In one of my several previous lives, I taught math part-time at a bunch of different colleges, in both Upstate New York and Ohio. I was what’s known as an adjunct instructor; “adjunct”, as you may be aware, comes from the Latin meaning “to do what the real professors don’t want to”. So as a consequence, there were two separate instances when I taught a 7 am class.
It was annoying enough that I had to be awake at all, much less standing up in front of a class pretending I wanted to be there and there was nothing at all amiss about working at that hour. But since they were fall semester classes, for several weeks we were all* arriving at school when it was still dark – which just emphasized the middle-of-the-night feeling for me. *I say “all”, but certainly we did not set any records for attendance at those classes.
I’ve recaptured that feeling these past 2 autumns, because middle school requires our young scholar to be at the bus stop at about 7:20 am – which admittedly is much different from 5 am, but at the beginning of November is still all-but-dark and made me feel like I should still be in bed.
So it occurred to me that there’s actually something good about November: the time change means that it’s no longer dark when he & I are getting around in the morning, which makes it a tiny bit more tolerable. And I get an extra hour of sleep for that one night, which I always waste staying up doing nothing because there’s no hurry getting to bed.
Then I thought, surely someone with a sunny, optimistic, look-for-the-silver-lining outlook such as myself can find more than one good thing about November. Dark, damp, dreary, chilly November. So following is my attempt to redeem the month. I was going to say that it’s the kind of month no one ever writes songs about, and I’m still not 100% convinced that this guy is not making this stuff up.
>> The fact that it’s chilly means that I can swap out my spring/summer clothes for my fall/winter wardrobe. That mainly means corduroys in hues ranging all the way from tan to black – all the colors of the rainbow, if you live next to a steel mill. Of course, I have to bid au revoir to my summer pants in shades of electric blue, grass green, yellow and white (I’ll keep the red ones out in case I can find a Christmas-related application)… although it probably is safer to keep them somewhere my wife can’t see or get at them.
>> The colder weather also means the end of lawn mowing, and hopefully a respite before snow shoveling. I do have to admit I probably need to at least knock down the lawn at camp one last time; it’s a little brisk for that, though.
>> It should mark, as well, the end of the prime allergy season for me. At least that’s what I thought until I woke up Monday sneezing constantly. I couldn’t remember whether I had missed my allergy pill, or perhaps it was just that Sunday’s relatively mild weather had awakened something dormant like in a bad 50s sci-fi movie – so I took more drugs just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, I’m
>> Gravy. I don’t really bother to make either a whole turkey, or gravy, very often during the year, so it’s not a bad thing that it’s compulsory on Thanksgiving (yeah, I know some of you are doing some other kind of menu, but just for the record, you’re wrong). Think about it: gravy is basically fat and salt, with a bit of flour to make it socially acceptable. Mark me down in the affirmative column on that one.
>> If nothing else, it marks the calendar period when it’s the longest time before Halloween, about which my sentiments are already on record.
Since I'm still me, all this sunshine and lollipops has not induced me to forget about frost on the windshield, the kids having five days off this month, radio stations playing all Christmas music starting two weeks before Thanksgiving, or the creeping pestilential scourge of invading marauders that is Black Friday – all the things that make November feel a bit like a prison sentence – I’m just saying that, while I still believe every cloud has a bunch of other clouds behind it, it’s possible that one of them has some shiny mineral content in there somewhere.
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