Sincerity as far as the eye can see

Is anyone else completely freaked out that it's fall already?

I guess for those of you with children, it's not really that big of a deal since back-to-school was like so yesterday. But, for those of us without, the coming of fall is like ... I don't know ... it's like something new is happening.

I know New Year's brings the sense of a fresh start to a lot of people . New Year's Eve is actually my BFF's favorite holiday for that reason. It's not like her life slowly degrades over the course of every 12 months, but it's the energy and feeling of hope a new year brings her that makes this holiday so exciting.

For me, that feeling comes in the fall. I call myself a summer person, but I get a little giddy when the days get colder and shorter. I love sweaters and boots and comfort food. Maybe I have a little black bear in me, but I love staying warm inside with a glass of wine and a pile of magazines, a lamp softly lighting every room and the tube glowing and going unnoticed in the corner. Everything seems that much better. Like eating chocolate with three layers on, because you're already all covered up.

This love of fall was probably instilled in me from a very young age. My parents packed up the car every October and headed to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Because my family didn't eat at restaurants, we tailgated at the beach and ate my mom's cold fried chicken and macaroni salad for lunch. Then we wandered the arts and crafts booths, peered in the window at the caramel-making shop and watched the parade. I was always, and still am, frankly, afraid of the people in stilts.

My mom made me and my sister's baby and toddler clothes and she made our Halloween costumes up until about the sixth-grade. We started the planning about a month early. I do not remember going to the fabric store, but I remember her brown sewing box with the cracked lid and her sitting at the kitchen table sewing away. Snow white, a gray mouse, a witch, a butterfly. The last requiring more wire and glue than thread. She taught me how to sew, and I made a Minnie Mouse costume my sophomore year in college. She probably wouldn't have approved. (It was more diva than Disney.)

Nowadays, Tim and I make a date to go to the pumpkin patch every year. I watch It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown as if it was a State of the Union address. I threw a cookie decorating party last year for my copywriter friends and made five dozen ghost, tombstone, pumpkin and black cat sugar cookies that we frosted and sprinkled. This year there will be pumpkin lights.

So I guess all there is left to say is, go ahead, buy that bag of mini Reese's peanut butter cups, drink some Oktoberfest beer and start dreaming of the pumpkin pie to come.

It will make you so happy.

The master of show, don't tell

My first T.C. Boyle experience: Drop City, first published in 2003.

Very quickly: this book is about a hippie commune that gets run out of the SF Bay Area and tries to live off the land in Alaska.

Not so quickly: Something started happening to me after the first 100 pages or so of this book. I began to feel like I had read it before, like I had walked through the original Drop City house in Sonoma County, smoked cigarettes with Star and Merry and rode in their Merry Pranksters-like bus. Some of it could have been flashbacks to my Phish-following, camp-counseling college days, but mostly it was just this unbelievable familiarity Boyle created that brought this on. (Aside: I have since watched a bit of that movie The Beach that came out in 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio after the book of the same name and the similarities are a little unsettling.)

Anyway, I don't know much about Boyle, but a quick scan of reviews and the criticism was heavy. He is both praised as one of the great novelists of the last few decades and accused of foregoing any real substance for a quick laugh. Sounds smart enough. And I totally get it. For the most part, Drop City and residents are thrown under that Merry Pranksters bus at the end, a big easy-way-out no-no according to one of my creative writing teachers.

Overall, this ended up being a hurried read. I rushed through it, and I'm not sure why. It wasn't exactly to find out what would happen as the characters depth gave way to hypocrisy and vulnerability. They went from people I was getting to know to people I did not want to know.

But one thing is for sure: Boyle is the master of showing, not telling. That's harder than it sounds. During my days as a reporter, when deadlines would allow, I would go through my articles sentence by sentence turning each one from a crappy, "The board voted 5-0 ..." to a "Children will no longer be able to check books out of the library because of a unanimous vote." Again, the deadlines. Sometimes they don't allow this. And neither does 11:15 p.m.

Someday, I hope this comes more naturally. Until then, I will give the T.C. Boyle catalog another try. Any suggestions?



Boyle, did he slip?

Hearts and thoughts, they fade?

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in Modesto, Calif. From my post, it was a fast-food, strip-mall suburbia that led to my utter boredom as a teenager.

I say “from my post” because I didn’t get the culture of the area until I returned after college for a two-year stint as a newspaper reporter. I didn’t understand that the area was feeding the country through the work of people who had risked their lives and left their families. I didn’t know about the Asian refugees who were trying to make sense of their new lives in America. (I also have friends who found true love and made happy homes there. That just wasn’t my experience.)

Some of my friends did live on farms. They wore cowboy boots and Wranglers. But I didn’t know what they did after school or during the summers. Most of us just lived in single-family track housing, one-story ranch style homes with popcorn ceilings in cul de sacs.

It was a big deal to drive over the Altamont Pass passed the windmills to San Francisco. The temperature dropped, the sky opened up and there were people with tattoos, piercings and attitudes. We knew something more was out there then. But we were isolated and frustrated, and there was nothing we could do about it. Bored out of our minds, we turned to certain recreational activities, fell in and out of love and stirred up trouble to break through the heat and dullness that was teenage life in the Central Valley.

Then there was this music that came in the early '90s. I think we discovered it as it discovered us. We did not really care, but it was dubbed grunge, and it was coming from Seattle. Until then, like those before us, we turned to the music of our parents’ generation, the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi, Pink Floyd, but it was too abstract and stood for things we weren’t involved in and couldn’t fully understand. It wasn’t ours—but until then, nothing was.

The lyrics and jarring sounds got under our skin. It was unstable and pissed off. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was called the anthem of an apathetic generation. We didn’t take offense.

There was a song for every one. As they kept coming, we gobbled them down from now-defunct music stores like the Wherehouse and Sam Goody. If you had shitty parents, a fucked a relationship with your mom or dad, problems fitting in, or were sick of pretending to fit in, this music spoke to you, it gave you a voice, and that felt like something when nothing else did.

I fell in love with Pearl Jam.

Sixteen years later, I relived those lyrics live in Golden Gate Park. It was one of the hottest nights of the year. It felt euphoric. Here's what it was:

It felt empowering to relive those songs and those moments so many years later, free from the issues that bound me to them in the first place, either by death, distance or resolve. I am older and wiser and less vulnerable. That night, I became acutely aware of this band's influence on the person I am today, how it helped me get through the bullshit that was growing up in a small town.

“I changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate...”

Except it didn’t.