September

To me, the first day of any month is its own little New Year's Day...an arbitrary new beginning to reinstate good habits and work towards whatever goals I keep envisioning and abandoning. I guess I'm pretty practiced at failing, but I'm also adept at brushing myself off and giving it all another shot. This is especially so when the month is September, season of yellow school buses, Indian summer, and intentions as sturdy as oak tag paper. There is a subtle shift in the angle of light, and the world seems ready for a change. We lift our weary heads and move forward.

When I was a kid, September marked an ending more than a start. It meant the constraint of classrooms after all those free-range months, new expectations thrust upon us, an anxious feeling that never quite left me. It was a feeling I felt throughout my childhood but it crystallized when my family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island. We were all about to enter schools...for me it was junior high...but our father stayed weekdays in the city for his work, and I will never forget those mournful Sunday nights of saying good-bye to him, with Friday and his return interminably far off, and so many hurdles along the way. I would face seventh grade that September as brave as a soldier, but this is probably when September and sadness really merged in my head, and I could no longer think of one without the other.

Of course there was also a scientific component to it. In those East Coast days I knew very well that even in its most deceptively hot and sunny guise, September had been assigned to bring in autumn, and autumn, as splendid as it might be, was just a last dance before winter, which would beat us up for months. The poet Mary Jo Salter said it well in her poem, Absolute September, which begins:

How hard it is to take September

straight—not as a harbinger

of something harder.

I just looked her up. She was raised in Michigan and lives in Baltimore, so we can appreciate her perspective. In fact, I wasn't going to post this poem in its entirety, but it's so short and lovely and understanding, that I might as well share the rest:

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent

scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent

of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end

of summer, and longs to haul it in

when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.It leaves us by degrees

only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,

Pure State of Light and Heat, the height

to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf's off the tree

no day following can fall free

of the drift of melancholy.

Yes, how hard the heart tugs, and that drift of melancholy...that's what September evoked in my life long ago. There was always something over or something ahead but nothing to just nestle comfortably into.  Even the occasions on the calendar: Labor Day; my parents' uncelebrated marriage anniversary; often Rosh Hashanah, of which my Jewish mother was quietly aware; and the equinox itself, all seemed fraught with mixed emotions. There were also my father's determined proclamations that September would bring a turning point. Things kept turning, that's all. There was nothing lighthearted about any of this.

Now in my California life, I can see September differently. It has wandered in confidently but without a lot of hoopla, and everything seems hushed and waiting for its next move, and  I am resolved to resolve. Once again.