Well, Thanks

Monday

• One would expect that thanks to God and the Universe would arise in fat times, when everyone is overwhelmed with the bounty of happy being, as exemplified by this marina.  That would misread the perversity of the human spirit. People usually take bounty for granted, and end up complaining about the quality of their silverware, the poor habits of their servants, the evil thoughts of their neighbors, or their own victimization compared to just about everybody else. 
• Days of common thanksgiving, illogically, are usually declared in times of disaster.  The typical exhortation no matter how bad the crisis is “think how much worse it could be!”  My task has always been to reverse that scenario.  I don’t mind complaining bitterly when life is awful, although I hardly ever find it so.  I think it a duty to be thankful every day for everything,  and I am constantly reminding myself how much worse my life and my world could have been.

Tuesday

Thanksgiving Limerick

Earthquake, drought followed by flood

Locusts, fire, war, lost our food

Diseases were gotten

Our cheeses went rotten

At least we ain’t dead yet, thank God

Wednesday

• Birds should be grateful _ lots of berries and fruits still hanging on the tree, as yet undamaged by frost.  The rest of nature is asleep or storing things like nuts where they can be easily found later.  With all that is around, one would suspect there is easily enough for all, that provisions have been made for every tiny being on the planet.  Malthus and Darwin and the rest have proved that idea to be cruelly wrong, a fact which we easily verify for ourselves.
• People are different.  For the first time, we have real opportunity to limit our populations, and guarantee at least food and personal security to just about every human born.  That we do not _ from violence or greed or maladjustment _ is hopefully changing.  Paradigm shifts occur almost by themselves, like US pop culture becoming worldwide, and perhaps the next big one will be finally that all folks on the planet are in this together and will thankfully share the overwhelming bounty being created.

Thursday

Curt was, as usual, complaining as we waited in line at the supermarket.

“So you didn’t have such a nice thanksgiving, even with all the family over?”

“Oh, it was nice enough, especially in principle _ we know we should get together once in a while.  But geez, what a bunch of complainers.  The adults were whining ignorant envious wimps.  Their kids were worse _ vicious unappreciative grasping monsters.”

“Ah, c’mon,” I try to cheer him up.  “People are always like that, always were like that, when they get together with people they trust.”

“I don’t think so. Well, maybe.  I did get sick of being told how easy my life had been, the fifties were a utopian lark, the sixties were our indulgent fools’ paradise,  and you know they truly believe we never had to worry about anything.  But, oh them!  Woe, impossible to find decent jobs, insecure about everything.  Their house is huge, but someone else’s is huger, their car is nice but they want something nicer, the kitchen was done over, but it’s already starting to show its age.  And horrors, Adam is not as brilliant and focused as Jennie, Heather loafed the summer and missed out on soccer camp.  What garbage.  They have no idea what they have.”

“Surely, we have been the same.”

“Nah,” he grumped, “Nah.  I’ve always been happy and properly grateful for a wonderful life, even during harder times.  Them, no matter what, they think their world is going to hell and pretty hellish to be in right now and they can’t understand what they are supposed to be so thankful about.  Stupid little twits all of them.”

“So it actually was horrible time,” I finally agreed.

“No, of course it was great.  We love our family.  Whatever gave you that impression?”

Friday

• Amazingly warm weather continues.  Nice for anyone taking advantage of it outside.  No doubt bad for the planet.  But that is true of many things, and there is always a question how much we enjoy the moment at the expense of losing the future.  We need to be thankful for each day, each minute of grace.  And yet we should also be grateful that there have been pasts which we can remember, and there will presumably be futures that we can imagine.
• I realize that personally there is little I can do to stop planetary warming on my own.  There are enough shrill voices.  My own contribution to climate change is miniscule _ I hardly drive, take maybe one plane trip a year, and try to be conscious of reusing materials.  But that makes no difference.  So I enjoy the lovely temperature, putter around my yard, and without too much guilt leave worries of the future to the future.  I guess I should also be grateful I can do that.

Saturday

By any measure I have been among the most fortunate of people.  I never deserved to be born, and I surely never deserved my good fortunes.  I was willing to do what was necessary: to love, to work, to appreciate, to hope.  Rewards tumbled all about, and all I needed to do was be willing to recognize them.

