Not that I need reminders that time marches on (the house is fully stocked with mirrors), but here comes September to drive the point home. T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but had anyone thought to press him about September, he no doubt would have called it the most wistful.
There's no mystery to it, especially to those of us who grew up outside the confines of California, where September may seem pretty much like August, not to mention January or May.
For us, September meant it was time to get a move on. The peal of the first school bell in early September was as much symbolic as real. Whether you were a first-grader or a freshman, the siren sound from the schoolhouse or campus summoned you to the new uncertain adventure that lay ahead. Instinctively, you knew you would be different nine months down the road.
That sensation, so real in the Midwest where I grew up, feels less pronounced here in California where I've spent the last 16 summers.
I confess to missing that feeling, even though I've made the typical Californian's bargain of accepting 70-degree temperatures in December in exchange for the changing of the seasons.
But as dulled as the ol' nostalgia membranes may have been in recent years, they're rustling again, if only vicariously.
Last week, a beloved cousin from my Nebraska boyhood spent a week in Orange County with his wife and two sons, both in their 20s. The visit was to help elder son Scott, 29 and a Ph.D., set up housekeeping as he begins his full-time teaching career at Cal State Fullerton. He needed to buy a car, buy a bed, get some furniture, learn his way around campus, meet his colleagues, start living his new life in a new town.
This weekend, a longtime friend is here from New Jersey with another young man in tow--his 18-year-old son, Dan, who will enroll at CalArts in Valencia. Dan has designs on becoming a drummer in a jazz ensemble. His father confesses to being a wreck, knowing that at the end of the 3,000-mile drive to California, he'll be saying goodbye to a little boy who's not so little anymore.
Is there a manual somewhere that tells parents how to handle these moments?
My Nebraska cousin and his wife are semi-experts, having already sent Scott and his brother off in past Septembers. And sure, Scott probably could have survived his arrival in Orange County without his parents' presence. But I find it kind of touching that they came, anyway, and that he's already phoned them a number of times back in Nebraska. During the week they were here, no one needed to say aloud that we grasped the momentousness of Scott surveying the landscape on the eve of his teaching career.
