Birthday

Autumn, A Fine Time Of Year

Yeah, Another Blogger157 Comments

For many years, autumn has been my favorite season, though I guess spring has been gaining ground in that regard. In any case, summer and winter sure ain’t contenders, as I’m not into sweating like a pig nor freezing my balls off.

What is it that puts autumn at the top? Well, the coolish daytime-high temperatures of many of its days please me just fine. And I’m influenced, I believe, by the fact that I’m an October baby. It seems logical to be a fan of the season during which one was born. Actually, I wonder how much truth is in that statement. I’m not sure.

But what I like the most about fall is tree leaves changing color, a spectacle I can’t get enough of. I feel sorry for folks who live in sections of the globe where the extravaganza isn’t staged. In a very real sense, they are being cheated. Many of the deciduous trees in my area have been doing their morphing thing for several weeks, and are looking mighty fine.

I live in a tidy, oldish and unusually hilly neighborhood, part of a town located close to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. In an attempt to keep my bod in halfway-decent shape, I go for walks in the hood fairly regularly. A stroll along the streets two Thursdays ago was a most lovely one. The temperature when I left the house at about 11:00 AM was 57°F (14°C), which was a little lower than it would have been if I were in charge of things, but perfectly acceptable nonetheless. What’s more, the sky was painted a vivid blue, with wads of clouds scattered here and there along its lower regions. I examined the sky closely throughout the walk, since the heavens above almost always are worth looking at and admiring. I’ve been semi-negligent about doing this for much of my life, and recently have tried to become more attentive. A walk I took and wrote about a few months ago got me thinking along those lines.

The color transformations on the Thursday in question knocked my socks off. Shades of orange, gold and cranberry, among others, lit up the neighborhood fabulously. I was particularly drawn to the trees laden in both orange and gold hues. They knew they were something special and proudly showed off their wares. But not boastfully. That’s how confident and assured they were about themselves. The mixture of those colors got to me in a deep way. Not only was it fiery, almost paradoxically it was mellow too.

By the time I arrived home, I had hiked nearly two miles, farther than I was expecting to. Tree leaves with mesmerizing powers had kept me on the streets. Sad to say, the multi-color show will have reached the end of its run by late November, if not sooner. That’s the way Nature rolls.

In 1972, Van Morrison, the singer-songwriter who at age 80 is still going strong, laid down the tracks for Hard Nose The Highway, an album that was released the following year and whose awkward title refers to the importance of trying to persevere through hard times. There are some top-notch tunes on Hard Nose. Maybe the best is Autumn Song, a Van composition that instantly carries me away, so sweet and relaxed is it. The best time and place to listen to Autumn Song, I believe, is late on a fall night, indoors with the lights turned off or way down low. But, with few exceptions, any hour of any day at any location will do just fine. The recording is more than 10 minutes long, by the way. Autumn Song doesn’t overstay its visit, though, because it’s a total charmer. Here it is, anxiously waiting for you to click on the Play button.

Happy Birthday, Sandy!

Yeah, Another Blogger150 Comments

Seeing that a person’s birthday comes but once a year, celebrating it in a substantial way is a damn good idea. Even though my wife Sandy and I don’t always follow that philosophy, a couple of weeks ago we did. Having booked a hotel room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA for Sandy’s birthday (the big day itself, plus the two days bookending it), we dipped into The City Of Brotherly Love’s many offerings and, as is almost always the case when we’re there, had a fine time.

Jules Goldman Books And Art, an eye-popping store.
Empty building that once housed the Painted Bride Art Center. Isaiah Zagar’s mosaic mural covers the building.
A portion of the mosaic mural at the rear of the building.

What did we do? We had two great restaurant dinners, for one thing, meals that we won’t soon forget. We took in a movie (Barbie, which Sandy, unlike me, liked a lot). We wandered into Jules Goldman Books And Art, one of the most mind-blowingly jumbled stores I’ve ever seen. And we gazed in wonder at the mosaic mural (by Isaiah Zagar) covering all sides of the long-vacant building that once housed the Painted Bride Art Center. Sandy and I saw loads of terrific music and dance performances at the Bride, and truly miss it. (The Painted Bride Art Center still exits. It’s at a different location now, and is but the merest shadow, arts-wise, of its former world-class self.) The building’s and the mosaic mural’s fates, tied up in litigation for a number of years, are uncertain. Demolition is a real possibility. If that comes to pass, Philadelphia will lose a treasure.

The painting popularly known as Whistler’s Mother.

The birthday girl and I also went to the Philadelphia Museum Of Art. In that enormous institution we viewed hundreds of artworks, including the world-famous painting popularly known as Whistler’s Mother, on loan from a museum in Paris. I was expecting to poo-poo the picture, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. It’s a well-designed creation, quite riveting, whose true title (Arrangement In Grey And Black No. 1) is a good description of what the artist James Whistler was going after, and accomplished, when his mother Anna posed for him in 1871.

The building in which I once lived (Clinton Street, Philadelphia).

I could mention plenty more activities, but I’ll limit myself to one. A very personal one. Namely, our visit to a central Philadelphia neighborhood we both were familiar with, and within which we very likely crossed paths many years before we formally met in 1990.

