Obituaries & Dust of Autumn

As I approach the BIG EIGHT-OH, I find myself sifting through the obituaries in the West Valley Independent, The Arizona Republic, even in my hometown paper, The Mobridge Tribune. I’m not indulging in that old joke about checking to see if I’m listed. I’m checking to see how old the deceased were when they bought the farm—how many were older than me, how many younger. It’s like some morbid scoreboard. I’m twelve years older than my father when he died, but fourteen years younger than my mother. Good genes on one side anyway. I’ll keep doing this death watch tally until someday I actually find my name listed. But I’ll be reading about it from some position overhead, or maybe from aboard that skiff heading across the river Styx.

Fall is in the air. Where did summer go? It just vanished, seemingly overnight. The air is chilly at night, the shadows lengthen to the north as the sun slips southward, that "certain slant of light" that Dickinson described. Falls in the past were always about the start of school, that awful annual chore of raking maple leaves, the nervousness of the club championship at South Hills or Jackson Valley, Halloween lurking just ahead. Dust of autumn, the title I chose for my second novel because of the portentousness of this time of year. I could always smell fall in the air, that scent of burning leaves from my youth when such burning was still allowed, the acrid odor of the sports balm we used by the buckets in the football or basketball dressing rooms. And here it is again, with its renewal of tv shows, its debuting of newbies, some stinkers and some eau de cologne. Blue Bloods returned with a contentious screenplay that had the Reagans all barking at each other like a pack of mad dogs. I’m not sure if it’s a bunch of new writers or if the success of some popular series causes complacency. But too often bad writing happens, and then the series goes down in flames. I hope it doesn’t happen to Blue Bloods. The Good Wife doesn’t seem as relevant as it used to be, especially now that Alicia is about to join Cary in abandoning Lockhart/Gardner. Will she or won’t she (pun intended)? And Kalinda has almost disappeared from sight. Come back, Archie Punjabi. Person of Interest is almost too complicated now. The Mentalist is still fiddling around with Red John and after five seasons, that’s too much Red John. At the end of the Mentalist premiere, we see either a dead Lisbon or a still alive Lisbon. God, I and Patrick Jane hope she’s not dead. NCIS still uses too much background music, and now Ziva is leaving. I and Tony “the nose” are really going to miss her. As for the new shows, The Michael J. Fox Show just isn’t funny enough, so we’re going to pass on that one. The same for Mom. Sorry, Allison Janney, you just aren’t funny enough. Sleepy Hollow has creepiness going for it, but it’s just too far-fetched to hook us. Hostages and The Black List look like keepers. We’ll see. There’s a bunch we haven’t yet seen, so we’ll see about them at another time.