Autumn in New York

It’s supposed to be autumn in New York, but signs of it, if evident, are few. Days drift from sultry to balmy to lamely breezy at best, rendering evenings occasionally cool only by comparison. As seasons go, it’s no season at all. It’s too early for nature’s best show: that shocking change of indescribable colors that slips into town for a limited engagement, but too-hastily doffs its fiery bonnet and unceremoniously skips out with let’s-blow-this-town indifference.

Soon, it will be too cold for the lone street-corner sax player—whose thin, labored musical strains I hear every day well before I emerge through the arch of my building— to occupy the wee circle of prime sidewalk real estate he lays squatter’s rights to, to play, tirelessly, (tiresomely for me), the only song he apparently knows, “As Time Goes By.”

A block south of me, a man lives on the street with his dog, his cell phone, and his journals, which he has been observed to pour through, under one of those open-air phone booths mounted on a post. The wife of one well-known New Yorker routinely stops with her dog, crouches down and lingers to chat at length with him. He doesn’t lack guests to his blanketed oasis—yesterday, he was host to a young woman who stroked his disinterested dog as the two parties softly discussed... what? Assured that New Yorkers are not as indifferent as they are perceived to be, not by a long shot, I’m hoping to catch sight of whom among them will offer the man and his dog, inseparable, shelter for the winter. It has to be the best reality show going.

Nothing against man and dog, but truer to character, my heart goes out to the lonely man with a horn. In my mind, I offer him solace. But only on condition of his learning to play a new song. And, if it’s “Autumn in New York,” I readily foot the bills for every lesson for as long as it takes.

Fall is a foolish name to call a season so glorious, and, as the song says, “so inviting.” It’s autumn—in New York or anywhere else. Wikipedia says the word comes from the Old French autompne, automne in modern French, but doesn’t state what it meant or came to mean in old or new French. That may explain why autumn gained disproportionate popularity as fall. Wikipedia also tells us, “Since 1997, Autumn has been one of the top 100 names for girls in the United States.” But I’ve never met a girl named Autumn. Or Fall. So much for Wikipedia this season.

Autumns in New York may no longer spell “the thrill of first-nighting.” Not when substantially discounted preview tickets are available. But reliably, on every Halloween every autumn, every brownstone on West 69th Street in the two-block stretch between Central Park West and Broadway becomes a story-book haunted house full of thrills and treats for children of all ages. And for the 84th Thanksgiving morning, Central Park West and 7th Avenue (in lieu of Broadway) will become the Main Streets of Anytown for the locals, who gather hours earlier to view and to cheer on the footsloggers and float-squatters of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Autumn is the season for The New York Film Festival and The New York City Ballet; for this season, the overdue arrival of the longed-for Upper West Side Trader Joe’s and, painfully, the imminent departure of the community-prized Lincoln Square Barnes and Noble; the Yankees’ post-season and Christopher Columbus’ Day; plus so much more that is distinctly New York. The season and occasion for a love song to New York that sings to all. All the more poignant, then, to know that “Autumn in New York” was the inspiration of a Russian-born composer, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, who became, in New York, the great American songwriter, Vernon Duke.

Autumn in New York,
It's good to live it again.

Listen to what Ella and Satch do with it.

I Believe

With my holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, less than a day away, and my happiest season of the year, autumn in New York, only a week away, it’s that introspective time of year for me when I start asking myself again what I believe.

With all respect to God, Torah and the Ten Commandments, I have discovered that what I most believe in is Respect For All. That doesn’t necessarily mean I personally respect all people, it means I show respect for all.

High up on my two tablets is “Character is destiny.” Because I consider plagiarism a sin (against man) I’ll be quick to tell you that “Character is destiny” is not my line,* it’s Heraclitus’s, a 6th century Greek philosopher. I resolutely hold that “Character is destiny”—for good or ill. Abraham Lincoln’s life exemplified it. Gandhi’s embodied it. We learn it as children, but improvidently put it aside with “childish things.”** Pinocchio personifies the ancient adage, conversely and dramatically, as his nose grows longer with every lie he tells.

Heraclitus, as quotable as the prophets, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, may also have said, “Know thyself.” Knowing a good aphorism when he saw one, Socrates prescribed it. The Oracle of Delphi billboarded it. I wish it on others like a blessing or a curse. We know he didn’t know much, but if George W. Bush had only known himself he might have applied himself. He would have made a fine baseball commissioner. If a sober Mel Gibson would come face to face with himself, it’s likely as not he’d either cut out his tongue or his heart.

Some time ago, I was surprised to discover in retrospect that every screenplay I’d written during my misspent Hollywood tenure had a theme in common: “power corrupts” (credit to Lord Acton). How did I fail to recognize in time that every person in a powerful position in Hollywood necessary to deal with was corrupted by power? If “character is destiny,” irrefutably, I know where every executive and producer in Hollywood is bound in the afterlife.

In the absence of the aggregate—respect for all, “character is destiny,” “know thyself” and “power corrupts”—what we get is unavoidably whom we get, and that is the antithesis of what I believe, the exemplarily bereft George W. I have always thought of people as rudimentary empty vessels you can fill with good or evil. The danger resides in their sheer emptiness: who pours what into the void, and to what purpose. W’s trouble auto-started at the top—his empty head filled his shallow heart with comfy platitudes. That left far too much room in his heart for the snake in his garden, Dick Cheney, to ply it with poison.

Is that all I believe? Not in the least. I believe in helping others when I can. I believe in always trying to see the other side. I believe in recognizing what’s more important to someone than it is to me. A legacy from my father, I believe in giving the other guy just a little more to make sure he feels he has half. I believe, with all my heart, in the words of Thomas Campbell, “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

Finally this day, my cardinal “commandment” is an imploration to myself and one and all always to think. Think before you act, think before you speak. Before you do anything, pause… to think. So many of the world’s problems, so many of our personal ones, could be averted by just a little prior thought.

Time to atone.

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Footnotes:
*Nor is it John McCain’s, who used it for a title, but not only didn’t put it in quotes, but also gave credit for chapter-by-chapter aspects of it to everyone from Joan of Arc to Wilma Rudolph, from Gandhi to Mark Twain, from Darwin to Mother Teresa—but never, it appears, to Heraclitus, the man who said it. How’s that for character?

**Paul of Tarsus.