October is simply my favorite month in the year. This harvest season when the world winds down for its winter nap. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are all well and good, but they are family events. October is when you snuggle under the blankets and do a sort of individual inventory or take long walks on damp streets. The days are still warm, but the nights cool and moist with fog. Snow hasn't arrived, but the leaves are going to their death in a blaze of glory. So here is my annual tribute to October:
Last Chances
Fall, even the name says down
Crushed into the earth.
The leaves of autumn become
No more than mulch, sacrificing what has been
To a future spring.
Foot falls, damp, the lamps of
Twilight wash sidewalks
Already wet with fog
Old songs filter through
The air thick with might have been.
Low moaning of horns and whining of clarinets
Speak of places at the end of a bar,
Old movies, and mysterious women in black
A time when gravity finally wins
To take hold of a year almost done.
This week's Take This Tune is Barry Manilow's "When October Goes". As I stated on the prompt page, this is simply one of my favorite "forever" songs. One of those songs that have so many memories connected to it that they all come alive with the sound of the first few chords.
The dearest friend I have ever had in my life passed away in September of 1984. As this story goes, you will find it is important to know that he played piano. As is often true of such events, it didn't truly register at first. It was simply too soon as he was only 50. there was grief and tears, but courtesy of that protective numbness that often sets in, the full impact of the loss didn't hit for more than a month. They tell you not to make important decisions at such a time with the rule of thumb being to wait one month for every year you have known someone that close. This advice exists for one simple reason. You don't know it, but you are insane.
By that standard, I should barely have moved until the following June. Instead, I quit one job, left a state that had been my home for 40 years, got on a plane for a destination 3000 miles away with less than a $1,000 in my bank account, knowing only one person who would let me crash for a couple of weeks, with absolutely no prospects. I found a new job and place to live and by the end of November established a whole new life. Was I running away? I couldn't have been running any faster if there had been a rocket in my tail.
By coincidence in that November, Barry Manilow released his jazz album: 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe. After years of "power ballads" and international mania, he went back to his roots ... a piano, surrounded by friends who made and loved music. The first song off the album that I heard was a fun duet with Mel Torme, "Big City Blues" .
Much of my life has been
spiced with romance
Too many bedrooms I've
slept in by chance
Drownin' out my sorrow
Longin' for tomorrow
Caught up in the big city blues
That song definitely got my attention. The following songs were backed by some of the best jazz musicians of the era: Shelly Manne, Gerry Mulligan, and Mundell Lowe. The NPR announcer kept talking about Barry's decision to do this album and doing selections while merrily chatting about how Manilow was personally entrusted by Johnny Mercer's widow with lyrics never used at the time of his death. Then for the first time I heard the gorgeous "When October Goes". If you love music and lyrics truly hit your core with recognition of personal events, you will know what I mean when I say the song destroyed me.
And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And you are in my arms
To share the happy years
Down came the shielding walls; down came the protective coating; down came the arms' distance separating me and really feeling loss. You can't get past grief until you confront it, and that song heard for the first time literally made me scream. Then it put me back together again.
It is amazing how just accepting a loss can start to heal the wound. You have to admit it in order to get past it. It is now 25 years later. To this day, if I happen to be in a piano bar with a player who knows his business, I will request what has now become a jazz standard. If it happens to be in the fall, there is a special poignancy and a tender smile for beautiful memories as I lift a toast to a special person and the first month of October when he was no longer there.
I should be over it now I know
It doesn't matter much
How old I grow
I hate to see October go
