The Edge of September (tf)
We’re on the edge of September. The kids are back in school. College football starts this weekend and the NFL the week after that. Baseball gets more and more interesting by the day. The heat has dissipated for the most part. The snap of fall is not in the air yet, but I can look to the hills and know it’s coming. The leaves will soon explode and we’ll be able to walk and drive in the midst of a beautiful canvas. There is nothing and nowhere prettier than NEPA in the fall. It’s been a long, hot summer and I for one am ready for some relief.
Summer is lazy. Fall is when everything starts moving again. Alarm clocks are set. Lunches are made and packed the night before. School buses criss-cross busy streets. Kids sleep-walk to their corner, staggering under filled backpacks and dreading the test they sorta studied for but not really. After school activities are charted. Who will pick up who when to take them where? It seems logistically impossible but it always seems to just about work out. A little bit of frenzy can be a good thing. It focuses the mind that has been dulled by July and August lethargy.
Stores have Halloween stuff out. Halloween! It’s only 2 months away. And we all know what comes after that. The year is 2/3 over. I can still taste the Chicken Marsala from New Year’s Eve. Where did the time go? My youngest called me “dude” the other day. Feels like weeks ago I was wiping her bum and now she’s calling me “dude”. She’s also excellent with money (says she’s saving all her accumulated b-day and Xmas cash for a car), and is always offering me some of hers when I loudly and frequently complain about being broke. It’s tempting but….
My hair has gone gray. There’s no sense fighting it. Oh it’s still sorta dark but the gray is spreading with alacrity and it won’t be long before I look like Sparky Anderson. I’m told gray hair on a guy looks “distinguished” but that’s just what women say when they’re watching a Richard Gere movie. Gray looks old, which makes sense because I feel old. Things hurt that didn’t used to hurt before. Kids bewilder me more than they used to. What little patience I had for just about anything mildly annoying has gone. Nirvana’s “Nevermind” record is 20 years old. The Russians were a year into their 9 year war with Afghanistan when John Lennon was murdered. Their was ended 12 years before our war with Afghanistan commenced….a war which has become, at 10 years and counting, the longest in US history.
Do you feel old now?
I’m just saying.
If was fall that brought this on was it not? True, I’m old and getting even creakier. But I can still feel invigorated….even if that invigoration leads me to the couch to watch sporting events. But still. It’s the feeling that counts.
We’re on the edge of September….and I long to fall over. Maybe into a pile of leaves.
It will be 10 years since the planes hit the towers. Ten years. Remember the sky on that day? How blue it was? It almost hurt the eyes to look into it. And then it was defiled. Those images still haunt, but they did not overwhelm us. We are a nation of colors. Blue. Green. And the turning leaves of fall.
Anything but gray.
–Tom Flannery
Riding Both Rails 