to see and to love in Your image, as your holy emissaries in this messy broken world. 

Baruch atah adonai, shomei tefillah - blessed are you, oh God, who hears all prayers.