October is such a kinetic month for me. Savoring the last vestiges of Summer, welcoming Autumnal festivities and cultural foods. Not quite ready for Winter’s dirge, but acknowledging it’s out there creeping up on me faster and nearer every day.
October is my birth month, and for me it’s a natural dead balls high noon moment to reset my circadian rhythm, to clear my cache so to speak, to unburden past mistakes and cherish past accomplishments. But… October for me is also a fickle month. Most life altering events in my life either have occurred in October, or have roots in the ripples of seemingly non sequitur moments that are born in every day October life. Insignificant events in the daily banality that yield uncomfortably unavoidable results.
About 50 years ago my Dad died suddenly right before my eyes in October just days within my birthday. I hadn’t seen him for years so I unrolled my cash wad and booked a trip there to celebrate renewal of familial friendship as well as my birthday. It all crashed within hours. Damn you fate!
I saw two marriages end in October. Both women abruptly left to pursue single life, so they said. But I soon learned that they both married horrible guys, one of which I personally knew as a human toilet brain had abused both of my children. He’s dead now, I have nowhere to go with that grief, damn you again fate for stealing my punch line! My children and I have quite a fractured relationship and currently we are estranged because some serious professional psychological help is needed and they’re unwilling to go that route.
I was abused as a kid too in October. Attending a Boy Scout Jamboree as an affiliated troop Cub Scout at age 6 in the mountains of western Maryland. A group of older Boy Scouts got me in a tent set up way out on the outskirts of the campground. I eventually found an adult who called my family. My Uncle picked me up, it was at least 200 miles from home, he bitched about being drawn into something he said I should’ve fixed by myself… then he beat me up and had a whack at me too. So… I have this constant conundrum of eagerly anticipating October’s uniqueness tempered with the undigested sadness of Octobers past. I admit, I’m a head case about it all. And I tend toward compartmentalizing all the past gunk into a locked Pandora’s Box until… well damn, it’s October again?
Music has always been part of my life as early as I can remember. I sort of latched onto this song’s pleading story and haunting refrains as a salve to help heal the still bleeding incisions from Octobers past. It’s helped me, along with decades of intense psychotherapy, to not notice the screech of my life’s brakes as October pounded more grief into my soul. In fact, it’s almost bearable. The song was originally written by Sandy Denny before she joined Fairport Convention on their wildly acclaimed 1969 album Unhalfbricking. She’d first made a stripped down reel to reel tape and played it for members of The Strawbs who encouraged her to script it for their upcoming collaboration album that wasn’t released until 1973. It’s rightfully a hippie anthem in its own production. Several cover versions have kept it percolating ever since. But the one version that entered my core is the one quickly recorded by Judy Collins in 1968 after hearing Sandy Denny’s tape, officially becoming the song’s public debut. She’d consulted with Sandy Denny, and with two relatively unknown troubadours at that time Simon and Garfunkel. The mood got a makeover in the style of another 60s-70s folk hero balladeer Leonard Cohen, and after several takes she decided to change one word in the lyrics: she changed “evening sky” to “morning sky” a truer vision of the seasonal migration of wildfowl… and the image of geese fleeting in the iconic V formation bravely defying the cruel elements of weather and endless miles of geography to get to their own personal reset buttons remains a talisman of hope and change for me.
Maybe it’s time to spread my wings too…