Baseball.
I know most people think of baseball in the spring and summer. For me, it’s October.
October is when the game gets exciting, every team playing is racing toward infamy. The nostalgia of the game is at its peak.
I stayed up to watch the Mariners grind out a win last night. It’s the first game I’ve watched this year. It was worth it.
If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a stadium this time of year, that’s a gift indeed. Enjoy your time.
I just saw a post on Facebook captioned “The Fall of Portland.” It was photos of trees around town with leaves that have turned from summer green to the reds, golds, and oranges of autumn.
If you’ve been following the news at all, this is subtly hilarious.
We’re about three weeks into fall, and with the weather having been so strange, the trees seem confused. The little dogwood in my front yard wend red overnight, but the neighbor’s tree, the one by which I measure the seasons, is still bright green.
The cold will come soon enough and the leaves will color and drop. Take time to notice them and the light that surrounds them over the next couple weeks. The time is too short.
I work in this wonderland that is part Global Corporation, a little bit frat party, and a whole lotta shoes.
We have a person whose title is something like “Workplace Experience Manager” and her job is maybe the most complicated of any in our region. She handles everything from building maintenance to what sort of coffee beans are loaded into the coffee machines.
She also picks out the candy for the candy jar at the front desk.
And yesterday was the day she started putting Reese’s Peanut Butter Bats in the candy jar.
Sure, you can get a Peanut Butter Cup any time of the year, but when October rolls around, Reese’s confections reach their divine forms: the Bat and the Pumpkin.
And somehow, inexplicably, they are just better.
In elementary school, the calendar on the wall where we learned the days of the week and the months of the year almost always had some symbol associated with each month. January was maybe a snowflake, February a heart, March a shamrock. October was alllllways a pumpkin and September was an apple.
As a chronological grown-up, those apples say October to me every bit as much as the pumpkins do.
Apple cider, apple cider donuts, apple pie, caramel apples. The best apples are pulled from the tree as the leaves are starting to turn. Get out there and get them before the weather turns.
Or, maybe check out https://www.cedarcreekgristmill.org/index.php/events. They’re pressing cider Oct. 25 and are inviting bluegrass-minded musicians to jam.
There was a full moon last night. The Harvest Moon. A bunch of calendars and folks on social media got that wrong, calling it the Hunter’s Moon as that’s the one that usually falls in October.
As this was the first full moon after the autumnal equinox, it’s the Harvest Moon. I don’t make the rules. I just look them up on the internet.
But even that has become problematic. Google’s AI says last night was somehow both a Harvest and Hunter’s Moon. Unpossible.
Regardless, the Farmers Almanac says the next full moon is the Full Beaver Moon, Nov. 4/5. Do whatever you want with that information.
Apologies to the hunters. I guess you all just get left out this year.
I’ve been dragging my feet on this all day. Back when I did this every year, the first Monday in October was reserved for a chat about the Supreme Court.
I no longer have faith in the Court, or any of the justice system currently in place in this country, or in those who enforce the laws, or in those who make the laws.
It feels like we’re just hanging on by a thread.
HTTPS://www.plannedparenthood.org
Today is your reminder, as we get closer to the big holidays and all their associated tasks and duties and busy-ness, dinner can be bread, cheese, and fruit.
Tonight, mine was a bit of baguette, some fancy Brie, and a crisp, cold red apple.
None of this needs to be overly complicated. Save your energy sometimes. Take a break. We’re nearing hibernation season.
Today is Anne Rice’s birthday. She would have been 84.
I first read Interview with a Vampire right after I’d graduated from high school. Most of my friends were on a mission trip to Guatemala and I, for reasons I cannot recall, stayed home. Tasha loaned me her copy to read while they were gone.
I devoured it. And then I started looking for what I considered the source material. I read Stoker’s Dracula, I read Carmilla, I tried to read The Vampyre but by that point, I think my head was too full of the lore and I moved on to the other Anne Rice books, the other vampires, and then the Mayfair Witches. I wore a lot of black.
