September is a coy mistress. She's still warm and summery but with the margins erased, the mornings a bit cool for reading and the evenings cut black with darkness.
Yet the leaves are still green and the sky the hue of robin's egg. Shadows are thicker somehow, everything having a Hitchcock profile, a foreshadow of winter with the sun adding melodrama.
In ages past, Septembers and Octobers were vivified by Reds baseball. During the '70s nearly every year was a fight for the pennant, which made the weather seem irrelevant (except in the case of a rain-out).
That I'm a baseball fan and my brother a football fan may be an accident of chronology. I was born in the wheelhouse of the Big Red Machine, enjoying Reds' World Series visits when I was 7, 9, 12 and 13, while my brother was born in the Bengals era. By the time he reached the age of reason, the Reds had shipped Tony Perez off to the Expos and the Reds were dead but the Bengals were in the pre-Mike Brown era, which means they still had life. They went to the Superbowl in January of '82 and '88, when my brother was 12 and 16.
In memory, if not in actuality, it was right around the moon landing that Mom told us that there was going to be another member of the family. "What, we're adopting!?"My best friend's family had just adopted a Vietnamese girl and so I naturally thought it was catching. I was clueless concerning Mom's developing paunch. Grandma had one too but that didn't mean she was pregnant, and Mom was every bit as old as Grandma in a six-year old's eyes.
No, Mom was going to have a baby.
This was news, much bigger than that of men landing on the moon. What was the big deal about that anyway, I wondered. A full moon looked two, maybe three miles away. (I figured NASA had waited for a full moon to make it an easier target.)
Adults seemed to get excited over the wrong things. Like beer and moon landings when there were much more awesome things all around us, like the fact that you could fit a 20-piece orchestra in a box called a stereo.
Or like the fact that babies, like deaths, could happen at any moment. My whole life there'd been the four of us, at least as far back as I could recall, and I was likely a conservative even then -- change was guilty until proven so. Certainly any non-sports or non-science news was, by definition during that era, bad.
My brother spent his formative years in a completely different era. He grew up, or at least became increasingly conscious of the world beyond the family, from 1975-1985, while I did from 1968-1978. I grew up when only bad news emanated. From the Vietnam war to Nixon's resignation to Carter's ineptitude and the Iranian hostage crisis, it was a period of American history when nothing went right. It was also the era of Pope Paul VI, who sadly seemed to be as relevant to the American church as Queen Elizabeth was to the British parliament.
My brother grew up in the John Paul II era and during the Reagan Revolution, which lead to a series of good news shocks that eventually led to the unthinkable: the fall of the Berlin Wall in September 1989, followed by the fall of Soviet Communism.
No comments:
Post a Comment