There are many unhappy people, or at least I so gather _ most of those I actually know seem content enough.   For much of the world this has been a measurably better time than most of the past, and it is a well-known historic fact that after such improvements is when revolutions usually occur.  Perhaps there is about to be a revolution.  Maybe it will even be a good one, for a change.

Some worry about social trends, some about climate change, some about falling populations, some about overcrowding, some about things I know nothing of.  The best of times, they cry, the worst of times.  Don’t I realize that ….  Whatever. Wake up do something.

What I do beyond the boundaries of my yard has little impact.  What is one drop among seven billion identical to me?  Life has always been out of control, the future has always been unknowable, and yet somehow we arrived here in these interesting times.

So I wake up and give thanks.  I walk and give thanks.  I fill myself with food and give thanks.  I am grateful I can think, and sleep, and still do many things.  The only proper reaction to being alive and conscious is to be awed.  Those who give those miracles up to preach despair are, I firmly believe, simply fools.

Sunday

• Sometimes, naturally, being Pollyanna all the time becomes wearing.  It is a rare person indeed who never has negative feelings about their place in the world.  That is especially true after trying so hard to look at the bright side of things for a week.
• I suppose I have ups and downs like anyone.  What have I done, where am I going, what’s the use of it all.  Silly, but there it is, just as real as being happy for all I have.  As day breaks, I know my task is to once more try harder to celebrate all that is.  A somber close to a wonderfull week.
•  

Shrinkage

Monday

• With more indoor time enforced, with greater preparations required for wandering in the open, with occasional thoughts of ice and snow, with shorter days and longer shadows and less powerful sun _ autumn is traditionally a period of shrinking inwards.  Of course there are busy tasks to prepare for harsh winter, but everything tends to contract towards home and hearth.  The natural world seems much less jubilant and sensual, an evil shadow of what it once had been a month or so ago.
• Technology has changed most of that.  Work and home continue as always, hours and tasks unaffected now that there is electricity, commerce, and interchange.  Saturnalian end-of-year festivals engage all our free time, weather is irrelevant _ even huge blizzards mostly an inconvenience if they bother to show up at all.  I’d be a fool to lament this easier and happier existence.  I’m willing to keep my toes in nature, try to stay in tune with the slowed rhythms, but I never lament being warm, well fed, and active.

Tuesday

Hibernation.  An idea

Whose time has come again.

Wait out the cold, the freeze, the wind

Dream beyond the pain.

Safe underground, safe in our beds,

Safe behind our walls

Safely retreated from the world

Safe stuffed deep in our halls.

We all know illusion’s charm

And though that may sound sweet

Monsters lurk, if not destroyed,

Will kill us as we sleep.

Wednesday

• These ruins of a pump house at Coindre Hall seem appropriate as the temperature drops.  Destruction, decay, and forgetfulness play an underlying theme in late November.  Winter may be the hopeless season when all seems lifeless and going outdoors is an act of defiant desperation, but autumn resembles a warning.  That is seized upon by philosophers and theologians to remind people how insignificant each one is in the vast universe.
• I have no idea where I fit into “the” universe, but in my universe I am the main event.  Today is magnificent, life is wonderful, and I look forward to tomorrow.  What I do is consequential to what will happen in my environment.  Deeper thoughts of cold logical philosophy and nagging intuitive religion rarely color my underlying consciousness moment by moment.  Even in autumn.  Perhaps that is a fool’s happiness, but such joy is real for me.

Thursday

“Hi, Jim, finally need the gloves, eh?”

“Yeah, summer’s fled, I guess.”

“Any big plans for the holidays or afterward.”

“Oh, the usual.  Family over for Christmas, of course.  Then we’re off to Florida for a few weeks beginning of February.  Not looking forward to it, to tell you the truth.”

“Sounds nice to me.”

“Ah, but I have everything I want at home.  Books, TV, food, routines, comforts.  I admit I don’t get out much, and certainly not far away, but I don’t miss it.”

“I share that.  Guess we’re both getting old.  When I was younger nothing seemed too big an adventure.  Now it sometimes seems an effort to even go grocery shopping on Saturday.”

