The Cruelest Month

T. S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, teasing us after the harshness of winter,

. . . breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain,

but ultimately disappointing. "Fear death by water," warns the poet, and do not be tempted by the promise of the new season. He accosts an acquaintance on the street and admonishes him:

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"

Uncomfortably bleak and morbid is this April Waste Land. My readers can rest easy: I will not be nearly as gloomy, poetic, or dense in explicating my cruelest month: September.

Even though it's been a hot one, with temperatures exceeding 90 degrees every day, it seemed, in August, and hardly a drop of rain to boot, who really wants to see the summer end? And end it will, by the calendar on September 23rd, if it hasn't already done so, practically speaking, with the passing of Labor Day and a sighting of school buses.

It's still warm this September 9th, and as I sit at my kitchen table composing this paean to summer, I am clad in the uniform of the season: a splendidly skimpy tee shirt and pair of khaki shorts, the same two articles of clothing -- in design, that is -- I don every evening after work, starting around May 1st, when I can at last shed my cool weather costume of jeans and sweatshirt.

I gaze pensively through the window at a scene so vivid and clear in the morning air, it might be high-definition TV: the lush foliage blanketing the oak and maple trees; the resilient grass still green in spite of the drought; my shirtless neighbor examining his yard, planning his pruning schedule. Then, with trepidation and restlessness, I turn to the calendar hanging on the wall (only three weeks until October 1st) and ponder: How many more days remain before I must consign to winter hibernation these tee shirts and shorts, not to mention the short-sleeved shirts I wear on dress-down work days, themselves soon to be supplanted by their long-sleeved brethren.

Summer, of course, is the season of vacations, usually of a coastal flavor, but whether that interlude is in June, July, or August, it's over and done by September 1st, and the next one looks as far off as a star seen through the wrong end of a telescope. For our family, two vacations bookend the summer: four days in Myrtle Beach the third week in June and four days in New York City over Labor Day weekend centered around the U.S. Tennis Open, between which volumes of days compress almost instantaneously into a few flimsy pages. The beach in June can be complacently deceptive: viewed from a chair anchored in the sand, book, beer, shades, and sunscreen at hand, Labor Day appears as distant as the hazy horizon where sea and sky merge. You confidently reassure yourself that two full months of summer lie ahead, yet before you exhale, they have evaporated.

As summer draws to a close, so too do the extended daylight hours here in Virginia, where at the summer solstice the sun rises at 5:30 and doesn't set until 9:00, and this September eve graced us with its presence until 7:30, illuminating my entire four-hour journey by car and Metro to Washington, D.C. (which incidentally interrupted the composition I so diligently commenced this morning). How miserable that trip would have been in November or December: the skies dark by the time I reached Vienna at 6:00 PM; undoubtedly, a cold rain falling or a brisk wind blowing, making the 15-minute wait at the open-air train station even more irritating and interminable; and orienting myself after emerging from the McPherson Place underground for the one-block walk to my hotel surely a challenge, because I never ask for directions.

I have mixed feelings about Daylight Savings Time. Since, for one who devours automobile miles like popcorn, late afternoon driving is much more pleasant under nature's light, I do not relish days shortened by both the calendar and the clock. On the other hand, DST's later-rising sun leaves early-morning runners -- like myself -- enshrouded in darkness, although I can't deny a stab of delight at watching the skies gradually lighten -- from star-studded blackness, to gray, to violet, to red-orange -- during a chilly outing in late fall or early spring. It's an easy choice, really: who would sacrifice those long, lazy, sun-drenched evenings for an earlier dawn?

Another somber signature of September is the rapidly approaching finale of the baseball season, after which aficionados of the game like myself sink into a deep slough of despond and an endless wait for spring and a rebirth of the box scores. In my book, the October playoffs and World Series are irrelevant appendages, although they do generate some interest for casual observers of the game (who don't deserve to be designated fans): only eight teams are left playing, and when you are an Athletic supporter or a Cub diehard, chances are both teams have already been banished to the golf course; those intriguing statistics, which, with their daily recalculations, enslave us statheads over the course of 162 games, are now cast in stone; and a glance at the scoreboard exposes its fulsome nakedness, only two or three scores on display, an embarrassing dilution from the full slate posted daily during the regular season.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, Renaissance scholar, President of Yale University, and Commissioner of Baseball -- whose brief tenure (September 1988-September 1989) was highlighted by his banning of Pete Rose from the Hall of Fame -- famously lamented the end of a baseball season when his beloved Red Sox were eliminated from playoff contention in an 8-7 loss to the Orioles on October 2nd, 19??.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then, as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it the most, it stops. Today, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains, it stopped and summer was gone."

The last out silently shatters the writer's poignant illusions: "School will never start, rain will never come, sun will warm the back of your neck forever."

By the second week in September, football, mighty football, has eclipsed baseball in the minds and hearts of the American sports fan. How sad. Just when a handful of teams are fighting for their playoff lives, when one or two pitchers are stretching for that elusive and increasingly rare twentieth win, when a 50 home-run or 15o-rbi plateau is in sight, the air waves are saturated with the imposing, inaugural college and professional football games of the season. Analysis begins three days prior and continues three days after each weekend festival, consuming every hour of the intervening period with pigskin talk. And if you want to catch a baseball score on Saturday, forget it. You must wait for the ESPN Bottom Line to scrawl through fifty college football games between teams as obscure as a Slippery Rock.

I can't wait for the Super Bowl. Spring training starts thirty days later.

While I, an empty nester whose grown children have taken flight to make their way in the world, bemoan the passing of summer, untold numbers of younger parents are rejoicing: School's in. I will concede that it's more than a little selfish of me to express regret at this seasonal ritual, but consider these two exasperating phenomena: first, the ubiquitous school bus, as tenacious as a bloodhound, impeding my progress by its own lumbering pace or by its flashing red and yellow lights and retractable stop sign; and, second, the intrusive traffic congestion on the road where I run two mornings a week, a main thoroughfare for three neighborhood schools.

Admittedly, my self-serving attitude has taken a 180-degree turn since my rambunctious brood of five was stationed at home; back then I was promoting twelve months of school and packed highways. Today, like the students -- and presumably the teachers -- I'm rooting for more workdays, snow days, and holidays.

In truth, this anti-Septembrist diatribe has contradicted a fundamental philosophical conceit of mine: embrace enthusiastically the glory of each passing day, especially at the age of 59, when so many more have been left behind than lie ahead. And there are some redeeming qualities to cruel September.

After all, is not seasonal change refreshing, a rhythmic reminder of the cycle of life, providing us with something to anticipate (as well as complain about)? Winter around here seems hardly a threat, with temperatures regularly reaching the fifties in January and February in recent years and the minimal accumulation of a lonely snowfall gone in a few days.

Beyond that, the predictable abatement of the current tropical weather pattern should produce favorable conditions for the Virginia Ten-Miler two weeks hence. My closet is overflowing with long-sleeved shirts and wool jackets and slacks (many of them hideously outdated) just itching to be worn. As baseball ends, basketball begins, a poor substitute, but at least offering a modicum of media competition for that other sport. I could alter my running and driving habits to accommodate the spate of automobiles and buses clogging the arteries (not likely). And, on a materialistic note, September launches the fall selling season for retail home furnishings after the summer doldrums.

Finally, of course, as fall and winter approach, one can always sneak a guilty peek forward to one's favorite month: April.