Memnoch the Devil was released when I was on the road with the ministry team. I bought it on one of our days off and hid it in my suitcase so as not to offend a host family along the way. I read it in the van as we went from place to place and I remember thinking it was incredibly blasphemous, though I could not for the life of me tell you a bit about it now. Might be time for a reread.
I reread Interview a few years back when I was prepping for a trip to New Orleans. It still holds up. But Anne was right, Rutger Hauer should have been Lestat on film.
We talked a little yesterday about a podcast I like and it reminded me that October is for storytelling.
It’s cold. It’s colder today than it was yesterday and it was colder yesterday than it was last week and this trend will continue until spring. So, we come inside and we gather and we talk about how great summer was or what our plans for winter are and when we run out of things to talk about, we tell stories.
Gather around the campfire, the hearth, the kitchen stove. Find a warm place and talk about the past.
Storytelling has changed over time. We have more ways to tell our stories and more opportunity for new and wider audiences. Time will tell if this is a positive or a negative.
When I was little, I was a voracious reader, but eventually the forced reads of high school and college beat that out of me. It’s only been recently that I’ve come back to it, a convenient Kindle in hand. I use Goodreads to keep track of what I’m reading and to see what friends are into. And I follow the path laid out by the Goodreads and Kindle challenges (“Read a book from this list by this date and complete the challenge!). The autumn challenges have me looking at lots of books about witches.
And when I tire of reading, there is an entire world of podcasters ready to tell me their stories. October brings me back to Tanis (https://tanispodcast.com/) and the Black Tapes (https://theblacktapespodcast.com/). They’re both a decade old and haven’t had new episodes in years, but they’re still hauntingly October. When you’re done with those, Rabbits and The Last Movie are in the same vein and from the same people. Want shorter stories? Spooked with Glynn Washington. Spooked has a couple live shows coming up in LA and Oakland if that’s your thing. My friend Chris turned me on to Old Gods of Appalachia some years ago and I listen sporadically, so I never know for sure where we are in the stories (https://www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/. They only have 90 episodes, so maybe I’ll just start over.
Or maybe I’ll work on a story of my own.
I’m listening to the Autumn Equinox episode of the Desert Oracle podcast. If you’re not familiar, you may want to give it a listen. It’s from the Voice of the Desert, Ken Layne, with music from a guy who calls himself RedBlueBlackSilver. I will warn you, it’s not for everyone. But if you have a fondness for the high desert of California, it might be for you.
I think it was October 1st when we left the desert in 1983. I might be off by a day. We got a late start that day because of a series of mishaps with a dirt road and a Uhaul truck. We stayed the night in a motel that had clown artwork. Like creepy clown artwork that was not meant to be creepy but was anyway. I assume we stayed a second night in Napa with my aunt and uncle, but I don’t remember it clearly. I do remember crossing the border into Oregon. I remember passing through Salem. I remember those first few weeks when we stayed with a different aunt and uncle in a weird little house at 114th and Harold.
I’ve only been back to the desert a couple times since, but I miss it. When you have it in your soul, you never really rid yourself of it.
I said yesterday that there is no more October place than Wisconsin, but I think the Mojave is a close second. It’s thousands of square miles of blowing sand and coyotes and lost towns and desert people. It is full of ghosts. You hear them on the wind, you hear them in the howl of those coyotes: souls who lost themselves out there, forever looking for a way home.
I went back last year for the first time in probably three decades. It was as I left it, though some places that I remember as shiny are now a bit tarnished. I drove to the end of the driveway of the house we left so long ago and hopped out of my rental car long enough to steal a few rocks from the middle of the dirt road. Don’t tell anyone.
I was lucky enough to spend time with a family friend, and we went to Joshua Tree to drive through the monument, and to Pioneertown to see some sites. We drove through the parking lot of the church where I once was Mary in the Christmas pageant.
The nostalgia of October is heavy. I guess it’s part of that “the veil between worlds is thin” thing. The past reaches out to you, whispering,”Remember.”
Remember.
octoberthoughtspdx 