Fall has many iconic symbols: colorful leaves (like, duh); apple orchards; pumpkins and mums and decorative gourds; pumpkin spiced everything (hate the game, folks); and many things spooky like inflatable skeletons and oversized spider webs and scary movie marathons and simmering rage when you see the “sexy question mark” Halloween costume in your Facebook feed. Here’s another: the humble, unassuming, faithful bench.
I grew up in a town where you didn’t need public benches because the town evolved in such a way that it desired to keep people in—malls, stores, restaurants, car dealerships, supermarkets--not have them idly wandering out and about like murderous drifters. Hang on, a slight correction. Plenty of the town’s chain restaurants had benches, those long, two-plank kind of structures like the kind paratroopers sit on in military planes and just as comfortable. There were also benches in the mall. But me and the rest of my uppity youthful friends made a point to actively shun them. Benches were for the elders who had nothing better to do than sit together and not-so-silently judge the young people and their crazy hair and terrible clothing and incoherent slang (Am I right, Daddy-o?). The only thing worse than the old people on those benches was your mom who had parked herself outside The GAP waiting for you and your friends after you had expressly told her you would find her in the parking lot by the food court entrance!
Like with so many things, life has a way of whisking you into the world and, thankfully, ejecting you from the tiny shell of your existence to broaden your perspective and expand your outlook. At least that’s always the hope, but because the Grand Design is riddled with software bugs, it’s still all ultimately up to us. Very good news/bad news kind of situation.
After undergrad I earned a couple of higher degrees at universities in different cities, places that were exciting and vast and historic and, to me, overrun with so much damn beauty from their monuments and old, elegant architecture to their incredible parks and pavilions, and greenspaces, big and small. I spent many hours in these settings, sitting on a bench with my book, a journal, and caffeinated beverage reading or people-watching or just looking around at nothing and everything. These were halcyon days between the end of last century and the beginning of this one, just before the acceleration of Apple i-products colonized our attention spans. Personally, those were not the best of times, but afternoons like the one I just described were as close as it got to a definition of happiness back then. And it still does.
The garland of autumn is strung together with days that entreat us to slow down. It’s in the thinning rays of watery light, in the corners of the sky turning purple earlier and earlier, in the extra layers we add to go outside. Our bodies welcome the drag on their otherwise fragile suits. Is it unreasonable to think the other parts of our being want permission to ease up on the throttle, too? For me, all of this makes the lovely, lone, stalwart bench queen of the season. Just when nothing else seems as important or necessary as taking a minute to take a minute, there she is: overlooking a river, trees putting on a van Gogh show of ochres and harvest umbers or under the embrace of a blazing red maple. Perfect! You think as you settle in and look around and start to feel a little lift here, a slight release there. How did someone know this was just the kind of spot I needed today? How, indeed.
