“try to remember the kind of September…”
2012.
For all my life, the arrival of autumn was the new beginning. Football season, back to school, the restoration of normal service after the abnormally hot and humid interlude of a Southern summer. And for most of the last ten years, it hasn’t meant anything but more heat, more misery, fires over a third of the state, and a reminder that things aren’t what they used to be.
But 2012 was actually a pretty good year. I made a trip home on short notice and hammered out the beginnings of, if not a peace treaty, a cease-fire with my relatives and first exposure to a new Birmingham that still intrigues me. I made a return to Vanderbilt for a football game for the first time in fifteen years, at a time when it felt like Vanderbilt football might improve to a seven-win program without having to compromise our values or sell our souls. We had friends nearby, close enough to call for dinner downtown without notice. I had a blood relation within fifty miles, for crying out loud. I had an out-of-band raise and recognition at work, even if it was starting to get a little annoying. And Cal had a newly remodeled stadium and the promise of “root hog or die” for Jeff Tedford, who as it turned out was way past his sell-by date.
The world was saner, too. Osama bin Laden was dead, the Senate was safely in Democratic hands, and there was no reason to feel like Obama could’t win in 2012. No virus. No Trump. It felt like 2000 could still be an anomaly, and that maybe a Presidential election going to the candidate without the most votes was a one-off rather than a permanent structural disadvantage. We hadn’t had Sandy Point yet, the proof that nothing will move the needle for the GOP, and Moscow Mitch wasn’t yet embarked on the permanent destruction of the norms and folkways of the US Senate in the name of preserving white supremacy for all time. And Washington had an exciting quarterback and a football team worth paying attention to for the first time in years. Technology wasn’t in a rut yet. It would take another year or so for the mobile phone to cross the finish line. LTE was coming, as was NFC and AMOLED and other nice-to-have technologies, but the iPad was a dream and the iPhone 4S was as perfect a device as I could ask for, having been handed it as a warranty replacement for a flaky 4. The iPhone 5, while intriguing, wasn’t a have-to-have yet. Facebook was bad, but hadn’t yet destroyed an election, and Instagram was new and interesting and fun to use.
And I was 40. That was kind of a problem, but it felt like things were moving the right direction. I certainly didn’t think I was in a rut, even though my health was taking a few knocks. I wasn’t under any therapist’s care, because I didn’t need to be, and even though my shoulder was twinging there was the hope that a quick epidural would fix it. Blue Shield hadn’t yet tried to screw me on the coverage.
I started my fifth decade pretty damn well. And then time happened. Progress ground to a halt, stupid graduated from valid to dominant, and we learned the hard way that the unwritten rules are meaningless and only cultural obstacles protect our established practices. Someone sufficiently shameless can do anything they want just by brazening it out, and they proceeded to do just that, over and over, until we landed here.
I know I’ve said before how much it felt like I wasted the decade of the 90s, but the decade of my own 40s has been a bust too – stagnant, depressed, running to stand still and still losing ground. I am in the middle of some fairly drastic changes in hope of breaking out of the quagmire, and I don’t have a lot of hope for anything wildly better, but if we were to end up safely in our new home, and I were to find my way to a job that could be done 100% remote, and done from anywhere, and that would at least pay enough to keep me fed and clothes and housed if I were left alone in Alabama, and that I could be assured of keeping for fifteen years or more as long as I worked hard and did a good job–
That would be enough, wouldn’t it? I don’t need the world, I just need the assurance that I will somehow be able to get by for a good twenty years. But this September, that seems like too much to ask for.