The days grow short

“Oh, it’s a long, long while,
from May to December,
but the days grow short
when you reach September.”
 
Crooning Frank Sinatra made that line famous and familiar in 1965.  Then at 50, he married 21-year-old Mia Farrow in 1966, the latter claiming that she lost her virginity to the Hoboken, New Jersey singer. They stayed married for two years in the ’60s.

The first of September is seasonally the end of the summer and the beginning of autumn when the days grow short in the northern hemisphere. But May to December romances do occur. When I was 57, I Mia Farrow’d a Shanghai girl who claimed she was 21. She was that in the lunar calendar. Our age difference did get existential when going to the Thursday night market at the Paseo, she appeared to have picked herself up an elderly tourist. Girls of Sinosphere dominated the streetwalkers in Garapan at the time, after the end of the garment industry when recruiters still promised 3-year contracts for 3-month work.

“Big heart” or “first heart” was how I translated her Chinese name in my limited Pinyin but she was “all heart and some” until she decided that “five years was enough” (four, legally married) and called it quits. She was obviously a willful girl, much loved but I was cognitively clear we would part sooner or later. She decided to leave first before I was ready. No matter. The five years of May to December did lead to days growing short.

So it looks like we will slow down writing now. With the early shadows arriving September, my apartment complex takes its time to turn on the generator for the six-hour respite of power and water at night. My neighbor who works for CUC assures me that the metal poles on a ferry from Guam finally arrived and will see them shortly, replacing damaged poles on Chalan Msgr. Guerrero and Beach Roads while an equal number were flown in with repair linemen from the Marshalls, Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Yap, and Palau, all vets known to each other by membership to an organization, to assist CUC personnel in putting up the poles. 

Whether we get our whole power and water system by the end of September is a goal in a timeline, more to boost our sagging morale rather than assure our familiarity with the switch on the wall again. My own estimate on when public schools will really be operational will be October as PSS discovered that the generators in each of the schools acquired earlier were insufficient. Meanwhile, teachers are still being hired, or await the judgment on hire, while every creature and his brother awaits a FEMA dole.

I am poor and unemployed yet unaffected by Soudelor’s fury but a well-meaning friend handed me a numbered application form for NAP food stamps and where to apply for food assistance from a government office. At 70, the man’amko look would get me the distance. The assistance is nothing to sneer at (I finally cashed a 5-year-old rebate check from IT&E that I had framed on my wall after I received it in the mail while teaching in China) but I am sure there are more needy folks than I am.

It is this autumn of our years that beguiles our reflection, and though I am on the winter of mine, my soul is tropical; I know of wet and dry seasons.  Soudelor had made it dry this time around.

I do not normally go to casinos but a couple of friends work at Club C (he is a cook and she waits on tables) and they joined us at my son’s 23rd birthday; she had hers a day earlier. The place featured entertainment and food so I ignored the games (we did see a former CNMI immigration officer screaming his delight while parting with a few of his pennies) but downed the proprietor-proffered drink, brother to a friend at PSS.

The entertainment featured a former Filipina model coolly singing her heart out, and a lovely lady from Los Angeles who lives down my walkway; she passionately belted the award-winning Olympic song, One Moment in Time that tugged at the hearts of everyone in the audience. 

Not yet a short September but between the San Miguel pale pilsen and the Mickey malt liquor, Joy and Kokoh on the mike, I was properly sauced on a late August night.  It took two cups of coffee to steady my balance that let me maneuver my car sanely and safely home.

It is the sentiment of the September song that now gets us. Some flame trees display the splendor of their flowers in bloom in spite of the battering from Soudelor; the green foliage is back at verdant, and recalling the leaves of temperate zone autumns, I hum:

When the autumn weather
turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time
for the waiting game
Oh, the days dwindle down
to a precious few
September, November . . .

To be nostalgic and romantic is a province in the mind as we no longer have the luxury of holding hands with “big heart” at Paseo de Marianas, and it is clear that life is nonchalant about the logistics of power and water but the youthful sentiments of the heart stays and tugs forever, even at 70.

Our days have grown short, indeed.