September has come to be a month of memorials, to storms and violence, to loss and devastation. It’s a communal thing that happens as summer collapses. Here, have a bouquet of monuments. Have a lapse of toughness while you comb the seaweed and sand out of your smile.
Early on, I’d lost the meaning of the month. Out of school before my friends, I worked a laborious job while they moved through the first moments of college. Had dreams well into my 30s about having to plunge back into high school as a group of chattering teens, swollen by abundant inability, leafed through inattentiveness.
I could listen to overwrought guitarists wring their fancy, but that had stopped working. I could call a friend in the deep of the night because of the time zone differences, but most prefer to text. I could live with quiet solitude and write deeply perceptive novels about the loss of courage, if only solitude would eviscerate this pearloid melancholic indulgence. Don’t cry for me, Alabama.
In the end I figured it out. September is the best time to see a baseball game. Fair weather fans have moved on the bigger, more brutal games. And you can sit out in the bleachers and rummage through the day with a bag of peanuts, not caring about the final score, just being a part of something. September, September, September.
by Hank Cherry
