A Seasonal Rite: Sniping From the Gutter

Greetings from the California suburbs, where your correspondent spent Labor Day weekend roofside, engaged in the hopeful and melancholy task of cleaning rain gutters. Hopeful because to muck out a rain gutter is to ignore the empirical truth that California has entered a new Dry Age. Melancholy because this is a seasonal rite, an acknowledgment that another summer has sprinted by, and soon will come the winter.

It occurred to me, dangling over the roof edge, elbow deep in gunk, that a good Californian probably would let the gutters go this year. Nature does have a perverse streak. It’s possible a clogged rain gutter--not unlike a freshly washed car--might somehow trigger a downpour. Like most good thinking, unfortunately, this mild brainstorm came too late. I already was on the roof--committed, as they say, to the task.

There is nothing like cleaning out a rain gutter to draw the attention of neighbors. “Good for you!” they shout up heartily from the street. “Need to do that myself!” What they say is not what they mean. Life in suburbia is full of subtext--go reread your John Cheever--and these cheery expressions masked darker sentiments, like:

Thanks, jerk. For making us look bad. For laying on the guilt trip. Now, to keep up, we’ll spend next Saturday hanging upside down, getting ready for rains that won’t come . Thanks. Jerk.

At least this is how I preferred to interpret the Saturday salutations. Up there on the roof. Dangling.

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Certain chores aside, fall is my favorite season. Perhaps this comes from growing up in Fresno, where it meant harvest festivals and Pop Warner football and the sweet smell of scalped lawns covered with steer manure. In California, autumn cannot be marked by temperature or turning leaves. True, there’s a faint dew on the grass, and the palm trees shed, but mainly fall arrives as a change in light. The bleach is rinsed from the sky. The afternoon sunlight turns almost amber.

Despite what the almanac says, fall begins over Labor Day weekend--an observance as relevant as rain gutters. Let us celebrate our working men and working women. Whose real wages have been frozen since the 1960s. Whose union membership has declined to something like 10%. Whose CEOs bound into corporate headquarters every day with a glint in their eye and a red pen in their pocket: How many jobs can I whack today, ho ho? Just how vertical can this economy get?

In truth, like most American holidays, Labor Day is about shopping. The gimmicks are fall fashion and back to school, and never mind that for most California kids the flannel season runs about two weeks, sometime in January. My own daughter was taken shopping for school clothes last weekend. She picked out a raincoat at the Gap. It was marked down to $3.99. The free market economy, like nature, can be a wondrous mechanism to behold.

In the past, Labor Day served as the traditional start of the political season. This, too, is an outdated concept. The guns of politics have been roaring full bore across California since July. The major candidates have spent a bundle on television ads. So far, the collective strategy behind their eye-poppingly negative spots has been simply to get voters to start paying attention. So all right, we are listening. Now, dear politicians, do you have anything meaningful to say? Hello?

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One seasonal sound is absent this September. With baseball gone, Vin Scully’s distinctive voice no longer resonates across Southern California backyards. This, many of my Los Angeles friends have observed, is about the only thing they miss as a result of the baseball strike. Otherwise, the baseball blackout has been perfectly enjoyable, like a late afternoon nap. There are simply too many sports. We needed a break.

And of course, now there is football again, and later this fall the O.J. Simpson trial. Television sets everywhere are snapping back to life. The political candidates are concerned about the Simpson case. They fear Californians won’t concentrate properly on the campaign rhetoric. Imagine that.

Actually, it occurred to me this weekend, while on the roof, that this political fretting is exactly backward. For the O.J. trial has the potential to produce what every advertiser, campaigns included, should want--a huge and captive audience. Thus, the smart politician might consider gouging the moneyed interests now for sufficient contributions to secure live air time at every trial break: That was riveting testimony on genetic fingerprints, folks, and it reminds me of my views on family values . . . .

I liked that idea on Saturday a lot more than I do now. Could it be that dangling upside down from a roof is bad for the brain? Next fall I don’t think I should risk it. Next fall I should just let those rain gutters go. Hello?