I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009

In the movie “Smoke,” Harvey Keitel plays a kindly and slightly eccentric cigar store owner who spends his days talking with customers and his mornings taking a single snapshot of the same corner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. The photos he puts in an almost endless series of scrapbooks, page after page of pictures of the same street corner.

A customer who becomes a friend, played by William Hurt, one day comes to look at the photo gallery that “Augie” has compiled. At first he s bemused, then slightly bored, then slowly overwhelmed by ho the same scene can take on so many different hues and shades and meanings. In an instant, he sees the figure of his deceased wife, killed in a bank robbery close to that same corner. She had been walking by the camera as Augie snapped his single photo that day.

It is a powerful scene, and on that reminds me of autumn.

Don’t’ ask me why. Do I associate the season with impending demise? Do I view it as the most romantic of all the four seasons? Did I see the movie in the fall and transfer the sensory bombardment that we get here in Chester County to my thoughts of the film? These are questions I cannot, and shall not, try to answer.

But what I am thinking is this. October is the time when every day the same scene outside your front door becomes different in incremental, but nevertheless entirely noticeable, steps. The light is demonstrably different; the sun finding its way up over the horizon at a different angle. The temperature makes its way south down the thermometer. But mostly, the pigment that has been waiting to explode in the leaves of the trees outside gets its chance to burst through.

In the spring, those changes in the foliage e see on our way to work or from our favorite window seem to go from zero to 60 in a minute, like a vernal Lamborghini. One day you notice a small green blossom on a tree as you get behind the wheel to drive o work, and then next day there are cherry blossoms and apple blossom and pear blossoms all over your windshield. Then by the time you get around to loading the camera to take a picture of the pink snow that envelops the branches above your head, it’s gone.

In the fall, you get a change to linger with the changes. Right now, I can see bits of yellow in the tips of the leaves outside the window. There is an orange chunk on the tree across the street. Red dots the top of the bush I pass by on my way home from Sunday services. And I know that little by little, those colors will replace all of the green that still makes up he bulk of the landscape.

I wax rhapsodic about these autumnal sights because I love the season so. I would not trade the hillsides of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware in fall for all the palm trees in Florida, or the sandy beaches of Hawaii. I moved here to Chester County in the fall, driving over the Allegheny Mountains in a 1970 Dodge Dart that held virtually everything that I owned to find a job on a newspaper that I had never heard of until then. The Phillies beat the Montreal Expo on a Mike Schmidt home run in the 11^th inning of the next to last day of the year, and I started getting to know the people I still call my friends.

Here is what the songwriter Robbie Robertson said about the fall when he was talking with a filmmaker about the meaning behind his ode to life and hard times, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”:

“In the story to me, it’s another piece I remember from my youth, that people looking forward, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place; we all know it, may have been there, may have not. But there are a lot of people for whom the idea of come autumn, come fall, that’s when life begins.

“It is not the springtime where we kind of think it begins. It is the fall, because the harvest has come in.”

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