Late September, as we have it, is always a mindbender of a season, I mean, it’s always pushing in and sideways and trying out cold fingers at old locks. Before we know it, there are wells of anxiety and trembling tearing yearnings pooling at the base of our throats, the place where the warmest soft beat of life pulses. That supple spot. And don’t be forgetting that vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, oh no, it’s a sign of life, of life, of real, live, living life. And when you’re living a life, a North American, first-world kind of late September life, suddenly you are vulnerable in all kinds of ways, no matter what age you are, and vulnerable in the little guilty ways that aren’t actually problems like wars and famines are problems, so you don’t say anything about them. You just walk in the chilling air and breathe the warm fumes of dusty heating systems, and look at Hallowe’en decorations crowding in the windows of the dollar stores, (jostling for space with the omnipresent early Christmas decorations), you eat cold snappy apples and tootsie rolls and cream-of-mushroom soup, and have nightmares about your days at school or work. You think about how your life might have been different, had you walked through different doors or answered differently on a test. Joyous regrets and dubious hopes jostle in our inner windows, steaming them up and drawing pictures in the wet fog, we can’t see out, but suddenly we can see in, and we like it or we don’t, or we do and we don’t. New long yellow pencils, darkening greens of changing foliage, corridors reeking of ammonia and sawdust, cheap gold earrings, stiff brown suede shoes.