Something Kind of Depressing, But Also Maybe Interesting to Think About?

Hi! Thank you for coming to my blog even though it says in the title that this might be depressing. It's going to seem like this is about the hurricane, but it isn't. Like most things I think about late at night, it kind of veers off selfishly into thoughts about my own future.

Last night as I was trying and mostly failing to fall asleep, I started thinking about the people in the northeast whose homes were destroyed or otherwise messed up by the hurricane. Some of them are in hotels, or staying with friends, but others were probably trying, at that very same moment, to fall asleep in uncomfortable, unfamiliar places. I thought, It's autumn. They'd probably even be okay sleeping outside for now, if they have to. But then I remembered autumn in New Jersey and New York isn't like autumn in Dallas, and I started to worry about them. But then I started thinking about the movie "Autumn in New York," which I never saw, but once heard described as a "May-December romance."

Then I started thinking, What month am I in? Am I a May, like Winona Ryder was when the movie came out? And surely, even with his silver hair, Richard Gere hadn't quite reached his December years yet, had he?

So then I thought, What if we say the average life-span is 84 years? (I know it isn't, but I used that number because it is evenly divisible by 12, and I didn't have a glow-in-the-dark calculator in bed with me. Also my mom's dad was 84 when he died, even though he smoked cigarettes and died of cancer. Although, don't think that makes it okay to smoke cigarettes--my dad's dad smoked too and also died of cancer, but he was only 62 at the time.) If we can expect to live 84 years, then that means each "month" of our metaphorical year is equal to seven years of life.

I like thinking of my life in seven-year chunks anyway. Once, I tweeted, "From 0 to 7, I was a baby kid. From 7 to 14, I was a smart kid. From 14 to 21, I was a hard-working kid. And for the last seven years, I've been a sack of rotting potatoes." But I deleted that one because it made me sad. Anyway, I'm almost 29 now, which puts me in the first week of May. If you think of this as a growing season, May is already a bit late to be planting seeds. Sure, I was an excellent student in the February and March of my life, but the seeds I planted then were nutritious, early crops, like onions and spinach and beets, that have already gone to seed (i.e. I can hardly remember a word of French, even though our teacher, who was FROM FRANCE said I spoke like a Parisian. I don't know--maybe she was from somewhere else in France where they think Parisians are dumb, and she was secretly insulting me. Hm. I wonder.)

But April! My "April" was wasted on me. When the weather was good, I took a lot of walks. When it was bad, I stayed in and read. (The grandfather who died at 84 left me some money which I'm abundantly grateful for, but which has, so far anyway, kept me from being forced to make a decision about what to with my life. I was never supposed to be able to live on it this long, but I'm crazy frugal and made some fortuitous investments before everything went to shit. No one can believe it!) Was it Eliot who called April "the cruelest month"? Yes, and he was being metaphorical, too. April is at least an unpredictable month--cold one day, hot the next, then pouring rain. So is our metaphorical April. Some people come out of college and slip right into grown-up life, with a loving spouse and a real career. Other people have a Texas April, full of tornadoes and hail storms.

And what to do with May now that April has passed me by with neither flowers nor storms? (I'm getting poetical. Deal with it.) June and July will be fruit season, for those who got their hands dirty in the spring. Is it too late for me to start? Can I have cantaloupes and watermelons in July if I plant now? And when will my July be, exactly? Ages 42 to 49, right? What can I do now that will come to fruition then?

That reminds me: what "month" was Richard Gere in in "Autumn in New York"? According to imdb.com, he was born in 1949, which means he was still only in August when the film came out. "May-August romance" doesn't sound quite as shocking, does it?

So what about the real winter of our years? Once we've spent our autumn picking pumpkins and other more elegant, late-season squashes, is there anything left to harvest? What happens when the new year comes, and we're in January again, wearing diapers while other people brush our teeth? Should we plant anything at all, knowing we won't be around when it blooms? If a person has been industrious and has planted and harvested as much as he could, I guess this is when he hands off the seeds he has saved to a younger person and hopes she knows what to do with them. I only wish I did.