`Turning to Light Before My Eyes'

A suitable emblem for September: A tall woman, 72 and spry, pushed on a swing by a 4-year-old boy. He giggles, sanctioned at last to shove a grownup. Soon she’s no longer sitting but lying horizontally on the seat, laughing open-mouthed at the sky. Absorbed and unembarrassed, they fill their ancient roles like figures in an allegory.

September used to signal the new school year, new car models and new television shows. Labor Day was misery. My kids are reprieved. Teachers in their district are without a contract and have gone on strike. No school Tuesday, none today and no promises from either side. We drove past a grade school and the sidewalks were lined two deep with chanting, marching, laughing teachers, placards aloft: “ON STRIKE!” Cars honked, meaning what? Another ritual jettisoned. Newcomers to the Northwest, we don’t know what to expect of September or the rest of autumn, the most noble of seasons. In our neighborhood the change will be, at best, incremental: Most of the trees are conifers. In “The City Shepherd’s Calendar,” L.E. Sissman writes:

“September. Summer meets fall in the classic annual contest and loses, 3 to 2. Sixty percent of September is crisp and purposeful; 40 percent is becalmed in the backwaters of summer. Trees decline imperceptibly, insects play an octave higher and several decibels louder, new flowers spring up in summer’s dry-grass waste, chipmunks and squirrels thriftily provide, wasps reach the peak of their activity before winter thickens the glycol in their veins.”

Sissman was writing of the Northeast, where the seasons are neatly demarcated. He reminds me of the increased volume of insect song beginning late in the summer – still a melancholy sound. When I was in Cleveland a month ago, cicadas droned endlessly. On Monday, my 8-year-old found a leaf from a tulip tree that had turned brilliantly yellow on one side of the vein and remained green on the other. I thought of a line from a David Ferry poem:

“What was green is turning to light before my eyes.”

The old lady on the swing is Virginia; the boy, Henry. She’s his babysitter, not his grandmother. His father is pastor of the nearby Presbyterian church. Virginia reassures me she’s Roman Catholic and asks if I am. Her bluffness is refreshing and she’s disappointed we’re not co-religionists. “You’re Irish?” she asks. “Half,” I answer, and she’s mollified. Like many older people she’s envious of children’s bottomless energy. My boys have taken off their shoes and are shimmying up a steel pole. Again and again, Henry tries to run up the trunk of a pine tree. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs says city parks are “deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.” If so, this park overflows with life and appreciation.

“Oh, I wish I could go and go like that. I’m so tired,” Virginia says.

Listen to Jimmy Durante sing Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” lyrics by Maxwell Anderson.