By Myles Ludwig
There’s a certain sweetness to autumn.
Can’t deny that.
Yes, summer days have dwindled into September, leaving a soft sense of sadness and broken promises trailing in their wake. Over much too soon. We didn’t have enough fun. But, at the same time, that feeling of loss, that nostalgic mourning, seems to gin up a burst of renewal, of beginning again. And that, the very thought of having the possibility of beginning again, is as exciting as it is filled with foreboding.
Many consider these early October days, like the proverbial autumn of our years, bittersweet, a Frank Sinatra-like chunk of baker’s chocolate, but not me.
I like these buttery days, those cautious days that swoon and dawdle into an early evening.
Even here in Florida, where seasons seem to be delineated less by nature than by thermometer and barometer, by hot and less hot, by more rain and less rain, I’m delighted to feel the first nip of fall. There’s a feeling a freshness on its light breezes that brings a frisson of change. There is a future. Halloween will come again.
The media will soon drop its déjà vu political screeching; the U.S. government will find its fiscal level; Saturday Night Live will settle into a blunted middle age that takes a nap after dinner; the world will continue to turn on its heels — at least we hope so. Maybe Iran’s Supreme Leader will give us a call to wish us Merry Christmas. Maybe North Korea will tweet us a thank-you card.
Coming up soon are smarmy reports on this year’s most popular costume for trick-or- treating. In my childhood, ghosts, princesses and hoboes were the de rigueur forms of disguise. This year those cartoonish characters of our childhood seem likely to be replaced by the walking dead. Frankly, this sudden popularity of the zombie figure of Haitian voodoo origin, which morphed a moony Brad Pitt into an extended Abbot and Costello comedy bit, is a little confounding. But then again, we’ve always harbored our horrors alongside our lift raft of resurrection. There’s something important lurking there in those seeming opposites, a kind of World Series of philosophy.
Speaking of lurking, we might find a few vampires hiding in strip malls and cul-de-sacs. But our fear of their dark appetites is waning and it’s not likely there’ll be flesh-eating bacteria knocking at your door to pocket mini-Snickers.
No Walter Whites either.
I grew up in what was then a small city in New England where October was swollen with pride. The little city was long past its prime as the 19th-century capital of whaling in the world, the great century of seafaring adventure that gave us Melville and Moby Dick, the persistent-to-a-fault Ahab, the oracular Orson Welles, the stern Gregory Peck, the narrowed eyes of Richard Widmark in Down to the Sea in Ships and gave birth to Greenpeace.
I have fond memories of growing up there: of lingering in the dusk in Buttonwod Park, our playground, our field of dreams. Our corduroys whistled as we ran among the trees, tossing horse chestnuts at each other. The changing color of the leaves, though clearly a sign of ending, was an ending pregnant with a sudden joy. The leaves seemed magnetized, gathering themselves into plush piles on the curb, deep enough for us kids to run through and scatter.
Curls of woodsmoke from chimneys.
We were a small band of pre-teen adventurers then. We roamed astride English bikes, the Raleighs and the Rudges: sleek black with silvery chains and hand brakes flowing plastic streamers, spoked wheels with clothes-pinned cardboard flaps attached that allowed us to pretend we were riding motorcycles. Our neighborhood basketball games at the hoop at the end of the driveway were shortened by diminishing light, but then we assembled on the corner, anxious to bike over to Eddie Shapiro’s house to watch Howdy Doody and dream wistfully about our goddess, Princess Summerfall Winterspring.
Falling into fall then was OK and it still is.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.