Reclaiming October

O suns and skies and flowers of June, 

Count all your boasts together, 

    Love loveth best of all the year 

        October’s bright blue weather.

—Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)

In the early third of this month comes three loaded dates for me. 

I love October. I love Halloween. But each year I have this snag to navigate, three numbers that loom, a trifecta of memory and love and loss. I won’t state them outright, not to be coy, but because I am trying to reclaim them.  

I count down to these dates as early as mid-September, wishing them behind me. The first date goes way back, to a particular someone’s birthday. Why do I remember it? I never remember birthdays. I am reasonably certain that he doesn’t remember mine. I want to un-remember it. Who ever heard of un-remembering? And I know why I remember, of course. Because of how I felt. About him. How I feel about him now makes no difference. It was how I felt at the time.

Years later, and one day off, came a terrible loss. After a long battle with leukemia, my dad died. For twenty-five years the energy on this particular date is off for me. I’ve had half my life to practice this, so I know to wake slowly, walk far, do yoga, be gentle all day. Each year, the day is quieter for me. After so much time, it’s difficult to express grief.  I’m sad today, I might say. Today’s the day my dad died. Oh my gosh! Your dad died!? Well, but it was twenty-five years ago. That feels cheap. If you’ve lost someone and you’ve kept this particular count, you will know exactly what I mean.

More years passed. In graduate school,  I learned that my new, much-loved friend was born in October, right in range of these loaded dates. This felt significant, so now I had a trifecta. Every year when the calendar showed these three swollen cubes, my friend would enter my mind. Then another beloved friend, one of my favorite people ever, revealed that her birthday was just this side of the trifecta. Now it became a quad-fecta.

More birthdays were added. A pet’s death day. So many Events of Significance that this year, I decided I could go ahead and call it the whole month. In October, shit gets real for me. The world is turning, the sun slides lower in the sky. Time itself changes. So what the hell. Do a lot of yoga, light candles, take baths. Open up the receptors, I say. Bring it. Feel the overpowering quiver of the nineteen-year-old in love as deeply as the shattered young woman on the day of her father’s funeral who stands bent over in a cornfield, bawling her head off.  

For years I believed that the violence and truth of the bitter feelings were more lasting and true than the frivolous joy of love. It’s true that we feel grief again and again in a lifetime, but first love only once. It is also true that there is a glorious in between. To all my darling friends born during the autumnal vortex: bless you! How I adore you! How I cherish the honest, dependable blend of love and grief contained in friendship. The steady engine of my women friends, born in October and beyond! Most of you have never met; only my love unites us. In my mind we all live in a big, glorious farmhouse with good beds and a full kitchen. Happy Birthday, my loves! We shall all walk through October gently and openly, feeling this bright blue weather.

Reading Round up: 

Lanny, by Max Porter

Just as deliciously bizarre and original as his first novel, Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Lanny features a ghost, Dead Papa Toothwort. Not one to waste time or words, Porter presents us with the wise-beyond-his-years, spritely outcast Lanny, his not-very-happily married parents, and his old man artist-mentor. Promptly, Lanny disappears. I won’t spoil this for you, but expect to have your heart in your throat. And honestly, why not? Why not have your heart in your throat and just see where it takes you?

I’m reading at the same time, in a way that I never used to do: Hot Milk, by a writer I’ve just discovered and love, Deborah Levy; Death of a Rainmaker, by Laurie Loewenstein, which is a Kaylie Jones Book , something I hope one day to be; and E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. I reported to my book group that Howard’s End was on my Top Ten Books of All Time list. They asked me what else was on that list. Like all serious readers, my group loves lists. Imagine my chagrin when I had to admit that I don’t know. It’s true. I don’t. I’ve cultivated this mysterious list since my early twenties. Here are two things I know about it: it changes, and there are more than ten titles on it. The Milagro Beanfield War began the list. That novel rose above most all other books in my memory when I finished it. I started to add titles to my list, based on that feeling: novels that shone high above everything else I had read. Titles like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

By the time I was thirty, I knew I had more than ten titles in my Top Ten list. Didn’t bother me a bit. The list is based more on sense/feeling than in bullet points. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is on there. So is All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren and A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. The list isn’t limited by the book’s age, or my age when I read it. As I keep reading, more titles are added, yet why should this mean that another title be kicked out? The only criteria I keep are shape and scope. The novels in my Top Ten are elegantly constructed. Meaning I have marveled at all that I held in my mind about characters and plot and time. I know enough about writing by now to understand that this doesn’t happen by accident. If I’m able to hold that much in my mind, the author enabled me to do so. Using her mind, her careful presentation of material and characters and scene order, she enabled me to feel smart, to know a lot at once, and to follow the story through to its end. Brilliant. By scope, I mean the cast. The novels in my Top Ten usually feature more than one principal character, with some exceptions (like The Catcher in the Rye). Part of my astonishment comes from knowing so many people so well that I can predict how they will behave. I carry those people with me in the same way I do all my best friends. I’m grateful for them, and for their authors. 

What’s on your list of Top Ten Books of All Time? How many of these silent, stalwart friends do you carry with you, dear readers? And don’t they make life better and richer and more bearable—even a delight?