Rites of October

I spy her slicing through the leaves, leaving an orange wake. I smile. She is our first-born and in less than a week, she will turn twenty-one.

Dampness and grilled hamburgers and hotdogs hang in a haze over the soccer fields, packed with players and homecoming visitors. As we amble, arm in arm around the field, we chat about her life—about her senior year, what she is studying, her roommates, the group of freshman she mentors. Our stroll is punctuated with hugs from her friends, our surrogate daughters.

Soon, this will be her alma mater; it already is her father’s. He is walking the same steps under the same trees, though there are a few new buildings. But it is her campus. For now, she is the present.

When we ask her what she wants to do for her birthday, she says she does not want anyone except family. Her quad break synchronizes nicely with her her day. She comes home for the weekend, so Sarah bakes her cake and creates a card, I decorate the cake, and the boys wait to eat.

Since it is her twenty-first, she brings a bottle of Chianti that her roommates have opened with her, and we sip it with marble cake iced with vanilla-rainbow chip frosting (a special request from the birthday girl). The house settles into the hum of evening and it purrs—we are all home. She leaves Sunday.

Because the phone is on the top of my desk, it interrupts my focus. I am grading student work. It is important—and overdue. However, when I see the phone number, my work is no longer significant.

“Hi, honey! What’s up?”

“Hi, Mom! I have an English question for you.”

Her calls come sporadically, and they focus with increasing frequency on our shared literary passion.

“Do you know an artist who has illustrated Dante? We’re talking about him in freshman seminar, and I want to show the illustrations to my freshmen. Is it Doré?”

I am silent for a moment. “I haven’t taught him in years, so I don’t really remember. Lizzy—you’re the Dante expert. If you have any American Lit questions….”

Her grin reaches through the phone. “That’s OK, Mom. I’ll look it up.”

We continue to talk about inconsequential things—how is she feeling? When is she going to come home again? The phone is replaced; my grading resumes its importance.

*     *     *     *     *

Lizzy loves old movies and musicals. One of her favorites is Fiddler on the Roof. She particularly likes the scene of the daughters dancing and singing, “Matchmaker.” I, too, enjoy that scene, and have a memory of her singing at the top of her voice, and dancing around the cluttered den of her grandparent’s home. Recently, however, I have begun to appreciate the gratuitously sentimental scene when Tzeitel, the first-born of Tevye and Golde, and Motel, the poor tailor are married and Tevye and Golde sing “Sunrise, Sunset” to each other. In the dialogue of the first verse, Golde muses “I don’t remember growing older, when did they?”

It seems appropriate that the musical’s revival is being advertised in October—the month of sunrises and sunsets. (The ad proclaims that it will be playing for three weeks in November, and would star Topol in his farewell performance. My husband wonders if he would be playing the part of Lazar Wolfe.) In the mornings, we leave for school in the dark, and travel down route 3 as the clouds begin to reflect pink and yellow. We return as the colors are reflected in the opposite direction. We try to hold onto its vibrancy; we even turn back the clock so as to add one more hour before the coldness of November closes the door on its light.

Before the month closes, however, small goblins and princesses knock at our door asking for treats. The faces behind the masks change, and now my older children place the candy in the buckets, pretending to be scared of the ghouls. But another father walks his daughter around the block. And the sun sets. And the curtain falls.