In which I meet myself a year later, setting out

It was a year ago today that I started this almanac. Consider this a candle in a cupcake. Or in a pumpkin.

Interesting to create your own year of something. It turns out that the journey is the destination, but you need the circularity, too. If you close the circle, however briefly, you've got something. It's the wisdom of tree rings.

(Try telling this to French prisoners marching around and around in a dank cell. The wisdom of tree rings, mes amis!)

Anyway, as I pass by the depot of October 13, I see myself here last year, out of a job, nervously addressing the world as every blogger must the first time, presuming that I have something worth saying (let alone reading) in that first one, about how October had come into its own, and how my identity has long been bound up in this birth month of mine whose defining holiday carries my first name, and whose own name carries my last. Hal-loween Oct-Ober, get it? (The pumpkin on the front porch nods. Got it.)

Off you go, then, old Hatch.

As for my present-day October 13, I spent a good hour of it at the edge of Spy Pond, on a ledge of rock, admiring the clarity of light and sound. Speaking voices carried from the far shore as if a few yards away. Colors had an almost lacquered brilliance. "Extraordinary light," I wrote. Sometimes you have to take the time to write extraordinary.

The Arlington High Spy Ponders were visiting their namesake, as they do every autumn, gliding around in long sculls. "Follow me and Annabelle," instructed the coxswain. Then: "Annabelle, what are you doing?" Punctuation of a barking dog.

A big fish jumped. The sun, the one in the water, jumped around too, in nervous flashes. Elsewhere in the pond it shimmered in an inverted ziggurat.

So goes a year. Goodbye to something, I wrote in the pad. Hello to something else.

Travelers

10/10/10. Cool.

Back from a trip to the Berkshires in Connecticut and western Mass., a place of broad hills be-sweatered in colors, golds and greens, coppers, russets, the odd little burst of red standing out, and as the sun sinks, pools of shadow in the hollows. There is a collaboration between the sun and the leaf. For two seasons it was for the benefit of green: a broad, tree-by-tree manufacture. And then it goes the other way. New work order: autumn. The ebb of green, revealing yellow undercoat. The rash of red. the tag of brown. So the trees get busy, working independently, working as a mountain, fractal coloration in which each leaf cell is tree and each tree is a cell.

Driving along the Mass. Pike past a wall of reds and coppers and it's like passing a blush. The brief feeling that you're witnessing an emotion, sex, an oh-my moment that reminds me of a donkey I saw years ago in a farmyard in Oregon, just a brief glimpse from a car I'd hitched a ride with, but it was posed on a ridge like a stallion feeling its oats.

I remember that trip. Discovering the west with a poncho tent and a Sterno stove. Walking the Grand Canyon at night. Staying at the Rainbow Tribe commune in Drain, Oregon. Hopping a flatcar in Bakersfield, Cal. I was more of a traveler in those days.

I kept seeing travelers in the Berkshires. On a walk I happened to look up just as three cottony fluffs from a milkweed took flight, all joined together like a trio of aeronauts, sailing away from the old home field of driftwood-gray pods, riding the air current until it let them off in the nearby marsh, maybe a hundred yards away. But for a minute it was a journey with no end, could have carried them all the way to the Andes.

And later, a rare sound and sight that used to be more common: the windborne gabble of a high, ragged formation of geese, high enough to take their time crossing the sky, apparently real migrators, traveling miles, not just "migrating" from one local pond to another.

And of course, the short, momentous journey of a leaf detaching from its axil and casting its lot with the beckoning wind. Come on, dude! Time to go!

Meanwhile, up on the broad hills, sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care and the sun makes love to the leaf.

All day, and all of the night.

Octobo

Good news! Turns out any autumn day, even a gem, yields tons of examples of wabi-sabi. Rusted leaves. Withered flowers. Mulchy smell. Mind you, a day like today—beautiful, mild, in the 70s—shows these so-called imperfections off to their best advantage, which is kind of a paradox.