“Some people age with lots of energy and are always doing stuff.”

“True.  Not me.  I like to take my time now. Frankly, I don’t envy them.  I always think they’re missing what I found.”

“Well, soon enough we’ll have spring and summer again, and more than we can handle around here.”

“Speak for yourself,” I laugh, “I’ve still got lots of leaves and other cleanup to keep me busy for weeks.  Not to mention cleaning  _ like you _ for holiday visitors.”

Friday

• Last lingering reminders are still all around, like these roses blooming into the teeth of an approaching storm.  Some days are still warm.  Fine outdoor sights and weather can be appreciated more now that they are endangered.  Someone who has just escaped catastrophe, or knows vacation is about to end, can easily discover fresh joy from previously mundane surroundings.
• I am the luckiest of creatures, blessed with memory and means to organize it so the past lies open.  That which I have experienced does not easily disappear.  Even trapped in freezing snowdrifts,  I can remember daffodils and autumn oaks, things I have done, people I have known.  My entire lifeline lies open to my consciousness, so that even when I sink seemingly bounded into a comfortable chair, I remain the king of infinite time and space.

Saturday

• I remain happiest in climates similar to that in which I grew up in Pennsylvania.  Anybody can justify anything, of course, so as I reflect on how fine it is to have seasons, I must also realize that perhaps that is because they attach strongly to my own past.  I like to think seasonal patterns teach us all something healthy, a perspective that we lose when we totally control all climate and always follow an identical daily routine.
• Predictable seasonal patterns _ wet and dry, or cold and hot, or whatever _ are the most obvious about which to moralize, but in fact all life has cyclical patterns of some type.  Even in the unchanging desert or ever-soaked rain forest there are differences between night and day.  But I think where no part of a cycle lingers with some potency, there is a tendency to believe things are eternal and unchanging.  Those of us enjoying _ or afflicted by _ strong contrasts as the year turns are more likely to believe ongoing gain and loss is inevitable.
• We anthropomorphize even wind and rain, even length of daily sunlight.  Suddenly I may believe my life has entered its autumn, as frailty strikes not only me, but all those my age that I know.  This melancholy may extend to worrying about a final winter I may not survive.  What is the correct reaction?
• Clutch closely that all that is around me?  That hardly works, like hiding under a tree in the rain, I will eventually get wet.  Clutching does little more than make my worries impossible.   Let go of everything and live for the moment?  Unfortunately, the possibilities of my moments are somewhat curtailed compared to when I was young and strong, and in spite of my “accepting my age” most of the time there will be unwelcome consequences for paying no attention to tomorrow.
• My solution is to project my inward thoughts out to the seasonal attributes.  Watching trees and birds and rain and long evenings is an enjoyment always available.  Understanding or fantasizing is a pleasure never fading.  My physical possibilities, in this season and at this age, may indeed be shrinking, but that need not affect my mind and soul.

Sunday

• An almost mad dash to the south for sunset each evening.  People exclaim they can’t believe it is getting dark already.  Trees have assumed their interlacing skeletal frames for the coming snows.  No wonder that ancient peoples made a ritual of end of year worries that the night might become eternal.  No wonder that we do the same.
• A month from now the sun’s race southward slows, stops, and begins a slow return after winter solstice.  Even though the heart of winter remains, that is a time of beginning hope.  But these final weeks until that rebirth are psychologically difficult.  The contracting constriction of everything natural strikes deep into our soul, a longer chord similar to circadian rhythm that we may ignore, but experience unconsciously nevertheless.

True Fall

Monday

• Foliage dimming brown, bare branches evident, this is the week when the bulk of the drying leaves come down.  Each gust of wind brings another shower of gently floating detritus.  Each morning, no matter how spotless the evening before, ground is covered as if with dust or brown frost.  Sometimes capricious winds will sweep one area bare, pile another corner high.
• I have always considered fall named for this unavoidable shower of vegetation.  Now I refuse to look up the true etymology_ sometimes it is nice to hold on to personal myths if they bother nobody else.  I think, at least around here, I remain one of the few people who think a few leaves on a lawn enhances it and makes it real _ spotless is for sterile indoor malls or obsessively clean rugs, not nature.  However tame we try to make it.   

