Here’s to Fall, the One that Nature, Not Man, Gives Us

Forgive this long litany of Place to make a point. I have lived in Fullerton, California, Phoenix & Tempe, Arizona, Anaheim, then Fullerton again until age 22. What followed “home” were  San Francisco, Redondo and Manhattan Beach, San Antonio, Texas, Fairfield, CA, Napa Valley, Montgomery, Alabama, Otterberg, West Germany, Vacaville, CA, Montgomery again, Annandale, VA, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Annandale a second time, Caracas, Venezuela, Falls Church, VA, Bogota, Colombia, Lima, Peru, and now the Northern Neck of Virginia.

What was missing in all of them?  The Fall I am seeing now, in 2025, as if  Nature offers a counterbalance to the Shut-down and the overall political gloom.  I only know Nature has given this California born-resident, something never experienced in all of the above locations.

                                This photo was taken from webmaster Ilona’s porch.

Lately, I spend a lot of time gazing at Mill Creek and its trees in their glorious Fall before winter.  I sit here now before light this Monday morning and reminisce about having to choose a state to study in fifth grade for Mr. Moore, a revered teacher at Fullerton Elementary. I choose Maine because it was at the other end of the United States. I don’t remember if Mr. Moore or my father told me how to write to a department of tourism in Maine. But I haven’t forgotten my excitement when I opened a large manila folder addressed to me.  In it were colored photographs and booklets providing everything I needed to know about Maine.  My mother almost died that year and in my mind I see her under a hospital’s white sheet, her face as white as the sheet, hardly able to speak. Yet this image is juxtaposed with trees in Maine. I did not know trees could turn red, orange, yellow, and gold.  I knew trees bore oranges and lemons (my father a Sunkist man) and I’d seen color in flowers.  But trees like those in Maine?

Mike and I arrived here in the Northern Neck from Lima, Peru, in early October of 2004.  I told a neighbor how excited I was about fall.  “This?” she said, chuckling.  “You should go to Vermont or Maine.”  We never know each other’s history, do we? I probably countered with, “The one here looks good to me.”

I have lived on Mill Creek Lane for twenty-one years now, and I will say this Fall is the most beautiful I remember.  We have had a crop of Fugi (Fuyu) persimmons that is not to be believed.  I don’t know if we will face a colder winter than usual. But this Fall seems an extraordinary gift right now.  If I were hungry, as so many are or will be, with forty million on government assistance, the shut-down continuing…..I might not be relishing this glorious early November.

Though I do hope its beauty might lessen whatever despair I were feeling. Nature’s beauty as solace….

Appreciating Mikhail Bulgakov the way I Appreciate Gabo

Years ago I offered a course on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The experience taught me that it is not a good idea to teach one’s literary hero. Not when he writes magic realism, and a reader must enter an extraordinary world and be a wide-open traveler… not a cruise-happy tourist who prefers commercial fiction and happy endings. That’s not fair in that I, the instructor, was not sure how to “teach” Gabo’s wondrous novel, given it must be experienced emotionally and not as a frog in a bottle, as Flannery O’Connor quipped to a professor of English. She meant that literary analysis with its dissection can keep a story or novel from continuing to affect a reader through its created mystery.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov is a novel that reminded me of Gabo’s magic realism. Or should I say Gabo’s novel reminded me of the Russian writer who preceded him. Bulgakov set his fantastical and satiric novel in a real place: Moscow in the 1930s, under Stalin’s brutal dictatorship and his ruthless censorship of artists. The Master and Margarita is a marvel of invention, with characters you have to read about to believe, and then climb in a time capsule and visit Pontius Pilate and Yeshua in Jerusalem. Two parts and two settings are in this novel of magic realism.

I loaned The Master and Margarita to someone and it was not returned. I have nothing intelligent to say about the novel because I read it once in a state of wonder. Now I feel the need to read The Master and Margarita again, after reading Bulgakov’s earlier novel, The White Guard.

The last few days I’ve watched the 2012 production of this Bulgakov novel, shown on Russian television. The eight episodes of The White Guard can be seen through Amazon Prime for $5.99. 

Even if you never read the novel, this series is worth seeing. It is set in Kiev in 1918. Bulgakov was there and lived through the war depicted in the novel. For me, seeing The White Guard made the past four years and the images we’ve all seen from Ukraine even more troubling.

“Are you surprised that people still can dance and sing in a world on its head?”  The question comes from the poet Dylan Thomas in a book I pulled from my library just now.  

To be continued…

The Unholy Trinity in my Head

There are three faces in my mind’s eye that I wish were not there.  The initials for them are TVJ, three last names, in descending order of their power, though it could be argued that J is more powerful than V, though neither more powerful than T.

Each day I awaken with an ever heavier chest and must force myself to take deep breaths. Yet in books I find solace, as I have since third grade when I read The Yearling. This classic is in my library even now. 

But this morning I located a small book titled Reverence, published by The Oxford University Press. I like the cover for Paul Woodruff’s thoughts on Reverence and “Renewing a Forgotten Virtue.”

                                                      The book’s copyright is 2001, though I bought it a few years later from the remaindered book company Daedalus in Maryland, not its later Mid-West successor that I doubt could have identified the company’s figure, whose son Icarus flew too close to the sun and melted the wax on his wings.      

One (me) keeps hoping that de-waxing will happen to TVJ.  The Greek greats would caution to Beware of Hubris. Which is to say …that an overweening pride creates the arrogance or insolence that causes a man to violate the moral code of the divine and to challenge God or the Gods directly.

 What have I underlined in Reverence on the first page of chapter two?

“Reverence requires us to maintain a modest sense of the difference between human and divine.  If you wish to be reverent, never claim the awful majesty in support of your political views.” 

The Unholy Trinity in my Head lights up, glitters in fact, a recognition that the three men (TVJ) speak for God, the Christian one only.  Throw Yahweh, Buddha, Mohammad, and all the other  prophets into the river and watch them drown. TVJ are gods unto themselves, though two chant Tee, Tee, Tee, prostrating themselves on golf greens and drinking Kool Aid to honor the big T, the Prince of Peace.

I’ve lived too long, my friends. Lived in five other countries, endured the slights against Americans, felt an envy mixed with admiration for us, and assurance the USA would help in a crisis, that USAID would find creative ways to help those whose fate was to be born poor in struggling countries.

I sound glib to lessen the pain in my heart, that I awaken day after day to a less reverent United States of America.

Next week: The Magical Mikhail Bulgakov and 1918 in Kiev