Anyway...

I took a bike ride out to Arlington Great Meadows, John Lennon songs coming from the radio in my pocket. The fat part of the afternoon, around 3:00. Sat down on a little hill edge, looking out to the far side of the meadow, a mixed grove of trees out there, colors just settling in. On my side, a stand of sumac also yielding to red, but not in a hurry.

Got to thinking about the approaching Columbus Day weekend and about my high school geometry teacher, Miss Anne Kelly, urging us all to be like Columbus (it was October 12) and discover...whatever it was, maybe proving that parallelograms have parallel sides...but tying it to Columbus discovering the New World.

There's that relativity question again. One person's new is another person's old. But somehow that distinction has stuck. Somehow the western hemisphere is newer, with its monkeys with prehnsile tails and its hummingbirds and jaguars and macaws, all newer than old Asia, old Africa, and old, old, Europe. Only a few mystics had a planetary view. The explorers were venturing out into the back of beyond, the land of dreams, if not spice.

Does this have anything to do with October? Yeah, sort of. It's the roundest month, maybe the Earth-iest. In fact, maybe we should make it even rounder and call it Octobo. And instead of Columbus Day, maybe we should have another kind of Earth Day, six months after the one in April. This one wouldn't be about the Nature of the planet; it would be a People of the Earth Day. And to celebrate, we'd skype each other or email each other and get to know about each other: schoolkids in Australia talking to a village in Lapland; Manchuria contacting Israel. The lost languages, the hidden cultures: bring them out. It would be exciting, like picking up Pitcairn Island on your shortwave radio.

Meanwhile:

Señor Octobo,

the carefree hobo,

played on his oboe

para todo el globo.

It wasn't the theme

from Rio Lobo

but rather, a dream

of a wild bonobo

in the jungle steam

that Señor Octobo,

the worldly hobo

from Constantinobo

played on his oboe.

Or so it seemed.

Wabi-sabi October

What gives? Three days of grim low overcast, prickly mist, and out-and-out, bus window-befogging, umbrella-hating rain.

Some months we step into with a picture of what it should be like, and October is definitely one of those. We expect calendar page fall foliage, blue sky, sun and shadow making the pumpkins oranger and the chrysanthemums more anthem and less "um...." So whose idea was this? Some colorblind crow's?

Of course, it's all going to change tonight. The rain moves out to sea, as it always does. Tomorrow the October queen will be back on the hay wagon, tossing candy corn to the crowd. And we will have missed another chance at understanding wabi-sabi.

There are plenty of explanations out there. Here's a compelling one from the website http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm:

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.

Okay, I'm not sure if a weathered, grizzled day in October qualifies as an opportunity to study and admire the imperfect—in the same way a wabi-sabi aesthete would admire a misshapen teacup or a rusted wheelbarrow.

Nor am I sure if I, the constant editor, plucking and pruning these words within an inch of their life, am qualified to extol wabi-sabi, just because I like the way it sounds and because I tend to befriend the worn-out, well-used thing, the stubbornly untamed vacant lot, the 1943 comic book, my piles of old, unreadable notebooks.

All I know is that there must be something worth finding in a bummer of an October day, not cold enough to be thoroughly miserable like an equivalent day in November would be. Even if it's just a reminder that there must be something worth finding in a bummer of an October day...etc. Even if it's just a gray, wet-bark, wabi-sabi daydream.

Early Days

So, where are we? Personally, I like the Giants over the Braves, but can they get past the Phillies or the Reds? Time will tell. Right now, as the Brits say, it's still early days.

Early October is a kind of deep September. At first it seems like there's nothing shaking but the leaves on the trees. But listen up, Harrison, sez the old north wind. There's signifying in that susurrus. The telltale of change! (At which point a jeering blue jay significantly leaves the tree.)

Early October is one pumpkin on a doorstep, no face. It's a layer of leaves on the ground that you didn't see fall. It's the set-up of the story: the three brothers setting out on the journey, but before they meet the mysterious little man at the crossroads.

