Falling into the Season

The following is the text from a recent column published in Small Town Living magazine.

It’s October, and while I don’t want to say fall is my favorite, it is definitely in my top twentyfive percent of all seasons. In fall, the trees put on their party clothes, but the wind gets wistful.  The seemingly interminable habit the boys on our street pick up every summer of throwing a football back and forth while swearing, a game I call the “Catch and Cuss,” finally reaches an end.  Delicious qualities such as these are, no doubt, what inspired poet John Donne to declare that “in heaven it is always autumn.”

But it’s not just teenagers whose lives autumn changes. The people in my hometown seemed to have gotten the bug for change this fall. Returning home not long ago, I had a chance to witness a recently founded tradition there: the Labor Day Weekend Rummage Sale. This is more than a yard sale. It is rummage sale as ritual, as community building, as communicable disease.  From a drive around town that morning, it was clear nearly everybody had gone into business.  People who the week before had been helpless couch potatoes, bored housewives, restless students, had become overnight retailers, instant entrepreneurs. Just add junk.

For this one magical weekend, everyone ceases to see their neighbors as the people whose penchant for Rottweilers and rotting pick-up truck chassis is lowering their property values and begins to see them for what they really are: a chance to unload the fondue set that has been rusting in the attic since that time Uncle Larry tried to use it as a foot bath.

The result of such a massive effort at derummaging is, of course, no actual reduction in the gross amount of junk. Instead, this routine is a clever plan to allow the average person to sell things with no sense of loss. Anything a guy wants back, he knows he can find for sale next Labor Day in the garage of whoever just bought it from him. Any day, I expect to see a story in the paper about a fellow who in a mere four years has managed to sell and re-acquire every single item he has ever owned.

As the seasons outside were changing, and the people back home were switching junk, our twoyear-old daughter came into the kitchen one morning to make an announcement.  “Grrr,” she said, one hand tensed into a claw. “I am the big bad wolf.”

This was a revelation. Granted, the birth of a child is a big event, full of action and emotion.  Things become a blur. Still, I’m pretty sure if anyone had uttered the phrase, “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Abbott, you have a brand-new big bad wolf,” I would have remembered.  I paused in the middle of making a sandwich.  “Do you know what Daddy does to big bad wolves?” I said.

My daughter, a look of confusion on her face, said, “What?”

“He chases them down,” I said, giving chase.

“He grabs them up,” I said, lifting her in the air.  “He turns them upside-down.” I flipped her over.

“He bops their heads on the couch.” Here I lowered her until the top of her head touched the cushions of the couch.

“Then, he throws them out the window!” (Note: this last bit was only pantomime. I maintain a strict policy against throwing toddlers through windows, or any large structure made of glass, really.)

Laughing so hard she could barely speak, she managed to say: “That was…NOT FUNNY…  Daddy.”

She immediately wanted to do the not funny thing again.

So we did.

We would be doing that same not funny thing still, had the responsibilities of life not dragged me away. I was reluctant to go because, unlike this little one, I am old enough to know such moments will not always pass between us. When spring comes again, I will be forty, still young by many measures, but old enough to know life only holds only so many glorious seasons.  I picked my daughter up from the couch and said, “OK, go play. Daddy has to get ready for work.”

I watched her waddle off, the tail of the trusted blanket she holds flapping behind her. As she went, I was reminded how brief a season this is.  And how grateful I am to be here when it is fall in our small town, when it is fall on earth, as it is in heaven.

Dream Trip

This it the text from a recent column of mine published by Small Town Living magazine.

The boys in my neighborhood when I was a kid spent as much of the summer as possible in the air.  They’d go flying on their bicycles from the ends of ramps built with two by fours and a sheet of presswood. From my bedroom window, I could see them on their “dirt bikes” pumping hard to pick up steam before hitting the grassy hill that divided the street. Near the top, they would do a trick that would send them flying, landing again with a smack of tires on the bare dirt where their falls had worn the grass away.

I knew where I would land if I were to try a similar stunt: in the emergency room. The threat of pain—and there would have been pain either from an accident or, just as likely, from my mother when she found me doing something so dangerous—was not all that dissuaded me. While I do not claim to be a person with an insatiable craving for mental stimulation, even as a kid I needed more than could be provided by riding my bicycle up the same hill 7,000 times a day.

I wanted a bike only to go. Those two wheels, I knew, would expand my world. No longer would I be confined to rambling along the cracked sidewalk of our tree-lined street. A bicycle would set me free. A bicycle would, no doubt, throw open to my exploration our entire block.

Thus began my longing to go. From early on, I wanted to see what there was in this world. “Let’s just see what’s around the corner” became my motto.

So when a cousin of mine returned from a trip full of tales of a vacation she’d had, my longings only got worse. Her family had taken her to a place unlike any other, where every corner was crammed with wonder. She had been to a place where every step led on to another marvel. She had been to a place populated by people whom I had believed, until that time, existed only in books. She had been to Disney World.

After hearing her describe it, my desire to go grew into a flame in my little chest. I probably don’t have to tell you this, but walking around with a chest full of fire hurts. I ached for Disney World, for its comforting Main Street, for its whizzing rides, for its hopeful vision of an antiseptic future. I couldn’t stop wanting it, and the pain lingered. For a while, the happiest place on earth made me completely miserable.

What I learned was that Disney World was a very exclusive place, a kind of club that simply did not take the kind of people we were.

We were the kind of people who didn’t have any money.

To remedy this, I started filling the small bank in my closet, a gray metal box shaped like a safe, with pennies, certain that someday the fund would grow large enough to get us to the gates of Disney World. 

 Eventually, my passion cooled and my pocket money went into candy and comic books rather than into my bank. At some point along the way I looked into my savings and realized that no family of four, regardless of how many corners they cut, could get from our small Indiana town to the Magic Kingdom on 68 cents and a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper.

The dream went on a shelf in my mind marked “Someday.” Even then, it was a crowded shelf. There it sat, along with plans for college and, naturally, a safari.

Sometimes dreams come off the shelf. As you are reading this, there is a very good chance that I am on my way to Disney World or perhaps standing right outside Cinderella’s magic castle.

A trip to Disney World is actually happening, in part, because a few years ago, my wife and I did exactly what every personal finance guru who aims to help you realize your dreams tells you to: we signed up for a credit card. Not just any credit card; this was a special Disney credit card that promised a Disney “dream dollar” for every hundred real dollars spent.

This spring we turned around and found our account, unlike my little grey bank, was flush with fake Disney money. It was time to start planning.

Now we’re off. As summer closes and autumn looms, we’ll be touching down just outside the long-dreamt-of destination. Then it will be home to the regular world where what is enchanted is much harder to see. There will be dishes to do, dogs to walk, babies to raise—but before all that, I’ll just have to sit down and write a long letter to my cousin.