HELLO, OCTOBER

I wish I were wandering the tented lanes of an October Festival. I wish I could smell apple blossoms (no, that would be springtime), smell cidar boiling, purchase for fifty cents (benefiting school children) and sip some cidar with clove, lemon and cinnemon, see oak and maple and birch along the streets bordering the town green, buy seasonal fruit, bite into a sweetly tart fruit, yes, both sweet and tart; see mountains beyond the tent-tops and rooftops, and see a fountain and statue in the heart of town, see the leaves turning.

I have seen and been such places on October days, brown and gold.

But my heart was always just a little heavy in northern Octobers. And so, too, in southern Octobers.

Now, that’s a failure of gratitude. I must be grateful. Name that sorrow that overlays everything. I can’t. As sweet-smelling macadam is laid down over dirt country roads on sultry Mondays, I can’t for the life of me recall the ‘where or when’ of a memory beneath life’s black, hot layers of ordinariness. So be it. Go on remembering. It is 5:26 a.m.. Light is coming. I prefer the dark, the quiet.

So much wasted time. So many fears. So many wrong turns, delays. But that’s life. The black, winding road to the October Festival is just a road. I wish to arrive.

There are those journal entries where we write. “Another year, nothing changed.”

But we should be glad when nothing has changed.

The leaves are changing up there. Yes, a good change, a season defining marker of mountain time within northeastern time.

Here, in Florida, the same abiding green, but a breeze yesterday, today the humidity again. But it will change. I see sun out there. I must drive across the bay to Tampa, grateful for days and weather in stasis. There will be traffic. The wind moves slowly among the palm fronds at either end of the bridge. I will find a mysterous but welcome haze ceiling off the Bay’s horizons as I flow with the death-dealing traffic across the causeway. Is it October? Where is the Festival?

Time present and time past

Are both, perhaps, present in time future,

And time future present in time past.

Wrote the poet.

I’m no poet.

But here I am. Writing. October again.

Hello, October.

Everything will change, and feel like nothing has changed.

That’s life, that’s good.

But I wish, yes, I were alone, still healthy, maybe forty or thirty again, and walking up to a smiling woman in a flannel shirt to buy her jam, the autumn breeze blowing, the mountains in the distance. The leaves crackling.

At dusk, maybe someone in the village will invited me onto their porch.

We’ll have hot tea as night falls, contented strangers.

But, in a windowless wilderness of corridors stripped bare by an infinite regression of florescent tubes of brightness, I am, in my mind before this October dawn in a foreign place, working down a green bottle of something from a vending machine. That, not the wide beautiful porch overlooking the Festival is where I spend my mind’s time.

October is outside, feeling the same as this inside of imagined people in cubicles.

There are calendars on desks. Yes, it’s October.

But it might as well be January, or July.

October, come for me. Change me. Keep me grateful.

Come for me. Greet me, whisper “hello.”

It is 5:45 a.m. now. Greet me again at 5:45 p.m.

Take me back to the Festival.

Too soon, it will be, Goodbye, October.

So, Hello.