October 15, 2006
Those of you who know me well know my ambivalence about October. Years ago, I took a title of an early Ray Bradbury short story collection as my own to describe the deep funk into which the season seems to plunge me, year after year: The October Country.
Nothing very awful has ever transpired in my version of the October country. Awfulness seems to happen in less obvious months, like April (“the cruellest month,” according to Geoff) or July, when sunlight blares at a post-equinox crescendo. My father died in April and July always presents a fiscal crisis of one sort or another. Go figure. Maybe that’s how Gaia likes it. After all, what mortal would expect a shit storm to strike at the rebirth of Spring or the palmy laze that is Summertime, when the living is supposed to be easy?
But the autumnal lack of calamity don’t mean I ain’t trepidatious when October come a’ knockin’. September serves as fair warning, when the days grow short and dwindle down to a precious few; when I try to remember when grass was green and grain was yellow.
October country is frequently bleached out in Southern California. October in Tennessee is far more logical. Here the season shifts with a vengeance. In L.A., the leaves don’t turn, unless someone’s planted a foreign maple in the front yard, and even then they drop to the ground gray as a battleship, not fiery red or orange or purple. The L.A. sunlight lingers as it does in any desert, refusing to dim the wattage until the first rain comes to town. Even overcast days are mild, pleasant, and without wind unless a freak Santa Ana whips through the Grapevine and heats the dry tinder of the Santa Monica Mountains like a blast from the summer past.
None of this means L.A is exempt from October country. On the contrary, some of my most ponderous and disabling October trials have been endured in Long Beach or Lynwood or Ojai, or parts in between.
Whether Montebello or Memphis, however, the month enforces introspection. And what we see when we look deep, occasionally helped along by a glass or two of Cabernet (or – as in my father’s case – a couple tumblers of paint-peeling bargain Scotch), is not always pleasant. October is the month of regrets; of what might have been. Robert Frost may have written about stopping by the woods on a snowy day during the depths of December, but I’ll bet my laptop he came up with “The Road Not Taken” in October. This is the time of year I take inventory, whether I like it or not, and it is always a fight to keep the regrets from outweighing the blessings.
Nearly half a century ago when I asked a Baptist preacher’s son during one of my first October countries why life was worth living, he answered without missing a beat: “Life is worth living because we have to find out why it’s worth living.” Then he swallowed the rest of his Red Mountain wine and poured us all another glass.
So here’s to October. The next round’s on me. May we all get to November with a few shreds of self-respect intact and our individual quests for the meaning of life unchecked by the change in the season.
