October

It's October. It's my favorite month. Glad it's here.

Having spent all but seven years of my life living in the Central Valley, October is fall to me. September usually is still summer here. You can get a nice 105 degree day in September just as easily as you can in June. The difference, though, is that, in September, the water's gone from the ground and any plant that was gonna die is dead. October, though, is the stretch when things cool down, but aren't cold and foggy yet. You can get some pretty serious fog in November if there's been some early rain, but October is pretty safe.

It's still California, though, so, hell, you can often still wear shorts in October. A few years ago, when The Mermaid was in kindergarten, I think, we went to the fall carnival at her then school. I think it was about the first week of the month. They had a booth where you could get a picture taken for $5 (a whopping $20 less than Squidward paid the pirates for the pie that was actually a bomb that he bought for Spongebob in the classic "Dying for Pie"). The Muse decided that it would be a good thing to get a family picture taken. So we did and, man, we got the nicest picture of our little family that I think we have ever taken. The Muse scanned it and sent it to her friends all over the place and she got what was to we native Californians the funniest response from one of them. Her friend in Pennsylvania said that she about fell over when she saw the picture because here was our entire family wearing short clothes (The Mermaid, Enthusio and I in short pants, The Muse in a short dress -- a very nice one, I might add) in a setting with pumpkins. The Muse's friend said that they always have frost on their pumpkins and couldn't believe that it was possible to being wearing shorts in a pumpkin picture. So October is one of those times when it is good to live here.

October is also just about the best sports time of the year. Being a live-long baseball freak, October is THE TIME. When the Dodgers are in the playoffs -- shut up, they used to be in playoffs all the time and their time will come again, you just watch -- October of course is the time when they might win the World Series. (We will celebrating the 17th anniversary of The Miracle of St. Kirk this year.) When the Dodgers aren't in the playoffs, I just appreciate what great games there are. It is inevitable that there are going to be great games, games where someone's ace starting pitcher comes out of the bullpen to try the one out that some team needs because, hey, if they don't get that out, they're going home. (See Orel Hershiser in Game 4 of the 1988 NLCS, Randy Johnson in Game 5 of the 1995 ALDS, Kevin Brown in Game 5 of the 1998 NLCS, Randy Johnson again in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series.) It's the time when, even if your team isn't involved, stuff happens that you never, ever, will forget (e.g., Donnie Moore & Dave Henderson in 1986, Bill Buckner in 1986, Will Clark putting on maybe the best game-after-game display of hitting I have ever seen in the 1989 NLCS, Seattle beating the Yankees in extra innings in 1995, the Pirates getting their hearts broken for the third year in a row in 1992, Curt Schilling and the bloody sock, the Cubs getting sooo close to the World Series, the Yankees committing the biggest choke in the history of professional sports, ha, ha). It is the time when baseball's superiority as a game is demonstrated. In baseball. unlike in the NFL, the kicker does not win the ring for his team. (Adam Vinateri may be the greatest kicker ever -- really -- but he's a kicker.) In baseball, unlike the NBA, there is not a special style of ball called "playoff ball" when the refs let the defense mug the offense and don't call fouls.

In baseball, instead there are games, where there are runners on second and third with two outs in the bottom of the eighth -- or maybe the twelfth -- of an elimination game and the team at bat is down a run, and you sit there and you wait for the next pitch. No one is going to try to kick on third down to make sure that they can kick again on fourth down if something gets screwed up. No one is going to kneel down and run out the clock. No one is committing a million fouls with the prayer that the other tean is going to miss a free throws. The pitcher is going to pitch just like he always does and we're going to see what happens. If the hitter gets a hit, then we're going to see how fast the runner at second is and how good of an arm the outfielder has. (Whatever else Barry Bonds ever does, he couldn't throw out Sid Bream -- the World's Slowest Man -- coming home from second and keep his team in the 1992 NLCS.) Playoff baseball, and thus October, just rocks.

October also is when my birthday is. October 7, to be precise. This added special juice to the month as a kid, of course. It still does, to some degree. This year is a big one, I guess, in that I'll be 35. My parents got married and had me young -- one of my formative experiences apparently was sitting on the side of the pool table in the student union -- so, as I'm getting older, I'm now coming up to ages that they were that I remember. When my dad was 35, we had moved off the dairy -- which was big -- and he was on the board of my school district -- 200 kids total, K-8, and I went to school with the same core 10 kids or so K-12, we had so many birthday parties with cupcakes together that I still remember some of their birthdays -- and had started his own cotton picking business. These were big deals to me. It is more than a little weird that I'm reaching those ages now. These realizations always happen in October.

There's really only one thing about October that stinks. The gunk in the air. When I was a kid, I had asthma and October is the time when everything gets harvested in the San Joaquin Valley, cotton and corn especially. Besides meaning that my dad was working about 27 hours a day every day -- don't how he did that year in and year out -- it also meant that there were lots of fibers in the air for me to suck down. Did a lot of coughing in October, but I eventually grew out of that, so, hey, that makes October better. Once in a while here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway, there will be big fires in the Sierras north of us -- because everything is dead and ready to burn -- and the smoke will blow down and we'll get what The Muse calls a "Brown Thursday," where the sky is literally smoky. That is more than a little weird and unhealthy, but it only happens every few years.

So it's October and it's good. Hey, U2 made a record named October, so it must be good.