Of Fall and
Passing
Bill Meredith
The most newsworthy event to
report may be that fall has come.
In ordinary times this would not be news,
especially when the season is already half gone,
but these are not ordinary times. The perky
young announcers on local TV stations, who
ordinarily would be gushing about fall colors
and reminding us to set our clocks back, have
been busy trying to project an image of gravitas
as they breathlessly repeat "breaking
news" that CNN announced several hours
earlier. Meanwhile, the country’s collective
attention has been directed toward anthrax
spores rather than the passing of another season
in our lives. No one seems to have noticed fall.
My wife is somewhat typical of the majority
of our citizenry; she has been mesmerized by the
little band of headlines that runs across the
bottom of the TV screen. However, she did manage
to tear herself away long enough to join me on
the porch one day shortly after we had the first
hard frost of the season. There she was the
first to notice an ancient Daddy Longlegs as it
crept out of the wilted remains of a potted
plant and hobbled across the floor. Three of its
eight legs were missing, and a fourth was
crumpled and useless; whether it was the victim
of an accident or a birth defect was impossible
to tell. When I picked it up I could see several
bright red parasitic mites clinging to its body,
sucking blood like miniature leeches. I set it
down and it limped to the edge of the porch,
tumbled into the remains of the flowerbed, and
disappeared.
Arachnid locomotion is not one of my wife’s
fields of expertise, but she could tell
something was seriously wrong with it. More from
the emotion of the moment than from analytical
thinking, she asked, "Will it die?"
And, more from the certainty of general
principles than from the particulars of this
individual case, I replied, simply,
"Yes."
Simple things can be profound, as Robert
Fulghum reminded us. One of the "things he
learned in kindergarten" was that the
goldfish in the aquarium, the hamster in the
cage on the table, and the geranium in the
styrofoam cup on the windowsill all will die;
and so will we. The only difference is that the
goldfish, the hamster, the geranium and the
Daddy Longlegs are not aware of it.
When I was a child we did not have
antibiotics or vaccines for flu and polio, and
funerals were a common experience; I learned
that people die before I learned to read. But
times changed. When my father was born, the
average life expectancy in this country was less
than 60 years; when he died at age 87, the
average had risen to 74, and it is now nearly
77. Backed by the success of modern medicine and
nutrition, the advertising industry has
convinced modern Americans that Fulghum was
wrong, and when someone dies it is either some
sort of cosmic mistake or a failure on someone’s
part. Most adults have become like teenagers
with their first experience at drinking and
driving: it couldn’t happen to them. This is
one reason the anthrax scare has terrorized the
country so completely. It reminds us that we are
not immortal.
Being aware of one’s mortality is probably
a component of mental health on an individual
scale, but when a whole nation starts dwelling
on it obsessively, it isn’t healthy. At one
extreme, something like mass paranoia results—
witness the recent surge in sales of gas masks,
and the rush across the border to Mexico to buy
cheap antibiotics. At the other extreme people
are paralyzed by pessimism. One can only hope
that the mass of our populace will come to their
senses and settle somewhere between these
extremes, reminded of their mortality and
resolved to live fuller lives as a result.
The Daddy Longlegs is surely dead by now;
even if it’d had a full complement of legs and
been free of parasites, the season was over and
its life expectancy was expended. But somewhere
in the leaf litter under the boxwood by the
porch are masses of eggs that will carry its
genes on to a new generation of Longlegs next
spring. Nature looks forward, not back; so I
will too. Considering the drought we’ve been
through, this fall’s colors have been
sufficient to add a lot to the enjoyment of my
weekly rounds of golf; and while I have spent
the past weeks cleaning and mulching the
flowerbeds for next spring’s bloom, my wife
has been canning quarts of apples to add to the
supply in the basement. There will be apple pie
for Christmas; winter will pass, and spring will
come. Mortality is what you make of it.