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3. The New Year for Trees
- Rutgers University Press
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3 The New Year for Trees The Lance and the Twig The first of Shevat is the New Year for trees (so say the School of Shammai; and the School of Hillel say: on the fifteenth). —Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1 Rabbi Shimon said: There is not one herb without its own constellation in heaven, which slaps it and says, “Grow!” —Midrash Genesis Rabbah 10:6 The Lance and the Twig: Expect the Unexpected It was a classic lesbian moment. My partner Lisa and I were sitting in our Brooklyn apartment, playing Scrabble over herbal tea, as our two cats rubbed against our legs. I pushed my chair back from the table and looked her in the eye. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” Five minutes later, we came back to the table, each holding our high school yearbooks. Mine was called The Lance; Lisa’s was The Twig. The Lance, in title at least, followed the martial theme set by my high school football team, the Gladiators, and the dance team, the Romanettes, all of which was as close as we came to the formal study of antiquity. Academics took second place to sports. There was a math club, and I was part of it, but we 19 20 The New Year for Trees called ourselves the Mathletes (“the jocks of mathematics” was the yearbook’s moniker) and tried to look tough in our photo, just a few pages away from the Rifle Club. But the truth was, the cheerleaders were tougher. Most of all, the name The Lance suggested significant height and girth, something at its peak: this was as big as it was going to get. For me and my classmates, growing up on Long Island, high school was meant to be the height of life. It would initiate us into the suburban lifestyle that was portrayed as being the best of all possible worlds. The expectation was that, after high school, we would move into our parents’ lives: we would buy houses in the same neighborhoods and work the same jobs. There was an implicit promise that we would work hard and receive a reward, and the reward would be a replication of the paths our parents had followed. However high our college aspirations may have been, we were always expected to come home. It never occurred to anyone that we would not be able to afford the houses our parents lived in, or even the taxes on those homes. The peak in greatness suggested by The Lance would come true, but more so than anyone expected. The 1980s were a bubble in time. For many of us, the high school years really were the best years of our lives. In the shadow of a broken economy, the classmates who stayed on Long Island have moved farther east to find affordable housing . The hair has gotten smaller, and so have the dreams. Lisa’s yearbook, on the other hand, promised a beginning: great growth was both expected and achieved. She attended a prep school in Toronto for high achievers, where many students were immigrants or the children of immigrants, imbued with a sense of responsibility to go further than the generations before. The school clubs included Enviropeace and Amnesty International, and the centerpiece of the freshman curriculum was a class called the Romance of Antiquity , in preparation for studying Latin. Lisa studied Aristotle [3.237.232.196] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:21 GMT) The Lance and the Twig 21 with a teacher who was genuinely Greek, and she has memories of hearing Beowulf read aloud in Old English in a darkened classroom. Her yearbook was full of references to academic achievement, and under the seniors’ pictures were glory quotes from Nietzsche for the boys, and Indigo Girls for all the dykes-in-waiting. The yearbook’s very title, The Twig, was based on the motto of the school, velut arbor ita ramos—as the tree grows, so grows the branch. This was a reference to the high school’s connection with the University of Toronto, whose motto and crest featured a tree. The tree has borne fruit: the school boasts two Nobel laureates and twenty Rhodes Scholars—one of whom I married. The most striking visual aspect of my yearbook was the hair. This was suburban Long Island in the 1980s. If you look closely at the headshots, you can see that almost all the girls’ faces look...