I was riding my bike on the Norwottuck Rail Trail recently, coming into Northampton, and I saw an acquaintance of mine walking toward me. He was with a couple of guys I didn’t recognize, and he was talking on his cell phone.
I hadn’t run into him in what seemed like a decade, but he looked pretty much the same as when I’d last seen him. Unlike me, he hadn’t aged at all. He didn’t seem to see me, so I was asking myself whether to try to catch his eye by giving him a wave.
Then I remembered. The reason I hadn’t seen Tommy for so long was that he’d died about a decade ago. There was no way on earth it was him. Or, more apropos, there was no way it was him on earth. Someone with similar looks, a doppelgänger even, but not him. He was gone, fallen from the tree.
When I think about that image of a person’s leaving the earth as being like a leaf falling from a tree, I think of the Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan song “The Last Leaf on the Tree”. The song begins “I’m the last leaf on the tree/The autumn took the rest”.
I witnessed that song being performed with aching poignancy by Joan Baez at the John M. Greene Hall in Northampton a few years ago. It wasn’t hard to see that much of the audience, who looked to be in the “autumn of their lives,” was there to share in a collective reverence for their youth. If you are too young to identify with Joan Baez as being part of the musical score of your youth, picture yourself thirty, forty, even fifty years from now, with your peers, at a concert of one of your favorite musicians.
This column is appearing in early October, when the leaves on the deciduous trees in these parts are acting out their showy descent to the ground. I think it is fair to say that most people consider our autumn colors to be right up there with the best nature has to offer for our viewing pleasure. Some people are so gaga over our foliage they pursue its vaunted “peak” like storm chasers.
I hope I don’t sound too “glass half-emptyish” when I say I can get wistful, even melancholy, this time of year. I can’t help thinking that the leaves, as picturesque as they can get, are actually signaling the end of their time on the tree. As the poet Gwendolyn Brooks put it, “It is summer- gone that I see, it is summer-gone.”
Sometimes I tend to complicate things beyond what is useful, so I seek a simpler understanding. In the case of leaves falling from the trees, I found my way to an explanation provided on the website of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which, incidentally, tells us that it is the largest children’s museum in the world.
Here is some of what the Children’s Museum has to say about autumn leaves: “But the word ‘fall’ is misleading. It implies that the trees are passive this time of year, when, in fact, they are actively ‘pushing’ the leaves off their branches … Leaves fall – or are pushed – off the tree so that the tree can survive the winter and grow new leaves in the spring.”
So, like the tee-shirts say about Humpty Dumpty, leaves do not fall, they are pushed. I find that, much like leaves, most of us in the autumn of our lives are not volunteers to leave the tree of life, we are drafted. Although, like every generation before us, we present to the world, and to ourselves, a certain calmness about being pushed off the tree (“stiff upper lip” and all that), this seeming composure can be a mile wide and an inch deep. Right below the surface is a “three o’clock in the morning alone” place where we are stunned that our time has come and there is nothing we can do about it, a place where the imminence and inexorability of it all seeps into us like a November rain.
Dylan Thomas famously wrote the lines “Do not go gentle into that good night, /Old age should burn and rave at close of day; /Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I don’t know that this column answers that poet’s clarion call to burn and rage. Perhaps it is more like flicker and fume. What I do know is that I sought to give voice to the opaque silence of three o’clock in the morning.
I also know that having taken a dive into the half-emptiness of the glass, it is time for me to embrace the fullness of the October days that are given to me. It is time for me to open myself up to being exhilarated by the warmth and light remaining in the season, and to being lifted heavenward by the transcendent colors of this moment.