A Final Thought: Well, Isn’t Fall Sweet
By Mitch Allen
The day before this column was due to our production department, a co-worker told me, “Be sure you don’t write about how much you dislike fall.”
I replied, “How did you know I was going to do that?”
It turns out everyone knows I hate fall.
But first, you have to understand what a strong statement that is. In our family, we don’t use the word “hate.” It’s a cuss word, like the word “pee.” If we have to pee, we say “tinkle.” Here, above the Mason-Dixon line, everyone says “pee,” which to a Southerner is on par with the word “p*ss.”
Some Southern folk won’t even say “tinkle.” They say, “Visit Miss Murphy.” My wife’s grandparents didn’t have indoor plumbing until the 1970s, and “Miss Murphy” was a euphemism for the outhouse, which, for the record, was not a two-seater and was occupied only occasionally by a snake.
No, the strongest expression of dislike in our family isn’t “hate.” It’s “I can’t stand,” with a strong emphasis on “stand,” as in, “I can’t stand the obvious laugh track on the Big Bang Theory sitcom.”
In fact, our family is so genteel, most of us don’t even realize there is a laugh track on Big Bang Theory. We assume it’s filmed before a live studio audience because it would be impolite to fake something like that.
And my son-in-law—whose people hail from Northeast Ohio and Upstate New York—says our family doesn’t even grasp sarcasm because we aren’t wired that way. He’s brilliant, sharp-witted and direct, so he regularly communicates via sarcasm. When he does so, we often take him literally and move gently toward solving the problem. This is such an issue that we have given him a symbol to use in text messages any time he is being sarcastic.
That symbol is “/s.”
Sometimes, when we’re having an in-person discussion and his sarcasm goes over our heads and we are moved to “bless his heart,” he says orally, “Slash S,” and we all relax, realizing his angst was a false alarm.
So, when I say I hate fall, I mean I loathe it. In our household, “fall” is the f-word, and you don’t dare utter it until mid-October. I can’t stand the fact that jack-o’-lanterns appear in area stores immediately after Fourth of July decorations are put away.
In Northeast Ohio, summer is utterly precious, and it should not be rushed.
Here again, you must understand what I mean by “precious.” In the South, there is a continuum of compliments: “cute > sweet > nice > darlin’ > precious.” I’m giving away the secret handshake here, but “cute,” “sweet” and “nice” are not even compliments. They are insults. “Well, aren’t you sweet” is the kiss of death. “Darlin’” is a compliment, while “precious” is the ultimate compliment.
So, when I say summer in Northeast Ohio is precious, I mean it is precious, and one should not defile it with premature talk of pre-season football, back-to-school supplies, clambakes, and pumpkin beer.
A few weeks ago, near the end of September, my youngest daughter’s boyfriend brought a six-pack of pumpkin beer to our house. This was before the start of October, so my family gasped wide-eyed and horrified, looking at me to see how I would react. I calmly mentioned to the boyfriend how “cute” the beers were, and how “sweet” it was of him to bring them over this early in the season, and what a “nice” gesture it was.
He was satisfied, blissfully unaware of his faux pas.
Afterward, my wife whispered to me, “Aren’t you precious? Slash S.”
I’m nearing end and don’t have room left to tell you why I hate fall. Just know that I once wrote a series of blogs called, “25 Reasons Why Fall’s the Worst Season.” It included detailed analyses of dried fall spices versus tender summer herbs, the true and horrific reason leaves change their color, why yellow jackets are kicked out of the colony by the queen and seek out our Coca-Cola cans at fall clambakes, and what I term the “Great Sports Conjunction,” that week or two in October when every major professional sport is active—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, the PGA, and NASCAR. But mainly I hate fall because it is the ominous precursor to the approaching six months of the Great White Death, which so many of us euphemistically refer to as “winter.”
Winter is nice, yes, but late spring—especially the glorious of month of May—is absolutely precious.