Tuesday

Frost rain wind cold sun, morning surprise

Annoying random waves and piles, thick or thin

Soggy leaves, or crisp.

Dappled lawn affront to neighbor’s eyes

Leather gloves, pull rake and plastic bags from bin

Hours building drifts 

All undone by nightfall, next sunrise,

Many more fall down, blown to our yard by winds

“Again,” wife insists.

Wednesday

• Classical European landscape artists rarely depict autumn.  In backgrounds of Italian Renaissance painters, it’s always summer.  The Dutch and French occasionally portray winter, but even there the greatest _ Ruisdael, Hobbema _ stick mostly to the times when green fills their worlds.  On the other hand, almost the first American landscapes are of color-draped Catskills or Long Island farms after harvest.
• Europe has colorful trees _ my wife and I have seen them in Paris in October, walking through Pere Lachaise.  Rather the explanation is convention and opportunity.  Until the 1800;s, painting had to be done in studios where paints could be prepared and mixed.  Summer was for sketching outside, then the real paintings were done over the winter based on the drawings.  Only with the advent of factory colors did artists venture outside, and even then most of the impressionists found working in autumn wind and rain a bit too challenging.  Anyway, I enjoyed remembering all this as I strolled through the Metropolitan museum yesterday, while heavy drizzle brought down the leaves outside in Central Park.

Thursday

I’d just gotten a large stack together at the end of the driveway _ about halfway through my leaf-raking journey around the house.  Jay came walking by, on his daily perambulation of the neighborhood, and waved a cheerful greeting.  “Ready to burn them now?” he laughed.

“What, and have someone call the fire department?” I replied.

“Or worse, the police.  I’m sure it’s illegal somehow.”

“Yeah, sure has changed,” I noted.  “My dad and I always just put them in a big pile out in the back yard and had a bonfire.  I mean a big pile, not like this little thing.  Lots of fire, smoke, but everyone was doing it.  You could smell it for weeks around our place.”

“Ah, the joys of environmental awareness,” he commented.

“I just can’t see how _ for example _ everyone in these suburbs burning a few leaves once a year comes anywhere close to the oxidation from all those forest fires out west, or in Australia, Europe, and Malaysia over the summer.  Seems kind of silly.”

“Yeah, I agree,” he said.  “Besides, there’s a lot more pollution of all kinds from blowers and using plastic bags and having big trucks take them to the dump.  I doubt anyone has ever done a scientific study.  Just one of those things that crept up on us.”

“Damn crazy regulated world.”

“Maybe.  But you and certainly your wife would no doubt complain if everyone else were smoking up the place, and blackening the walls, getting soot in the house.  Some smoke like poison ivy is even dangerous.”

“Didn’t bother us way back when,” I protest.  “And Alders down the street always has a fireplace going smoking up everything anyway.”

“So run for town council,” he smiled.  “Anyway, the exercise is good for you.”

“You sound too much like my wife,” I grumped.  More leaves swirled down on a stronger gust of wind.

Friday

• A few days of rain, a few nights of cold, a few more days of wind and the landscape is new.  Ground spaces previously cleared are filled once more.  Trees have lost at least half their canopy, some branches stripped bare.  While the leaves remain wet, it’s a waiting game because dry stuff is a lot easier to clean up, blow, bag, and carry. 
• For me, this is the heart of autumn, past the fairy tale colors and suspicious warmth.  A season has arrived for real, and there will be cold and there will be precipitation and there certainly will be increasing darkness.  Our sun sets at four thirty, and even the mornings are grey and mournful.  In a few weeks, all the foliage will be cleaned up, all the winter clothes on display, and soon yard lights will futilely try to add cheer to arriving solstice.  

