LIKE AUTUMN IS TO LIFE

SEPTEMBER...

It sneaks up on you, though it got cold sometimes where I grew up. I remember one winter where it was it dipped into the 50’s almost every night. It would be hard to tell the seasons were changing by the turning of the leafs though; oak leafs simply fell to the ground revealing the twisted, ghostly limbs of branches which had already seen decades more time on earth than I might in a lifetime. Lime green eucalyptus leafs don’t offer a sign that summer has come to an end and autumn is upon you either. The cedars and evergreens, popular in landscaping along the coasts of California, are the tint of jade in October as they are in April.

Just outside Los Angeles, where at barely 800 feet above sea level in Simi Valley, the Santa Anas alerted me to Fall’s approach, but the hills were as brown then as May. Fire season meant the hills would burn the scrub off as the Santa Ana winds, up to fifty miles an hour, would whip through the dry valleys; but even that didn’t stop the Football game against Hart High School one October night in
1970...

The fans left to protect their homes as fire ringed the hills; fire so bright the new night lights in the stadium we had earned through selling chocolate bars could have been turned off; yet we played on. I never quite figured that one out. Of course the Hart High School team couldn’t return home over the Santa Susana Mountains on the new 118 Freeway because of the fire (later to be named for Ronald Reagan, our former Governor and actor who made “B” Westerns in these hills.) We couldn’t even get home after the game, so many roads were shut down. So we went to Chi Chi’s Pizza to eat and to watch the hills burn down, then each of us walked home through the smoke and fire-lit cinders whipping around us on LA Avenue. It was exciting to water down our roofs that night, play fire-fighter too, as September just closed its door.

That was a bad one. Usually one or two homes got it. In 1970 their were dozens burned down and even murderer Charlie Manson’s hideout just miles away, the Spann Movie Ranch, burned to the ground in the Fall of 1970. But life went on, and we barely noticed the oak trees regain their tiny hand-shaped leafs, or that the Eucalyptus dotting either side of LA Avenue had lost any of their tiny feather-like emerald ones. Leafs don’t change on evergreens.

I paid attention to February and May; those months as turning points in a year that alerted me to so much change coming. It meant tennis season and the fun-filled days at the beach, and summer jobs, and growing up, and dating pretty girls, and maybe playing another season of Football approached; and a boy needed to stay in shape for all that. Life was long as the days were too…

But September? It had no meaning other than another school year. And I had a long life ahead of me, and leafs falling weren’t a gage for such things, and colors were browns, except for those found in little suburban ranch home lawns and gardens of roses, gardenias, flowering ice plant, periwinkle, Japanese boxwood, and the ubiquitous juniper bush.

I recently visited Simi Valley, and stayed with Mark May on a hill that burned to the ground in 1970 while he and I played football. We reminisced. We looked out over the valley we grew up in and loved, and for a moment we hadn’t grown to be our father’s age…

You remember Mark May? The part-time 4th grade bully in MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs who would become one of my best friends? I uncovered the single home movie from my last football game, November 6th 1970 – We watched and laughed, and became boys again...impressed with out lithe running and skills which included getting clobbered only to get up and take it on the chin again, and again...

I got hurt, never put shoulder pads on again, but it was the game of my life. I played my heart out on a muddy field against a team boasting of another great friend, the team captain from Newbury Park High School, Mike Carlisle. We didn’t know he would have two "Falls" left to live back then… Or that our quarterback Phil, would see his last autumn season just one year ago.

Ah September. Where did it go? The quiet approach, hardly noticeable, then…

Another approaches. I live in the mountains now. It snows here. Leafs turn amber gold and the aspens quake among the evergreens. I became as old as some of the oak branches back home on the coast, and quake at the cold that is coming upon us as I realize the golden youth of so many Septembers is but a dream…


“Jim”
August 2008
www.jmpratt.com

Coming in 2010: WHEN THE LAST LEAF FALLS