I moved to Philadelphia in 1974, taking up residence on Clinton Street, a leafy block with any number of fine old houses. I lived there for 14 months in an apartment building, the one nondescript structure on Clinton, during which time Sandy worked two blocks away. Did we pass one another, maybe more than once, on the street? Did we chow down in a neighborhood eatery at the same time? We’ll never know, but I’m guessing yes. On the day before her birthday, we reminisced about those long-ago days as we strolled along a bunch of blocks in the Clinton Street area.

To continue: As noted above, our paths crossed in 1990. Meaningfully too. This occurred at a singles event near Philadelphia’s Delaware River waterfront. Sandy and I, each of us far removed from our Clinton-Street-neighborhood days, clicked right from the start and have been together ever since. I don’t believe in fate or anything like that. But it’s cool that, unbeknownst to us, we were part of the same picture all those years before, in a sense just waiting for our stories to entwine.

Now, this being a piece about a special occasion, I’ll conclude the proceedings with blasts of good cheer and high energy. And I’ll turn to The Beatles to handle the honors. Their hard-rocking song Birthday appears on what has come to be known as The White Album. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote Birthday quickly in the recording studio in September 1968. A few hours later, the band, McCartney handling lead vocals, put it on tape. Man, in no time at all a classic was birthed.

It’s inarguable that Paul McCartney calling Sandy and singing Birthday over the phone to her would be better than my presenting her with The Beatles’ recorded version. Maybe one day, in an alternate universe, that will happen. But for now, the original, in all its glory, will suffice beautifully. And so, once again . . . happy birthday, Sandy!

Autumnal Thoughts, Autumnal Tunes

Yeah, Another Blogger149 Comments

Planet Earth, which we humans increasingly have been making a mess of since the Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s, nonetheless has remained reliable in various ways. It keeps on spinning, for one thing, and traveling around the Sun, for another. Good thing that it does, no? If those movements were thrown out of whack, we, along with every entity taking up earthly space, would be goners in a couple of blinks of an eye.

Well, as we know, on the 22nd of September those good ol’ reliable movements brought about the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox in, respectively, the northern and southern hemispheres. This was due to the Sun being directly above the equator, by the way. For me, a resident of the north, this event officially marked the beginning of my favorite time of year — fall — and prompted me to gather some thoughts about that season. Here they are, along with a few recordings that capture fall’s cozy, mellow essence. Damn straight, I’m in an autumnal mood!

This is the main reason why I like autumn as much as I do: I was born in late October, smack in the heart of fall. And my birthday has been lovingly acknowledged and celebrated, by one combination of people or another, every year of my life. Over time it became only natural for me to associate autumn with my birth anniversary. How could I not, seeing that autumn never fails to whisper frequent reminders in my ear about the approaching big day? And when that day arrives, autumn, behind the scenes, is one of the celebrants. Yeah, autumn loves me, and I therefore love autumn back, you dig?

Hatboro, Pennsylvania

To meld with autumn righteously and timely, on its first day this year I took a long walk through Hatboro, a cute town a few miles from where I live in the Philadelphia suburbs. I headed there with the newly-hatched season fully on my mind. The mid-day temperature was lovely, about 73° F (23° C), the skies were as blue as you could hope for, and a light breeze ruffled the few strands of hair that remain on the crown of my head. In other words, the day was pretty damn well ideal. How sweet it was not to be sweating like a pig, which I had done numerous times during walks in the just-departed summer. Autumn weather suits me just fine.

Produce Junction (Hatboro, Pennsylvania)
Hints of gold in a tree in Hatboro, Pennsylvania

Hatboro was starting to get its autumnal mode in order. For instance, I saw scarecrows on a couple of porches and in a couple of store windows, and I gazed with admiration at the arrays of pumpkins in Produce Junction, a store on Hatboro’s main drag. But there was little evidence of fall in the billions of leaves within Hatboro’s boundaries. Only in a smattering of trees did I notice a changing of the color guard, such as in a tree outside of Produce Junction. Hints of gold decorated that specimen, harbingers of full-blown color transformations yet to come. I’m eagerly awaiting mid-to-late autumn’s golds, russets, burgundies and ambers. That palette grabs me powerfully each year, yet tenderly. Yes, autumn is a period of beauty that goes down as satisfyingly as comfort food.

As I walked through Hatboro, I pulled some autumn tunes out of my memory bank and let passages of them play silently in my head. I’ve always loved Autumn Almanac, by The Kinks, and Van Morrison’s Autumn Song. They provided part of my stroll’s soundtrack. As did Harvest Moon, a Neil Young composition that quite a number of musicians have covered. Young’s version is special. It makes me go limp with wonder, so beautiful do I find it. In Hatboro, those songs, and a few others, kept me company excellently.

Back home later that day I did some research into fall-themed songs, discovering Eva Cassidy’s live rendition of Autumn Leaves (music by Joseph Kosma, English lyrics by Johnny Mercer). With vocals emanating from Cassidy’s most-private chambers, this performance would break the hearts of all but the stoniest. And I reconnected with Autumn Serenade (music by Peter DeRose, lyrics by Sammy Gallop), off the album that the famous saxophonist John Coltrane recorded in 1963 with the not-so-famous vocalist Johnny Hartman. A bit more research would have revealed many others, so deep a hold has autumn maintained on songwriters past and present.

Rather than overload this essay with YouTube presentations, I’ve decided to limit the recordings to three. I think you’ll enjoy the following Young, Cassidy and Coltrane/Hartman works. Be well, boys and girls. And, as I usually mention, please don’t be shy about adding your comments.