When the best advice comes out of nowhere
After a most unusual start to their courtship, Joy Friedman reads her vows to Alan Fallick 18 months later at their 1992 wedding. Credit: Darsan Photography
In the summer of 1990, while working in a hospital in Flushing, Queens, a fellow nurse showed me an ad for an event in Commack. I was 29, living alone, and she thought I might enjoy attending the International Jewish Arts Festival.
“Where is Commack?” I asked her. I had heard of it but didn’t know where it was on Long Island. I had no idea I was about to find out it was in “The Twilight Zone.”
I asked my brother and his girlfriend to accompany me to this place “out east.” They agreed, but when the day came that Labor Day weekend, they had a change of plans. So I, too, decided not to go, but at the last minute, I changed my mind.
We had no GPS back then, so I found the Suffolk Y Jewish Community Center on a Hagstrom map. After a 40-minute drive, I entered the festival, welcomed by sounds of Jewish music, delicious smells of hot dogs, and displays of vendors selling handmade jewelry and other crafts.
A genealogy tent caught my eye because I was interested in exploring my roots. This was before the internet and ancestry.com. I was studying maps of Central Europe when a young man approached me, asking if I was interested in genealogy, “like the Mormons.” We casually chatted for a few minutes before I left to go to another exhibit.
After visiting other tents for more than an hour, I had to return home to Bayside to be on call for job emergencies. I left the festival and drove down Commack Road toward the Northern State Parkway.
Before I got onto the parkway, though, I heard a voice in my head say, “If you don’t turn around and go back to the festival, you will miss your opportunity to meet your husband.” I had never experienced anything like this before — or since. Puzzled and intrigued, I decided to return to the festival despite my on-call schedule. I convinced the ticket-taker to let me back in without paying the $14 again even though I hadn’t gotten my hand stamped for reentry.
I walked toward a stage where an Argentinian singer was performing and sat on the grass. A few minutes later, the same young man from the genealogy tent came over and asked if he could sit next to me. (Several weeks later, he told me he’d been looking for me since I left the tent.)
When I looked into his crystal blue eyes, I knew we were destined to marry. He told me he lived in Huntington Station, by way of the Bronx. We talked for a while until I really had to leave, and he escorted me to my car.
On my way home, I stopped at my mom’s house in Roslyn Heights to tell her what happened. Before I could say a word, she looked at me and said, “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary!” I then described the unusual series of events leading to meeting Alan.
He called me a few days later. We started seeing each other, and I felt I had known him for years. We went on many adventures and enjoyed watching early episodes of “Seinfeld.”
Thanks to that voice in my head, this Tuesday, Alan and I will celebrate our 33rd Valentine’s Day together. We extended our own family trees with two beautiful daughters, and I am grateful for the day I ventured from Queens to the “far reaches” of Suffolk County.
Reader Joy Fallick lives in East Northport.
