Day Fifteen is Seasonal (part 1)

Seasonal (part 1)

I begin to yawn at 5:03 pm. 

This is the first sign that nothing is as it was in the past.  That is, as it was in my past.  This is my second autumn in the east.  My second, colder than I’d known before, darker earlier because the angle of the sun makes it feel like I live just beneath the North Pole, approach of winter. 

It’s really not cold, yet.  Not even in the very early morning, when the red-orange leaves on the ground are frosted, is it cold enough for me to wear anything more than a tee shirt, above a pair of sweatpants, when the need sometimes arises to walk outside with my first morning coffee.  Oh, and slippers.  Not fucking UGGs, mind you, just bedroom slippers. 

On Eyewitness News every day, anchor Liz Cho never misses the chance to tell viewers how “cold it is out there” before handing it over to meteorologist Lee Goldberg, who politely reminds the audience that it’s really a lot closer to late spring weather than it is an early winter, but he can’t convince Liz.  All I know is, having spent more than 60 years in Southern California, this isn’t cold.  Last winter, my first winter in New York, I made snow angels on the same front lawn where I found this morning’s autumn leaves all frosty.  Just like last winter, I was also only wearing a tee shirt, above a pair of sweatpants, with my feet in just a pair slippers.

And we know it’s not dark at noon, right?  Also, this is not a graphic novel about vampires in Barrow, Alaska.  At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.  So what gives with my desire for all the zees, four hours before I turn out the lights?

In my life, I’ve worked all hours of the day, and night, since I got bit by the bug that made me a chronic sufferer of late-stage capitalism, sometime before my eighteenth birthday; when my first adventures on the graveyard shift predated my earliest understanding of the magical properties of coffee.  Nodding off, upright, in a warehouse full of rattan and bamboo, became a normal occurrence for seventeen-year-old, as yet still decaffeinated, Bill, when sleeping all day wasn’t the stigma it might have been, when my years of marriage and child-rearing would make their appearance, a decade-or-so later.

But today, I’m not 17. 

I’ve lived my adventures in, and out of, the light.  Now, there are only so many things I have left that I want to do, and none of them involve dozing off at 5:03 pm.

Next time, the conclusion of, Seasonal.

Talk to you tomorrow.