October! Tobes! I'm late. I feel like Rufus T. Firefly in that early scene in Duck Soup, when, waking in the monogrammed four-poster bed, he hears the distant chorus of "Hail! Hail! Freedonia!" and quickly sheds his nightgown for the tailcoat underneath, slides down the pole to the royal assemblage waiting for him one floor down, and takes his place among the sentries, brandishing his cigar for want of a sword.
Of course, thanks to YouTube, I can just show you here (start at the five-minute mark) , but I kind of enjoyed describing it. Which is a similar appeal of October—Tobes!
We throw our arms about each other in a brotherly hug. There's no other month I so enjoy describing, following around, back in Nature Reporter mode (press ticket in my fedora). But I'm tardy, it's already post-Columbus Day. Sorry, Tobes. Part of the problem was this lingering summah. It put October in an overwarm limbo, like the delayed autumn in Chris Van Allsburg's The Stranger, caused by the temporary amnesia of Jack Frost (never named, but who else would it be?). Even a querulous screech owl in the maple outside my window was whinnying its unease. A seldom-heard sound that immediately puts you inside a kind of medieval litho.
Then today, a return to normalcy. The sky is mapped with altocumulus clouds, the temp back in the orchardly sixties. Summah, I think, is sashaying back to Bermuda, or St. Pete, or wherever she goes. And olly oxen free! the rash is loose in the maples, the amber in the honey-locusts, and the fool moon, due tonite (I saw its dress rehearsal last night) wears a knowing look, a canny, lemme tell you a story look, a third of the way into the month this moon owns. This moon. This noble leotard. (You mean leopard) That's what I said. A leopard in a leotard. We tolerate much from this canny moon, because it's serious, but in a funny way. Is all about costume, candy, voyages, rocket boys (October sky), corn mazes, cider, sweaters, desperados, bumper cars, ostriches, okay now you're just getting silly, corn silk! punkin Dunkin' donuts, cold nights, rugged individualists in plaid wool shirts splitting logs and hearing the split echo. The split echo.
These are the October crickets, carrying the threnody forward like a relay race, through the basking afternoons to the early-turning evenings. That code that may mean something or nothing, or a very meaningful nothing. Time chirps. (Tobes... How should I end this?)
Hail, hail, Freedonia! Land of the brave and free!
[long pause, filled with the sound of cascading silverware]
Groucho: I can't understand what's delaying that coffee pot!
[clunk!]
It's been a l o n g hug from summah, though it's officially autumn now. Or awesome (au-sum). Whatever you want to call it. There's no fence between seasons. Autumn's kids queued up for summer's frozen custard. Summer's kids have the run of autumn's apple orchard. So Fall goes about its business regardless of the heat and humidity. Bringing forth the asters and goldenrod and the tote bags full of Macintosh apples. Coloring and uncoloring leaves, puffing up the milkweed pods. Mixing up Back-to-school and Halloween. Letting crickets B crickets B crickets B crickets B crickets B crickets B crickets.
And the sky says You Are Here.
I saw it the other day as a map. It's other things, too: a circus, an ocean, a ceiling, a port. But from outer space it's the map the planet wears of white swirls and contrails over the undermap of blues and browns and moss-greens. That's the same map we're looking up at, only ours is the local version, bound by local horizons, a few miles across. And wouldn't it be interesting if we could open a map like this, like something out of Harry Potter, showing clouds and air currents in ceaseless motion, revealing and concealing our whereabouts? But it would be unnecessary. Looking up, we know that here and now is beneath the sky directly overhead, and that varying degrees of then and thereness stretch to the horizon, which is that edge of the world people once feared as the border of Never. Now we know it's just the border of Not Yet and Eventually. Which may be why horizon clouds sometimes make me feel a little uneasy, because they're experiencing some time behind or some time ahead, a distant conversation I can't hear. (I really don't know clouds at all.)
This has nothing to do with the Red Sox. Or maybe it does. At some point tonight we will be directly under the outcome of their last regular-season baseball game, and it will bring many of us joy or consternation or an extension of anxiety for one more day. I cannot ride the cloud that already knows the answer. So I will ride the planet and wait for it to be the current current overhead. But I hope to hell they win and the Rays don't.
I think summer's packing her bags (her tea bags! the bags under her eyes!). Seriously. Today felt like a too-effusive embrace, didn't it? Highs well into the 80s. A tad untimely, no? And the rest of the week, down to the sixties, maybe low seventies. That says farewell hug to me. Passionate, but maybe wasted on an autumn guy like meself. On the other hand, I should say thanks for the cherries and nectarines and blueberries in season for weeks on end. And the watermelon and the sweet corn. And the ocean. And the ice. But not the sweat, the mosquitoes, the melting butter, the sticking door, the reluctant gel capsules. The let-me-show-you-my-coin-collection, mouth-breathing, foggy-glasses yewmidity. Shan't miss that, miss Honeysuckle Rose.
