Awards

Winter arrived awfully suddenly this year after a mild early November. It’s shocking to be burrowing under the blankets so soon after strolling in shirtsleeves and to feel the ache of frost in your fingers because you hadn’t even thought to get out gloves just yet.

But the display in Isham Park makes up for a lot, the leaves accumulating in crisp piles, the giant gingko on Broadway putting down thousands of its fan-like leaves on the stone stairs. Nature hasn’t yet turned barren, and the easy days of summer remain within memory. Just two Sundays ago we could sit on the benches watching the neighborhood boys toss baseballs and footballs and even get too hot if we lingered very long in the sunlight.

For a northern kid like me, the dark, indoor season isn’t exactly a joyous time but it’s a necessary one. You shift into different habits, and your attitudes follow along. Going places becomes more complicated, you have to confront the elements, don and shed wraps constantly, stumble around in the dark in the morning, and one result is that you tend to stay put more, head home earlier and turn inward in subtle ways. It’s a time for reflexion and domestic affairs, then the holidays come along to remind you that another year has slipped by, your projects are pretty much where you left them, and life generates about as much happiness and satisfaction as it did the year before.

Usually I’m too exhausted by bipeds to feel much more than despair about their insane behavior, but this time of year does stir my compassion upon thinking back on all the sad stories we’ve had to digest. I recall the lady in New Jersey who came off her night shift at the hospital to find that her two teenagers had died in a house fire. We had the usual endless parade of fatalities, usually female, resulting from violently uncontrolled tempers, invariably male.

We’ve had a terrible uptick in racist attacks recently too, which is disturbing, but behind the overt violence is another layer of steady repression and control, the stream of stories of false imprisonment where black men are assumed to be guilty and railroaded into ruined lives. One guy facing a murder charge in the Bronx was sprung just this week when his electronic subway card confirmed his alibi—the eyewitness accounts of a half-dozen friends didn’t convince anyone because they’re all black, too.

Yes, it’s a time of year when you feel, like the squirrels that own our park, that having a little tree-hole to come home to for the frigid nights, a stash of walnuts and a functioning body is a pretty swell line-up of good luck. Winter reminds us that just getting through life is quite an achievement.