Saturday

• Raking leaves, one thinks of the carbon cycle we all learned in elementary school: animals eating, breathing oxygen and churning out carbon dioxide while plants turn CO2 into food and oxygen.  Visible sequestration of carbon seems to swirl all around us at this time of year, the end result of the mighty lungs of the huge forests of Eastern North America.
• If we worry about climate, it tends to center on carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in prodigious quantities by industry, or perhaps by the destruction of lung forests such as those of New York or the Amazon.  What will happen as our air goes increasingly out of balance?
• But, like many things, these ideas are far too simplified.  The leaves sequester carbon for a while, of course, but rapidly decay on forest floors, often consumed by microorganisms that release carbon dioxide more efficiently than the larger mammals.  Volcanoes and forest fires can release amounts of CO2 that dwarf anything produced by human activities, at least for a while.  And much of the carbon cycle is actually accomplished by things much less obvious than broadleaf deciduous trees.
• We easily realize that grasses and shrubs do their part, and with a little effort will admit that algae and seaweed do the same.  Perhaps we do not quite understand how much of the balance is done by those less obvious plants, but at least we respect their efforts.  Even there, we may not realize how much of a part in the cycle oceans and their inhabitants play, making most of the land efforts puny by comparison.
• But the truly astonishing thing is that much of the oxygen in the atmosphere is accomplished by oceanic viruses.  Science still struggles to understand it all.  Surely that matters a great deal to the health of the planet, but who wants to see viruses as necessary and good (especially since we cannot see them at all)?
• Leaves are useful obvious metaphors for the interconnection of life on earth.  Like so many of the metaphors we love they are incomplete and almost, but not quite, so misleading as to be wrong.  Consider that the next time you brush one off your shoulder in November gusts.

Sunday

• In less than five days this year just about everything is on the ground.  Oh, the more stubborn leaves will hang on for a few months, trickling down to annoy those who prefer spotless.  Only the hard freeze has held off, so there are still ragged spots of brilliant color in some gardens.  Anyone outside today knows this is the end of the year.
• I’ve seen roses right up until Christmas, in sheltered locations.  A few trees remain green turning yellow, as if they are the last poor victims in a plague ward.  But there is no doubt that this was a good week to dub the heart of fall.  

Cohesive Complexity

Monday

• All that is, is.  Everything is connected to everything else in space and time, sometimes in unknowable ways.  Even in a simple scene such as this, invisible radio and x-ray radiation surrounds all, countless neutrinos pass by, and dark matter, dark energy, and spiritual values are unknowable.  To believe that any element can be an island is an illusion.
• Society seems just as interconnected, and just as complex.  Each of us is a complete universe, and a group of us is almost an impossibility.  Our hubristic illusion, fostered by our scientific outlook, is that somehow we can break society into little elements like “government” and then control each piece in isolation.  That’s a dangerous fallacy.

Tuesday

Wisdom treads fearful

Sensing complication

Waits

Universe moves on
Wednesday

• Away from the water, this is one of the most spectacular autumns ever.  Experts try to predict which years will be particularly colorful, but none dare try earlier than July.  And even a week ago, nobody could plan a day reaching nearly seventy degrees.  Times like these are when industrially scheduled jobs are the most painful for those who must remain indoors, because this special confluence of wonder cannot last long.
• Walking on my way to vote, I remembered that three years ago, doing the same task, I left a frigid home which had been without power for days, and I dodged fallen trees all the way.  Nobody had predicted that superstorm either.  If we cannot determine such simple things, what ignorant hubris must be driving us to believe that changing a tax rate or extending a jail sentence will have a known outcome years from now.

Thursday

John’s sitting on a bench in the park, watching the swans run along the water to take off.  “Got another traffic ticket for turning too soon.”

“One of those automatic cameras?” I ask.

“Yeah.  Stupid things.  Nanny state.  Full stop on red instead of common sense when nobody is around.  What can you do?  Government regulation and power …”

“Just part of law and order.” I reply smiling.

“Never goes after the ones they really should catch anyway.”

“Which is everybody else, no doubt.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose,” he admits.

“What did they say _ ‘if men were angels there would be no need for government.’”

“As I recall,” he notes, “the angels in Paradise Lost didn’t do any better than people.”

“The problem is,” I remark, “that we switch roles so easily.  If I’m a pedestrian crossing here at the light I curse the stupid drivers who don’t slow down.  But if I’m a driver I curse the pedestrians paying absolutely no attention to me.  I always think I should have the right of way, you know?”