I say give me a reason to wear a sweater and these big high-top slippers I just got from Lands End for 9.99. Put me in the catalog with the other dudes in the wool tartan plaid shirts and the wide-wale corduroys. I'll go wandering off in some wet meadow instead of posing with the Irish setter, and come back with my cuffs wet and a dozen cockleburs on my sleeves. And I'll lead a mutiny of the models to throw off their veneers and look and act like real people, but it will be quelled by a silver-haired dad model with the testosterone of a teenager, curse my luck. And no one will ever know about the brief rebellion that took place between pages 78 and 81. Needless to say, I was not asked back to the Lands End catalog.
Just as well. I have already begun buying pumpkin muffins at Dunkin Donuts and half-peck bags of apples at Stop and Shop, and today I lingered over the Halloween cards at Walgreen's. And I am definitely thinking about kettles of broad-winged hawks migrating over the summits of Mt. Watatic and Mt. Wachusett. (Gesundheit.) I say, be seasonable.
A hurrricane named Lee is a hurricane you can almost have a cup of coffee with, but not without your guard up. It's a mysterious name, Lee, not telling all it knows. Simple-seeming: one consonant, one vowel, one syllable. But elusive. Could be male or female. Could be Lee Marvin, Lee Remick, or Lee Harvey Oswald. Could be Robert E. Lee or Pinky Lee. It's another ironic name for a hurricane, following Irene, which means "peace." A lee is "a place sheltered from the wind."
Unlike Irene, we are in the lees of Lee, the dregs, which is making for a wet week. A rainy, gray September is not much different from any other wet, gray, rainy month. It discourages uplift. It has the weary sound of windshield wipers on intermittent just as you realize there's not enough drizzle to cover its complaining sigh. Today's continuation of yesterday's rain began with the unwelcome but fitting sight of a few hundred little maggots making their blind way over and up and down the garbage container, which I'd put out for the trash collectors the night before--larvae-free, as far as I knew. I hosed it down, grimly and, to passing cars, redundantly, except the hose was way more effective as a vermicide than the drizzle.
The Sandpiper
On Thursday the last wet heavy downpour, amid which I drive my son to school, joining a long line of cars queued up in the AHS turnaround, off-loading kids to be educated by strangers on another first day of school -- or the year.
Back home, I finish Zeitoun while the rain thuds down like an old vendetta. Then just a grudge. Then it lets up, which is too bad because now it's merely wet outside and the sky is white and tight as a short-sheeted bed with the annoying schuss of cars and trucks going to unknown places.
Eventually I go outside to put a Netflix in the mailbox (the red envelope now as common and telling as the YOU-GOT-A-TICKET! orange of a traffic citation), and mosey down to Spy Pond, where I see piles of clouds massed and milling like a demobbed army waiting for a new war. This one, Lee, is over.
The Canada geese are avidly grazing, yanking up grass in their black bills like it's going out of style. I frown on this despoiling of the lawn, but I'm not willing to make like a dog and yap them into the water. Then I see with pleasure another bird on the periphery of the herd. It's a spotted sandpiper. I've seen it here before, again in company with the geese. It picks its way along the shore, flies briefly to a rock, where it teeters, as they do, then flies back and resumes its foraging. It's not tiny, maybe seven inches long, but among the grazing geese it's like a mouse, a mascot, one of those symbiotic little opportunists that hang around big animals in a fable-like way. The geese don't seem to mind, but it's not exactly underfoot either.
The moral may be: Birds of a different feather flock together in the lee of the weather.
A new month. And in the case of September, you need to go out (on a daily basis) and take auspices. Which means, in a sense, taking Au (gold) and spices. It's an amazing progress, dismaying to summer folk, perhaps, but summer on the way out is as auspicious as summer was on the way in, way back in June. Gilded now, mature, experienced, narrated by the threnody (time for that word again) of crickets. The early lapping-in of evening on the tideline of the afternoon. September plays a flute. The tune it plays? Well, to find out you need to go out and take gold and spices.
We made out all right. A lot of people didn't. Forty-six people (so far) died in the storm. The rest of us survived, and some probably disdained it afterwards as not much of a hurricane. A considerable number suffered the effects of flooding, power failure, fallen trees and large branches. We who didn't suffer much more than a boring Sunday indoors brandished what we could as proofs: "There was a tree that fell at the Broadway end of Allen Street. I didn't see it. The DPW guys hauled it away pretty soon afterward." You move on because that's what we're wired to do. If you survived and were not impeded, you go shopping, watch a baseball game, write a blog about all of the above. Take your survivor's guilt with a bottle of Izze and knock on wood.
*
I was going to write about a good day, which I stumbled upon briefly last week, before the storm. It was one of these days that merge summer with fall. The tiredness in the leaves suddenly reinterpreted with a surmising breeze.
A good day is a kind of persistent daily myth. We're bidden to have it by waitresses and cashiers and bank tellers as if we're each embarking on our own private folktale and need this verbal amulet (Y'all have a good day) against trolls, ogres, and jabberwocks. It's occasionally celebrated in song, like Paul McCartney's edenic mantra, "Good Day, Sunshine" or earlier, that old pop standard, "It's a Good Day," which Peggy Lee wrote (who knew?), the one where she, or Perry Como, encourages the sun to rise and shine. We seldom have a good day like that, but it's frequently possible to find pieces of a good day in your path, which are good to pick up and collect, like beach glass.
