Talk of the Town Ernie Anderson
The boy who cried autumn
Do my eyes deceive me or is it really September already? September! That’s the gateway to October, which is the main reason why we have November, which is in itself an open invitation to December and all that blech that follows. Year after year I warn you people: If you allow the Fourth of July to happen, then it’s all downhill from there and the next thing you know, you’re out in -10 degrees with a whipping wind blowing snow down your blouse as you try to shovel your car out so you can drive on ice-slicked roads to work, only to repeat the grim process eight hours later. If just once you all would forego your sparklers and glow sticks and overcooked weenies in early July, we might avoid all of this nonsense.
How do you like your grits?
You will notice in the above polemic that I wrote “you all” and not “y’all.” I have never once — nossiry, not a single time in my whole life — said or written “y’all” in any context, inasmuch as I don’t live in Tennessee or Texas or Kentucky or Georgia. Notherners using “y’all” all the time like they do now is somehow obscene to me and I won’t have it in my polemics.
Back to school
Every time I see all those fresh-faced wee ones marching down sidewalks on their first day of school, I get all nostalgic for the old days. Not for school, specifically, mind you, but for the old lunch boxes I used to carry on my way to Brookside Elementary. We’re talking The Six Million Dollar Man, Scooby and his crew, and I think I even had a Mork & Mindy lunchbox one fine year. Why, I can still recall the smell of the old thermoses with utter olfactory clarity. There was NOTHING like the taste of warm and borderline sour milk tinged with the flavor of dangerous plastics for a young lad making his way through grade school.
Just crazy for autumn
That’s another gross thing about autumn (that’s what we were talking about, isn’t it?). In a matter of days, I’m going to be standing there in my most flattering bathing suit, boogie board in one hand, beach towel in the other, but instead of taking me to the beach, some wretch is going to trick me into going apple picking, leaf peeping, pumpkin ogling or hay riding. Instead of breaking waves and the scent of suntan oil and pier fries, it’ll be all pumpkins and corn stalks and everything in the world flavored cinnamon. The horror of it will cause my mind to snap — SNAP, I tells you! — and the next thing you know, I’m wearing plaid, a sweater neatly knotted at the throat and who knows? Probably leggings, too, because that’s just how daffy this season is. It ain’t right, y’all.
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