There is no Saturday like a Fall Saturday.
The first chill in the air calls all stratified segments of the population to a brisk attention. For all the talk about unity in the work place, politically, within families, and toward any historic cause, really, no leader has been able to emulate the inspiration that Fall does. Leaves get raked, oil gets changed. Baseball and football converge into a Shangri-La for sports fans, allowing for them to reflect and come to terms with baseball's results while still providing dreams of what is to become of the nascent football season.
Ceremoniously, today, I donned my Fall Saturday uniform. As with most people's, mine is a combination that is designed to cover as much skin as possible as comfortably and in as aesthetically repulsive of a manner as possible. A tattered dark blue sweatshirt and "Guinness" pajama pants are my mainstays for these mornings, to wander my territory and to clean and to read. For flair, I wear a camouflaged Brewers hat that I bought for four dollars not too long ago. For all obvious reasons, I have not been dressed like this recently. Nonetheless, it is the most comfortable outfit I own. It keeps the chill out.
The chill serves as a reminder that there are a number of things that are not under our control. In a sense, I suppose, this could be negative. It's also the beginning of every true adventure. It's the mother of necessity which, in turn, is the mother of invention. Nobody can avoid the chill; nobody can avoid change. So we cope.
Yesterday, the business day before I was supposed to begin my new job, I received a phone call informing me that they did not have it in their budget to take on all the people that they had hired. I was one whom they had decided to let go. Bad news is bad news; bad timing is hell. I had informed the other company that I was interviewing for that I had decided to take this offer, not twenty-four hours before I received this phone call. Due to circumstance, and I'm sure nothing but circumstance, I found myself back on square one.
Them's the breaks.
I took a little while off. I took a few minutes to just sit down with my mouth open, staring at nothing in particular. But, I eventually realized, every minute that I'm staring at my hands is a minute that I'm not using them. Previous to receiving that phone call, I had been prioritizing; picking through what tasks I wanted to take action on, and deciding how I would take action on them. Two days before, I had given blood for the first time since my arrival. I had begun contacting charities to see if there was any way that I could volunteer for them. The night before, an online magazine said that I could write some posts for them.
A lot had changed, but what, exactly?
So today I felt this chill. I didn't think that it would be reaching California this early. After a minute of shuddering at the thought of cold (although it will not be like anything I have been privy to in the past), I put on my uniform. My sweatshirt and pajamas had never been so comfortable. I sent applications to a few jobs, and contemplated what I would write about for the online magazine.
Then, I went back to reading my book on Eisenhower by Stephen Ambrose in the ambient sunlight, filtered by my blinds. It's amazing that Ambrose, Eisenhower's hand-picked biographer, criticized Ike so openly about the results of many of Eisenhower's decisions. But nobody ever criticized Ike for his decisiveness.
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