When October Goes...

I don't profess to be a Barry Manilow fan, or "Fanilow" as they are known, but I do enjoy the occasional song by him. Way back in the 1980s, he and Johnny Mercer wrote a rather nice love song called "When October Goes" and it's a love song, waxing nostalgic about how he hates when October ends. I, conversely, am always glad when October ends. I know this tends to fly in the face of most people's opinions of the month, but as we've firmly established, I'm not most people. 

I do enjoy Halloween and dressing up, the abundance of apple things and a few of the pumpkin things, but the pumpkin spice everything? You can keep that. I don't really enjoy the cooling temperatures, the shortening days and the impending death that I fully expect faces me in one of these Octobers. Hmmmm... I guess I skipped a bit of the story, so let's go back to when all of this started. It's a short story and I promise that I won't keep you long, but at this point, you deserve an explanation. 

It was in the spring of the year that I was five years old. We lived in a slab ranch in Mentor, Ohio, right on Lake Shore Boulevard. I laid in the hallway by the coat closet, adjacent to the living room, the playroom and the bathroom. I was doing that thing with my eyes where peaks in the ceiling patterns suddenly looked more like canyons because the shadows were playing tricks. I laid there on the floor for quite a long time before I was discovered by my mother. 

"What are you doing laying in the hallway?" she asked.

"I'm thinking about the day that I die," I gently responded. 

I'm sure my mother was deeply disturbed by this because what five-year old thinks such things? Well, her five-year old did, apparently. 

"That's not going to be for a long, long time," she spoke reassuringly. 

"I know," I said with certainly. "It doesn't look like now."

"Oh?"

"I am going to die in October, on a Sunday afternoon, between the 4 and 6 PM. It will be rainy outside and the TV will be on. I will be in a hospital and the machines look very different from now. That's why I know it won't happen for a long time."

My mother scooped me off the floor and gave me a hug and told me everything would be okay and I didn't have anything to worry about. For the moment, she was right. 

Unfortunately, for the last twenty or so years, the hospital machines do look like now. So every weekend--every Sunday--I get that sense of foreboding. Once Monday hits, it lessens a bit, but it really does take the flip of the calendar to make me feel like I'll be safe for another eleven months. And recently, since my diagnosis, it seems like we always find out that every treatment fails in October and a new treatment must commence. That certainly doesn't help. I guess it's grim and it fits the tone of the month, so consider October celebrated. 

So if I change one word, the chorus becomes perfect... for me:

   And when October goes
   The same old dream appears
   And you are in my arms
   To share the happy years
   I turn my head away to hide
   The helpless tears
   Oh, how I love to see October go