“No sun. No grass. No leaves. November.”
Darkness at noon. Yes. Here it comes again. A coven of old men in Armani suits and bright ties, who spend the winter in Florida, have once again decided that it’s “in our best interest” to continue this unnatural darkness at noon. Egad!
The night life darkness of Los Angeles and youthful Manhattan was always with our smiling friends that patted our backs and tie dyed our dreams. Daylight was show biz work, nights were spent on wooden stages.
The darkness then, when it descended, was full of neon and busy streets and gorgeous partners and the crazy, happy sounds of the Mamas and the Papas, The Beatles, the crazy Doors and Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” where only the crickets sang.
The colors of Lautrec and Van Gogh’s “Irises,” are gone now.
This summer they lasted longer than years gone by, but now they slumber in the rain, forgotten but remembered in song like Johnny Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” that moaned about “old winter’s song.”
Oh dear, the gnarly days of Maine’s “Old Winters” song that brings spooky afternoons and sheets of icy walks, old, old, old, old, oil money, and “April showers” that hit the black and white keys well into May.
The trees outside my windows, oh, those wonderful trees that waltzed us through summer and into November.
This year, they’ve faded, and with the soft November have, as they always do, silently slumber on our lawns like exhausted dancers. Let them sleep. On the trees, they were art, and art is exhausting. Ask Vincent.
And here, at 3 p.m. as the sun slowly crawls past the lawns and porches full of empty Halloween displays, my cold nose against the window makes me feel like Heathcliff’s ghost walking on the Wuthering Heights.
But take heart, the poet cries, we’ve two holidays to brighten our fading days.
Thanksgiving, the gluttonous half brother of Christmas, appeared again, with its Broadway cast of costumed hoofers and ravaged turkey while we sleepily peer at old movies.
Cheer up old friends, Easter will return with colored eggs on plastic grass.
Easter, once again, promises resurrection to the weary who toil in the early darkness, and the aging candidates spewing graceless sermons to the dozers, while all the while I sit in my Ebenezer Scrooge sweater embracing my remote.
Dreaming of summer’s last groans and November’s belches, I lay in bed these nights, staring at the ceiling and thinking of the darkness up there where creatures surely dwell.
There’s no attic up there, oh, that there was an attic. It’s just a crawl space full of noises and memories.
J.P. Devine’s Irish grandmother, Mary Ellen Daly, created a needlepoint when she was 8 years old that now hangs in Devine’s office. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine
It’s one of those sacred places my mother told me of that warmed my Irish grandmother’s fingers, had held her childhood dolls, tiny dollhouses where she sat and created a needlepoint full of flowers, the alphabet, and her full name and age.
Mary Ellen Daly, age 8 years. Hair the color of a Dublin winter night. Born in Killarney, she’s long gone, but my mother saved that needlepoint for me to hang in my tiny office.
Enough, the wailing about November. If we’re lucky, we’ll live to see another, and each others’ happy faces.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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