“Cameras don’t care,” he notes glumly.

“Price of progress,” I say as I continue with my laps around the pond.

Friday

• Heavy fog, unnoticed by bats, fish, trees, and probably dogs.  Organisms, according to current theory, inhabit a restricted umwelt of which they are aware.  Nothing else is perceived.  Fog is invisible to a bat using echolocation, or to a dog primarily aware of smells.  Anything outside the umwelt simply does not exist.
• Science claims we extend our umwelt with technology, and although I have never experienced radio waves, neutrinos or nuclear forces in a carbon atom, I concede they are “real.”  Some people claim they foresee the future, or talk to the dead, or hear meaning in the universe.  I am not vouchsafed such abilities or illusions, yet I am less dogmatically sure about such things than I once was.  I am too well aware of my own umwelt to swear that all the fogs I cannot perceive are someone else’s fantasy.

Saturday

• This culture is afflicted with what may be called “simplistic utopianism.”  If only one thing could be changed, the world would become a paradise.  If only this swamp were drained, if only this forest were cleared, if only taxes were lowered, if only I were left alone, if only everyone could be made to work, if only all agreed on what was right.  Yet doing any of those things, even successfully, has side effects and produces its own set of problems and paradise continues to slide away.
• We have only recently become aware of impossibly intricate webs of ecology in nature.  My favorite example is a simple one:  in India, killing all the cobras menacing people tending rice fields seemed a simple “silver bullet” to make life better.  But the natural prey of cobras are rats, and without predators the rats multiplied geometrically, ate the rice, and caused the dirt dikes _ the result of centuries of work _ to collapse as they burrowed freely.  Dealing with cobras is awful.  Getting rid of cobras has costs.
• Society is even more complex than ecology, because each individual is a complete universe.  Degrade poor people enough and they will either willingly die or revolt.  Redistribute wealth and some things taken for granted _ parks and museums and new hospital wings _ may no longer exist. 
• The “Goldilocks” society in which we live has evolved just as fiercely and purposefully as any fruit fly species.  Nooks and crannies that make no sense, annoyances that would seem to be easy to eliminate, idiotic and convoluted chunks of daily life _ all possess some purpose.  Eliminating the wrong ones may leave us without the dikes we take for granted, and civilization may degenerate into the family and tribe Hobbesian struggle now apparent in the Mideast and parts of Africa.
• I am not against draining swamps, clearing forests, or killing cobras.  Ecology also informs us all is in constant flux, and change may be good, change may come no matter what we do.  But I do insist that we realize nothing is simple, no “if only” will produce utopia, and we should worry more about side effects before we begin to slice our culture into something better.

Sunday

• The thing about everything is that it is so unexpected, because we ignore it until we don’t.  We’re so busy talking, thinking, planning, driving, or doing something requiring concentration that much of the world never exists in our perception.  Like in that famous experiment where people instructed to count the number of passes in a video of a basketball game never see a gorilla that is walking casually through the scene.
• I know I miss an awful lot of gorillas every moment.  Even more distressingly, even the ones I take note of fade as time goes by.  That’s one reason I am less certain of what I am certain of these days.      

Exercising Ghosts

Monday

• American Halloween has become a surprising world export.  Costumed people, carved pumpkins, ghosts and tombstones and giant spider webs now appear in Europe and China.  Perhaps it is because these fears are so imaginary that they banish real ones for a while.  Nobody comes dressed as a crazed serial killer, drunken driver, cancer patient, religious cult maniac, or any of the other terrors truly to be feared daily, even by the most well-off.
• Originally, I suppose, “hallowed eve”  was a sly counterpoint to “all saints day” in the Catholic European calendar, something to make the dull saints themselves more appealing.  Maybe it safely encapsulated pagan traditions of druids and ghosts and witches into one well-contained night.  But it took American ingenuity and perversity (and the imagination of Washington Irving) to turn it into candy and dress-up. Since it is one of the few holidays not associated with pompous tradition _ no commentators are spouting off about “remembering the true meaning of this day” _ folks are just glad to have a chance to celebrate being alive in a slightly crazy way. 