My good day began with a good decision: to conquer my laziness and pump up the tires of my bike to the 35psi rock-hardness that a good bike deserves. Feeling uncharacteristically competent, well-situated, and fortunate that I didn't have a flat tire--far from it!--I continued on to the bike path that runs along Spy Pond and invites riders of sufficient mettle to go as far as Bedford to the west or Somerville the other way. I took the westward turn and there by the path was this guy I'd seen before: an itinerant bike mechanic who had a mobile bench set up and one of those stanchions for hoisting a bike like a patient in a chair. I pedalled on by, for what need had I? But then I thought, and slowed, and stopped, and turned around, and went back. For I did have a need. My bike wouldn't change gears to the big sprocket, the one where you work the hardest, thus confining me to pedalling that was too rapid and too loose for a velocipedant such as myself. Having already done my bike some good, I was well-poised to do it better. The bike mechanic, Tim by name, labored over my Univega for a good twenty minutes. I tried it out. Success! Ten bucks and a two buck tip. On I went. Through Arlington Center, past the Uncle Sam statue (the real guy, not the symbolic guy), and all the other landmarks: the old Brigham's ice cream factory, the high school, the Dept. of Public Works. Pulling in at The Bike Stop, secure in the knowledge that my bike was in good repair, needing only a cold drink.
Realizing I was in the midst of a good day (vaguely aware that it had something to do with bicycles) I sat down on one of the plastic chairs under the trees with my can of pomegranate Polar Seltzer. I extracted a pad from my backpack. "A good day," I wrote, as if I were an expert, "should have the following ingredients:
1. An expenditure of worthwhile effort (e.g. work, play, art, repair, volunteering, writing, exercise)
2. A mind-engaging period of input (reading, music, conversation)
3. A pleasant surprise or serendipity, either external or internal (i.e., a good idea)"
I needed a mnemonic. Effort, input, surprise. E – I – Oh.
Did my day qualify? I put air in the tires, I filled six flashlights with batteries in advance of Irene, I wrote this; I half-listened to the radio while doing a reasonably hard crossword puzzle; and a pleasant surprise: the bike repair dude.
A final observation: "What goes well with Polar Seltzer? Oral pretzels."
In June we got tornadoes -- or at least they did in central Mass., an hour or two from here. We never get tornadoes.
On Tuesday, we got an earthquake -- or anyway the house rocked gently back and forth like a giant cradle. We never get earthquakes.
And right now, Hurricane Irene is rolling slowly up the Eastern seaboard, due to arrive on Sunday. Supposedly she will be more irenic (peaceful) than she was in the Caribbean. But not so irenic as to be ironic. Anyway, we almost never get hurricanes.
I'm not suggesting that we all bone up on our Armageddon Preparedness drills (basically yelling "Armageddon outa here!" and running like hell). But it does seem like the end-of-the-worlders could have had more recruits if they'd waited a few months.
As earthquakes go, it was a carnival ride for toddlers. I was at the dining room table when the house was possessed by the gentlest swaying, forward and back, accompanied by a rockinghorse creaking. Except it was dumbfounding. The equivalent of a giant ? over the head of a cartoon character. At first it was a sensation looking for a name. Pretty soon the brain came up with the name--more of a tentative suggestion. It couldn't really be an earthquake but of course it had to be an earthquake. The rocking continued. (These were those fat, slow seconds reserved for unusual events.) So, what to do about it? 1. Ride it out. It was so gentle. Almost fun. 2. Mosey outside. Would it soon become less gentle and not at all fun? 3. Something about standing in a door frame. A few more fat seconds later, the rocking ceased, the creaks subsided. The gods had finished their bouncy-bouncy. Relief and disappointment high-fived each other like a pair of tectonic plates.
Belatedly, words spilled out. "Holy shit!" From Matt's room, an echo: "Holy shit!" He came out, looking agog and delighted. I was happy for him. A grandpa moment at age sixteen.
I looked at my watch. Seven minutes to two. It seemed important to fix the moment. Next important thing was to validate the event by finding it in the media. But it was too fresh. It was still in the tender "what the fuck was that??" phase, a story not yet told. Nothing on the Internet, the radio, not even a businesslike bulletin bursting through the bubble agony of the soaps.
The soft tissue was already hardening into history, though. Brains were busy measuring it, making sense of it, canvassing reactions to it. My father-in-law came upstairs, bemused and amused. 5.8, epicenter near Washington, D.C., he reported.
The innocent, freefalling, naked sensation--the ? moment--was a gently rocking memory to be freely distributed as "DId you feel the earthquake?" trading cards. Those who hadn't, somehow had.
"Are you having a hurricane party?" I heard someone ask someone else today. Meaning Irene. And there will be a run on milk and water and chips and salsa and other essentials. Some people in Winthrop will board up their windows because you can't be too careful, as the too-careful say. Mainly, the expectation, at least two days before, is a kind of fun hurricane, like the fun earthquake.
We can feel guilty or grateful that our disasters don't measure up to the maximum hell that other places get. No famines, no floods, no fires. What we have is heck. No shame in that.
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