BURN NOTICE: AN AUTUMN ESSAY ON THE SUN AND SELF

September 21^st.

Autumn.  And we are all brothers and sisters under the sun.  Animals, vegetables, and minerals (those ingested by humans) all rely on the sustaining rays of the sun.  Our particular sun has been presiding over our planetary system, cycling resources such as air and water, literally, since our earth was born.  Nary a bubble of oxygen nor a droplet of water has ever exited our solar system. Since we, as humans, crawled out of Africa some six thousand years past, we are still breathing the same air and rinsing our gullets with the same potable water that sustained life, rained over, and quenched the thirst of dinosaurs inhabiting this same planet millions of years before our arrival.  

Our nurturing sun has been burning brightly for 4.6 billion years, and our learned astronomers have given it its burn notice.  Just 6 billion more years, they say, is when our sun shall burn itself out.  If this is true, then our sun is in the salad years of its shining life, in human terms, emerging adulthood.  Perhaps such a theory adumbrates my own existance. For 61 years I have been breathing regularly, and my life insurance actuaries have given me my burn notice.  At 78 years, they say, and my live long days shall be fini.  I am in the autumn of my inspired life, in western jargon, a senior citizen.

Our golden red sun lords over an entire dairy colored galaxie that includes a red planet, a blue planet, seven seas, and a silv’ry moon.  As for me, I lord over a one hundred-seventy pounds of dairy pinkish skin, ruby red lips, grey-green eyes, type A+ blood, all topped with a silv’ry sheen.

My favorite characters marching in my Chaucerian parade this week:

• The zoomorphic who instructed me to Take this cart if you want some money while I was busking in the Extra Foods parking lot.     

          To which I treacly replied in milquetoast fashion, No thanks. 

      

• The malevolent beggar who was unceremoniously escorted from Shoppers on Broad, and after seeing me busking with my guitar, in his drunken maxixe, pirouetted and  pounded on the store glass yelling, How come he gets to stay! (Forsooth, buskerhood and beggarhood are not a brotherhood.)

Whilst our sun continues to burn, the physicists have postulated that our universe is forever expanding, both physically and metaphysically.  Whilst I am breathing, my physician has postulated that I, too, am expanding, both physically and psychologically.

Autumn in Canada has just arrived today. Soon, the mornings will be crisper, the verdigris leaves vividly vermilion, and sun drenched moments shorter by the day. As the fervor of the sun fades ever so slowly, my life, too, doth fade.  Even so, death doth not affright me ... yet.

It is common knowledge that our sun controls our seasons with its bi-annual solstices. It is not so common knowledge that I, too, control my seasons, or at least can stretch them out, because there is no such thing as bad weather -- there is only bad dress. Very soon my autumn attire shall be my woolen Brixton ranch hat, my Canadian tuxedo overtop one of my assorted brightly colored cowboy shirts and neckerchiefs, my Levi jeans pulled outside my green leather cowboy boots, while thrumming my guitar or banjitar and blowing my blues harp.

Come Winter, perchance you may find me on some snowy sidewalk on a chilly day in December, creating an endless summer for my be-mitten busking self, blowing hot air into my new red didgeridoo.