This is Shangri-La, ah, ah.
I’m writing you from the town where I went to undergrad. I’m here this weekend visiting an old college friend I haven’t seen in years and now she’s at rehearsal for a play she’s in tonight – or, no, what’d she call it? An “ensemble performance piece.” Ahem, ahem.

So I’m sitting at the coffee-shop/earthycrunch market that’s sort of at the crossroads of this town, (around the corner from the delicious diner housed in the old mill where we had breakfast, across the street from the organic ice-cream store, across the way from the town farmer’s market, where else.)

It’s a ridiculously beautiful day. I remember coming here from Pittsburgh as a college freshman and rubbing my eyes, whose pupils were not used to shrinking down so far past the first of October. The sun! The green! Today is a day that feels like those early days. The sky is a big, blue dome. The plants and trees that are Just Everywhere are waving, dancing, in the welcome autumn breeze.

So are the people. This place is all a-bustle with young families whose children wear brightly-striped knit hats and sunglasses that match their parents’, professors on bicycles, a thousand-one hip grad-studently types.

They tote cotton and hemp grocery bags. They wear scarves made of cashmere or hand-dyed wool. They smile brightly at one another, the whiteness of their teeth practically blinding in the bright sunlight. And there’s a diversity among the populace that makes everyone look like they wandered over from some ad for a computer printer company: they’re well-dressed; they’re perfectly integrated. Dreadlocks and expensive glasses and organic clothing. In Polish and Spanish, Southern drawls and New York terseness, you hear arguments about Asian politics and sociological theory. Gene-pools that range from around the globe to converge on this spot and make the most beautiful babies in the world, babies whose first words are, “I WANT some carrot juice!”
Which is one thing.

But who wouldn’t be making babies? Who could resist? I mean, did I mention it’s not just the tykes, that there’s an overabundance of physical comeliness, here? I mean, I don’t know what people are making of me right now, for I am staring. I am all eyes. I am sitting here and there is lust. Lust in my heart, not just from the loins but from that part of myself that eyes white teeth that match the superfluity of IPods, that soaks in this multi-culti, intellectually superior and upwardly mobile brand of healthy freshness. O, you fair-trading, volunteering professionals and scholars reading your Utne Readers in the morning sun, you. Are. Beautiful.

[And did I never notice this as an undergrad? I must have, coming from Pittsburgh, where inhabitants are, in large part - and I am sorry all my dear, dear Pgh-brethren- but: pasty. And clad at least half the time in sweatshirts advertising sports teams.]

I will take this thin layer of this shine back with me, to the coast when I return. And I will try not to whine.

What Fall Does
There are moments, and they are rare, that you look up and find yourself living a new life. Not just inhabiting it, but living it. You’re out drinking beer at a grad school function. You wander back from one room of the bar to the other, talking and laughing with the friend you made five weeks ago, and there, at the table where you left them, are your friends. It’s home.

And it’s weird to realize this. Fall does something strange to me, to everyone I think, to some extent, but since I’m all weird and like, sensitive about this shite, I notice it in this intense manner every single year. One friend of mine says fall makes her manic and unstable. To me, it does something different. Something quieter and more thoughtful, but just as intense.

Here’s what I think: That in fall, we realize again that we’re vessels, vessels who now want to be emptied out of the old. The new faraway sun makes us realize what we didn’t when the glare was so hot and hard: We can see, suddenly, what’s not working for us, what’s making us uncomfortable. It’s the chill, and the way the sky feels bigger. Limitless. It makes me want to take on new, good habits. I am active, my muscles stretch and stir in air that is finally breathable again. And I am pensive and thoughtful and wistful. I want nourishment. Hot chocolate and chili. I want to talk for hours and be alone for just as much time. I want to listen to Richard Buckner and Diane Cluck. Spring is a time for romance. In the fall, I want to feel the truth like hard dirt, grit under the nails.