Early October is a day of so-what overcast when you expected more scenes out of Yankee Magazine. It's the cider donut in the brown paper bag, the flannel shirt with a sleeve around a coffee cup, and the corduroy pants with the cuff up on the radiator.

There's an art to waiting, and it's all in the details of early October.

Two bits

Sometimes you can almost hear the gears change. Yesterday, Oct 1: humid, brooding, summer in a shoe. Then, after threatening morning glower, the rain came and meant it, sweeping away the night's Red Sox-Yankees game in a GIT-outa-here downpour. Sending us to our beds with a book and a backdrop.

And today, October 2: behold, a clear, chilly morning! A new season befitting what we expect fall to be in these parts. Crisp. Sharp-edged. Changeworthy.

Time for a haircut.

My long-time barber, Teddy, I may have once mentioned, retired last year. Luckily, there was his former competitor Vincent a few blocks up the street—Teddy's match in skill and more than a hair faster, if not as quirky. But then Vincent's back gave out, forcing his retirement, too. After several weeks, my shaggy patience was rewarded when Vincent's son-in-law, Anthony, also a barber, stepped into the breach, dividing his days between his shop and Vincent's, saving me from Supercuts.

The conversation meandered and clipped through Red Sox and Patriots...how we're each doing (hanging in)...how Vincent's doing (mobility not so good, spirits luckily not so bad)...and eventually to barbering. I forget how we got there, something about trends, but I happened to reflect, half-jokingly, on how the Beatles must have impacted barbers. "A lot of shops closed," he said darkly. Then he recalled barbers who took it upon themselves to give their long-haired customers Army cuts, as punishment for their excess. Losing a customer in the process. He went on to recount how hairdressing grew with the barbers' slowness to adapt to newer styles. "They became like technical experts," he said, in contrast to the barbers who didn't even know how to use a hair dryer. Back in the old days, it was the barber who decided on the cut, often giving the same one to every customer. Now it was ten different cuts for ten different heads of hair...

More change in the air.

I took my new haircut down to the Mystic River, not far from the Nine Steps, with a good book (The Whistling Season) and a tree to sail it by. Around the newly elongated shadows of four o'clock, I stood up and went to check on the bees. None on the goldenrod. They'd moved on to the asters, those little frostflowers. But at least bees there were still.

Happy birthday, Groucho Marx, Bud Abbott, John Romano, Annie Liebovitz, and other Oct. 2 sons and daughters with a sense of the wry.

My bro', Oct.

He's the best-known Ober, by far, but he's a modest chap, doesn't let it go to his head (already pumpkin-sized), not even the joke that among the months he's a 10. Just does his benevolent thing. Good with colors: stays inside the lines, mostly. Likes a good mystery. Genial disguiser (fond of scarecrows), heavy lifter, taking summer on his shoulders and carrying it to the foothills of winter. Friend of September and November, who don't so much get along with each other. Knock-kneed, bandy-legged, hobo impresario, especially outdoor ensembles of homemade instruments playing jazz and old blues. We're proud to have him in the family.

I started this blog a year ago, on the 13th, so I missed the beginning of the month. In fact, it was because of an event at beginning of the month that I had the time to start the blog. It was on 10/1 last year that I got laid off (odd phrase—like a mistranslated expletive) from the company I'd worked at for a good chunk of my life. So the anniversary hangs over the day like a kind of comet. Hello up there.

We remember other historic events (in 1869 today, Austria issued the first postcards; in 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened), so why not personal ones? The summons to the Spaulding Room, knowing I was about to be expelled from school because the textbooks were too expensive. The following week of slow leavetaking, wearing the new normal with exhilaration and numbness. And gradually, over the months, with the help of this blog and time cauterizing, cooling, carrying on, the event becomes what it is a year later: my private comet, crossing my orbit like all anniversaries do.

So, Oct. Walk with you to Halloween?