September

September is a month that makes me think more about the passing of time and of the hour of my life than any other. Assuming I will live to be 80 -about average for men in the USA –  each hour on the clock of life is about 3.5 years. So on my clock of life it’s just about 8:15 PM now – just about 3 hours and 45 minutes left until the clock strikes midnight and death comes to take me away.

In my life it is past twilight time – night has fallen. So I can either flounder around in the darkness like a blindfolded man and perhaps fall into a well or be hit by bus or meet my end in some other violent, untimely way, or I can look up and count the stars and wonder at their grandeur — and know that I’m just as important as they.

When a star dies it lets everyone and everything know – and the bigger the star the bigger the fanfare. The largest stars explode as super novas. These bright and powerful  heavenly spectacles can be seen from thousands and thousands of light-years away.

But death is death – or is it?

From death springs life and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a red giant star or the poorest man on Earth – from death comes rebirth and life.

If it were not for stars, novas and super novas our Earth, our sky, our sun, and almost everything else we take for granted would not be here –  we would not be here. Life comes from  from  the stars – and we and everything we see and touch and feel is made of stardust.

Looking up, the stars are so beautiful and they seem so small. Yet, it is I who is small compared to those magnificent huge globes of boiling churning gas. Compared to the stars I don’t even amount to a grain of sand. But everything is relative.

To a bacterium, I must seem like an unfathomably large “thing” – yet one of these tiny specks of primordial life, can invade my body, multiply uncontrolled and kill me in less than a day.

Everything is relative. One of my favorite songs is one by P. F. Sloan called “From a Distance” and in it he says:

Have you ever wondered
Just how tall is tall?
From a distance, the highest building still seems very small —
From a distance, from a distance, the highest buildings still seem small.
And we can’t measure anyone, or anything thing at all.

I don’t know why the waning of summer and the approach of autumn makes me yearn to understand things so much. All I know is it’s September and I find myself yearning and reaching back to grab memories that have slipped away from me so quickly.

It seems like yesterday when I was sliding around on icy slush, dressed in a heavy coat, gloves and hat and hurrying to get inside and get warm. It seems like only a few days ago I was watching hope spring up from the ground in the form of crocuses, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths.

It seems only a few hours ago, I drove out into the country looking for fresh spring vegetables and wishing that the first red tomato would appear on the vine.

It seems only minutes ago when I walked through the summer festivals eating wonderfully unhealthy food and mingling with people who I never met and who I’ll never see again. They were like actors from a scene in my life.

The festivals are almost over for the year. There are still a few coming up – but they won’t be full of life and sun like the summer festivals were.

It’s September now and summer is gracefully giving up its hold on my part of the world and autumn approaches quietly like a soft summer sunset just beginning its glow. One moment the sky is blue and the wind is hot, and the next moment the sky is orange and red and the air and the breeze is cool – and the veil of night slides slowly over the sky. The death of each day brings the birth of the stars and the planets and the moon and all the things paint the night sky and make us wonder where we belong.

It’s September and all the things I hoped for summer are gone and now I prepared for the beauty of the autumn. The death of summer brings the birth of autumn and all its splendid beauty – from the blaze of autumn trees, to the shocks of corn in the fields, to the Jack-O-Lantern on almost every porch.  Autumn is he saddest happy time of the year. I rejoice in the in its pleasantly cool days and crisp, frosty nights, while I dread the approaching gray silence of winter and all the dead brown things which cover the ground with sadness and the endless sheets of gray dreariness that cover the winter sky.

It seems just a a week or two ago when I was reveling in those first rare warm, sunny days of spring.

Nothing reminds me more of how quickly time rushes by me than the month of September.

The clock of my life is ticking away and I am powerless to slow it down. And I wonder – would I even if I could? My first thought is that I would for sure – I’d turn back those hands to about 19 o’clock on some sunny summer morning in June. I’d be in my early thirties then – healthy with a bright future in front of me. “If I knew what I know when I was younger…”  However, when I think about it, I have lived my life and I’ve made some good choices, some excellent choices, some poor choices and some horrible ones. I think, perhaps, turning back the hands of time, would be a poor choice at best – and perhaps a horrible one. The good thing is I don’t have a choice so I can’t go wrong.

It’s 8:15 p.m. on my life’s clock – there are less than 4 hours to go until the midnight hour after which my life’s clock will never tick or chime again. And maybe someone will miss me and maybe no one will, but I don’t think it will matter much to me either way.

My children will miss me in the way grown children miss departed parents. Their sadness will be tempered by their busy lives – and that’s how it should be. I would not want it any other way.

I brought nothing into this world with me,  but I will leave something important behind – my two sons and my grandchildren. And perhaps I will leave something else behind too. Maybe something I’ve written will make someone think about things they would not have thought about otherwise. I think if I help just one person think about something they would have never thought about, I will leave something else good behind.

I guess, though, in the grand scheme of things, what I leave behind or don’t leave behind, is as inconsequential as that first warm, ephemeral spring breeze is when I look back from now – September.

September is my time for reflection and for remembering that the clock of my life is ticking faster than I think. Midnight is really not that far away.