Tuesday

I don’t fear goblins, ghosts, or ghouls,

Vampire’s silent flight,

No poltergeists come haunt my dreams

I love the still of night.

Chainsaw clowns bring no alarm

Zombie hordes no dread

Nor headless horsemen swinging swords 

Giant spiders prowling webs.

I have my worries _ pain and age,

Illness striking deep

Shrinking finance, loss of home,

These all disturb my sleep

But let young children trick or treat

False terrors cause shrill screams

The real world is what bothers me

As lovely as it seems.

Wednesday

• This boathouse falling into ruin is probably as close as Huntington Harbor comes to a traditional haunted castle.  It’s easy to imagine mad scientists, rats in the flooded basement, bats in the belfry.  And a sinister lightning rod raised into roaring gales some dark and stormy night.
• Modern mad scientists don’t need abandoned mansions nor liquids bubbling ominously amidst incomprehensible apparatus.  They sit munching Cheetos and drinking cola in some dark room, as they peck away at computer code that will end civilization as we know it.  Doesn’t make nearly so good a movie, but the story is excessively frightening just the same.

Thursday

“Hey, Jim, what’s new?” I asked, pausing outside the library.

“Grandkids scared me to death, making me take them to the movies.  I didn’t even know they made stuff like ‘Prince Vlad Goes Mad At Home Depot, Part III.’”

“Sounds strange enough, I admit.”

“You have no idea what can be done with the chainsaws and other stuff from the tool section during a hurricane blackout …”

“Are the kids all right?”

“Oh, them, they laughed through the whole thing.  Me, I have trouble sleeping.  What ever happened to stuff like the headless horseman or witches in the forest?  That, I could handle.”

“Maybe when you were younger,” I mused.  “I was always unable to take any suspense.”

“What?”

“Strange, but I needed to know the ending.  It was not knowing how it would turn out that I couldn’t stand.”

“Well,” he laughed, “at least that made your own life easy.”

“How so?”

“You always knew , like the rest of us, the inevitable end of that story.”

“A mean, low blow, Jim,” I managed.

“Happy Halloween!” he chortled.

Friday

• Cemeteries are haunted by ghosts, which inhabit each human mind.  Some ghosts are of the past, of times that are no more, of people who once meant much to us or to their worlds.  Some are of futures and where we might be and how we could be remembered.  Some are hopes into the vast unknown about what life really is.  All these ghosts truly accompany us amidst the stones, here in the present.
• Depending on your outlook, cemeteries are interesting, or meditative, or depressing.  And that too is because all interpretation on Halloween, as on every other day, resides in ourselves.  Our responsibility is to achieve insight from these spaces, and apply it well to what we can affect now.

Saturday

• We believe other “higher” animals engage in play, but none so completely as humans.  We have the capacity to encapsulate all kinds of information into metaphors, tales, riddles, dreams, and songs and somehow all that helps us survive in our world.  Play is a miraculous gift, we can shape our world magically to fit our needs.
• Tragic or triumphant tales of evil spirits, for example, are a playful way to put our lives into perspective.  We can face ghostly danger, even allow ourselves to be terrorized by it, while nevertheless retaining some control of the narrative.  Sometimes such play gets out of hand, when imaginings project balefully into our environment _ such as blaming problems on a witch or demon-possessed other .  But usually we understand that the spiritual world is truly beyond our immediate reach and control.
• An ability to play is a survival skill for consciousness.  At Halloween, for example, we direct can pretend to be something else, to imagine a world controlled differently than our daily one, to ignore usual mundane roles. 
• Halloween and other holidays help us realize that what is normal may not be the only way things could be.  That’s what play is all about _ imagining alternatives and sometimes using them to create a better reality.

Sunday

• Foliage mellows into subdued colorations; crisp breezes slice through patches of warmer air; ducks land with splashes as geese fly noisily overhead.  People either decide it’s time to return to the climate controlled gym or bundle up appropriately.  Fall not yet fierce, but definitely arrived.
• I feel bewitched and kick the leaf-piles along the street, an expression of the child I still think I am.  Most people have now shed their costume, unfortunately I am still clad in mine which is bald and wrinkled and much more than skin deep.