In the south, they don’t know how to do September
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- September 5, 2020
- 820
They simply don’t know how to do September down here.
It’s not their fault, necessarily. It’s just Southerners can’t quite admit where summer ends and fall begins.
Call it their Mason-Dixon lie.
Oh, I understand about the tourists and the needed income that a massive influx of Yankee dollars can usually provide, but this year it’s different.
There’s a pandemic on.
I’m sure you’ve read about it.
Wait.
Maybe you haven’t. Maybe your local newspaper has been shuttered, along with the newsstands that used to offer a place to buy one, not to mention the soup-n-sandwich place you used to read it, all because a disease with no cure continues to run amok.
Ah, isn’t it great to be alive when so many — who were doing just fine on New Year’s Day — aren’t?
But now it’s nearly Labor Day, and who doesn’t want to celebrate the loss of millions of jobs with a weekend full of empty leisure?
Here’s an idea.
If you still have the same job you had back when the coronavirus was just going to magically disappear, raise your right hand.
Hmm. You’re not under oath, but even if you were, no one’s going to hold you to a constitutional standard that means less every day.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice if September meant a return to sanity?
Back in the old days, when I was a kid, when the August calendar page was ripped down and retired to the dustbin, we got serious.
No more screwing around with your friends who thought it was a fine notion to take a tire, strap it to the flagpole halyard outside the high school and hoist it up, up, up until it dropped down, gravity doing the hard work, until it looked like a Lifesaver on a pencil.
I’m not saying I was involved in such a sophisticated prank, but if I were, I’d take a bow because that would have been so cool.
But senior year in high school wasn’t cool.
It was all about the future, and that could be real, real bad.
Dick Nixon was still running his Vietnam draft lottery like a doddering, drunken uncle, the kind you’d avoid at the Thanksgiving dinner table for fear he might ask you a semi-coherent question, one that you couldn’t ignore … or answer.
“So whadda gonna do,” he’d stammer, necktie dragging through the giblet gravy, “if Notre Dame says no? Hmm? What if you don’t get in? What then, smart guy? Ever think of that?”
Thankfully, the jowly president didn’t favor our family holiday with his soon-to-be-disgraced presence, but that’s not the point.
What I want to stress is that the fall starts now, and this is not a drill.
To quote Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, “Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?”
I’m not going to lecture you on the upcoming election because you’re on your own.
Keep in mind I volunteered my sacred Saturday mornings in 1972 making cold calls on behalf of the doomed George McGovern candidacy, that I paid good money to support the Fred Harris campaign by attending an Arlo Guthrie/Shenandoah concert at the Morris Civic in 1976 and that I backed Gary Hart up until the Monkey Business yacht debacle sunk his 1988 presidential bid.
So I’m used to supporting losers.
One of my favorite lines in any American novel goes like this:
“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.”
If you identified it as a quote from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” then I salute you. You must be quite the Yossarian fan to know his take on Clevinger, the Harvard-educated guy who had few friends.
Even if you’re new to that passage, I urge you to reread it carefully and then substitute another noun — “skiing” or “movies” or “baking” or “baseball” — for the word “literature.”
And then apply that sentence as an indictment, a spoken rebuke offered by someone you thought loved you as everything died.
That happened to me once, many falls ago. She thought she was being flippant when she inserted “music,” but it cut me deep.
“She wasn’t serious,” my college roommate said. “Seriously.”
But I knew she wasn’t kidding. She knew the truth.
I can’t dance.
There. I said it.
Oh, I can move by myself. Being a mirror star comes naturally to me. For an example, sample the John Mellencamp video of “Pink Houses” and the way he high-steps it through those sunflowers.
I can do those clumsy moves — and well — but I’m not a rock star.
Folks would just laugh at me, and I doubt I’d like that much.
Fall is a time for cutting your losses, for steering clear of crowded spaces, for wearing headphones and savoring the Raspberries, for donning Nantucket sweatshirts, for reading not-so-great books that no one ever has to know you really enjoyed, something along the lines of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” or “Goodbye, Columbus.”
I was walking along the ocean’s edge the other day, deepening my summer tan even as an autumn wind kept badgering me to pay attention, when I realized the American South in 2020 might have something important to say, not only to me, but to you.
You’ve heard about the undertow, right? It’s the invisible but altogether dangerous sucking sensation you feel just after a big wave has exhausted itself before heading back out to Portugal.
It can surprise you to such an extent that you realize that what this part of America, the Eastern Seaboard, this Crystal Coast is trying to tell you is quite simply and in its own way only this.
You have no idea what’s going to happen next down here.
Assume nothing.