AUGUST'S LAST GASP

 

September first isn’t just a plain ol’ first.

It’s the (unofficial) beginning of fall.

It’s the whisper of the beginning of a new Jewish year.

And in Israel where I grew up, it is the absolute first day of a new school year.

That made August thirty-first a singularly wistful day.

Invariably we had to do something special on this last day of summer. Spending the day kicking sand on the beach, going for an ice-cream sundae the size of a mountain, or frantically beginning that art project we meant to do in summer but never did, only to leave it half-done once again.

It was as if we were parting with something we’d never experience again.

When you could count your years on earth on both hands, the prospect of next summer was as distant as the moon. You could see it, but experienced it as something unreachable.

This added melancholy and longing only August the thirty-first possessed. The closest thing to a heartbreak without a defined cause.

 

So Goodbye August. We never had a choice but to part, so we might as well pretend we do, and welcome September.

©By Shelagh Duffett

Feeling Wistful

Many years ago, I had a friend who was important to me and I think I was to her.

Changes in her life made her drift away. I didn’t look for her. But one day she walked into my life again, and her presence was a blessing. She helped usher a different chapter in both our lives with grace and the kind of warmth possible in old friendships.

Then she vanished, only to reappear at an important junction, again. It was as if the great weaver was threading our strings and resuming embroidering at just the right time.

A few more years, and we lost touch. I thought of her, and trusted we’ll meet again, as the British song goes, “some sunny day.” 🙏

It was actually a foggy afternoon, when I got the urge to look her up. I did what people do who have no acquaintances in common: I googled. Yay! She had Facebook account, and yup, she had posted recently, including a photo of the two of us from way back. I commented on the photo with glee, and also sent a friend request. That’s the protocol of Facebook: you "friend" people who are already your personal friends, you accept friendship from people who will never be more than Facebook friends, and you ask for friendship from people who once were good friends.

I didn’t get a response. I figured that was that, or maybe not.

A few months ago, out of the blue, I got a keen urge to look her up again. I went straight to Facebook. The last post on her timeline was two years old. On one of her posts, another of her friends wrote that she will be missed forever now that she is gone.

The date of her earthly departure was a month before my old friend request. She was much too young to have made this transition. 😢

I’ll never know the last chapters of her life. But I felt wistful and also marveled at the intensity of the connection I experienced right then. To write the whole story of our intermittent connection and how much it meant would be writing a full-length novel, not a short blog post. To try to make sense of it, as one does when constructing a novel, would take more inventive powers and imagination than I have access to for now.

 But nothing stops my feeling that a story is looking for a proper tying of loose ends, the way editors ask us to do.