Summer and the Fall.

So many things I would have done
But clouds got in the way

--Joni Mitchell (duh)

I don't typically celebrate my birthday. Sometimes I've even neglected it--well, as much as possible when married to a woman who thinks birthdays are absolutely to be observed, and festively.  A woman who, unlike her husband, doesn't find it somehow distasteful to see a grown adult-type person demanding as much as an entire week of adulation, over an arbitrary event that occurred many years ago, one which they had almost nothing to do with other than showing up (and what a guest--arriving naked, screaming, and empty-handed).

I've always agreed with Adam Carolla (on this topic, anyway) that an "achievement day" might be better employed, commemoration of a day you did something you're proud of. Now that I think of it, however, that seems kind of Objectivist, not to mention that the day I often thought of for myself (when, as a not-very-independent 21-year-old, I moved upstate, enrolled in school, and found an apartment the same day--in a damn-near-blizzard, no less) came during the most depressed, aimless period of my life, ultimately leading to nothing productive, and nothing resembling an accomplishment. (I'll leave that sobby story to another post, perhaps, and hopefully make it less run-onny.)

This year--this week in fact--I decided to embrace my birthday. Oh, I didn't actually mention it to anyone, but I think I accepted and acknowledged well-wishes more graciously, gratefully, and sincerely. I was prepared my favorite dinner (Thanksgiving), baked my favorite dessert (Boston cream pie cake), and gifted the thing I was really hoping for: a lightly-used VCR. I'm not even kidding. Clearly, I'm not a man who wants for much. And yes, I took a whole week--at my wife's insistence, only somewhat resisted--but now it's back to washing dishes and so forth.

I try to remind myself that, upon birth, I hit the Cosmic Lottery: born a white male (I mean, right there!) in the latter half of the 20th Century, to a middle-class family on the East Coast of the United States. Of course, like most lottery winners, I have since almost completely squandered my fortune, but that element of luck is undeniable.

"Age is just a number!" I hear chirped often, to which I cheerfully reply "Yes! A number that may accurately reflect the amount of time one has left in their life! But not really, because its end may come much sooner, through accidental or otherwise unnatural means!" So, yeah, may as well enjoy the marking of another year, undeserved, improbable. I have only so many of these natal anniversaries left, after all--which was always true, and a fact always worth remembering.



Whenever I think of dying, for some reason I think of when I'd like to die, what time of year. My birthday hits right as my least-favorite half of the year begins, just days beyond the vernal equinox, which has probably tainted my enthusiasm. (Although, through much of spring, I can sometimes delude myself momentarily and regard the still-bare trees and the cold, damp overcast as signs of my beloved autumn.) I used to love summer, particularly its schoollessness, until that advantage no longer applied.

These thoughts led to the rest of this post, which I wrote at the very end of fall, 2021.



SUMMER AND THE FALL

The first time I saw the ocean, it was summer, and I didn’t know what it was. I thought maybe it was another country, possibly an inhospitable one, because it fought me as I tried to enter.
Maybe it was trying to save me.
What did it know?

I visited the ocean many times over childhood years, but never ventured far past its border; it always threw me back to where I came. I didn't take it personally. I laughed, unless the wind had been knocked out of me, and then I might sulk, and yet the best summer was the one with the most violent waves.
The visits happened under the sun, always, sometimes just until the brink of becoming late.

Older, I’d visit well after late, and look into that country of dark, look until I couldn’t see. Without seeing, there was left only an agreeable language I was never really destined to speak.

After summer, the fall. The colors of the leaves, overhead and under foot, those are the crayons I’d use most at that time of year, diminishing, peeled, and spent by winter.

The chill encroached, the afternoon evening golded the light differently, until shadows weren’t the same. They threw, lain long across the ground, black scarves my raw fingers wouldn’t stop knitting, as lateness drew nearer.

If I die at the end of summer—not this summer, especially, but any summer—I will be pissed. (Well, maybe especially this one, now that I think of it.) I hate the thought of missing fall. Thinking of all the future autumns I’ll miss upsets me. Then I think of the many I have already missed, the ones before I was born here.

I guess I should, and can, be happy with the falls I’ve had, and summers I’ve had. My visits to dark, violent, unfathomable countries, my knitted shadows long thrown.