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September Song
Oh it’s a long, long while from May ’til December; And the days grow short, when you reach September; When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame, one hasn’t got time; For the waiting game (“September Song,” composed by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Maxwell Anderson; 1938)
I love the fall season. The relief from the oppressively humid summer heat, the implied obligation to go outside, the interminable season of interminable baseball games. With the first breezes of Autumnal winds it is like you can breathe again and think more clearly.
As I get older, my feelings for the fall weather have come to mingle with a sense of mortality. I still love the fall season, the cooler air, the absence of bugs and the spirit of football. But there is that sense of the impending dormancy of winter. How many Autumns do I really have left?
The autumn of life is much more complicated than the equinox of the solar cycle. After a certain amount of laps around the sun, the Wheel of the Year takes on the contours of a bald tire and life does not come with a spare.
My own birthdays fall sometime around Labor Day and Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. On the Hebrew calendar, I was born on the full moon of its year’s final month. Since the lunar Hebrew calendar is adjusted for the solar cycle and because Americans demand that holidays always fall on Mondays, my…