it's what i call the high holy days - saints' day, souls' day, sadie hawkins day, all the big ones. they are actually big because the weather is better now, in my opinion, than any other time of year. after it's turned cold, cold and a little wet, orange turning to brown, leaves blowing in wind or getting wet and preparing to rot on the ground, i love all this. time to celebrate making it another year.

an unusual color splendor this year; it kind of snuck up on us and at first i said, not so great. then it got better, and still better, until last night it seemed to be at its peak. keep in mind that broad and mary, our corner that i look down on right here from my seat, is halloween central for all the trick-or-treaters. you can include halloween in the above list but i'm rather traditional and say that halloween was there because it ushered in saints day/souls day which are the real holidays, let the kids have their fun, but it's not technically part of the high holy days. same with election day, which tends to muck everything up with television commercials and everyone getting tense about political violence and such, and some of this is inevitable in my view. things will happen here and it may not be good. but what can i do? for high holy days i celebrate life, the end of a summer, the promise to bring spring around again, the peace and clear air of a cold night out in the neighborhood.

the neighborhood was packed; cars were parked all up and down the street, which usually gets no cars parked at all. we being historic district, upper middle class and all, while still in town, have the best candy and lots of my neighbors even go so far as to make a performance, invite children in through a chuppah, put on a show, give them a whole basket of candy, the whole works. we simply drop a smarties and a lollipop in their bag and hope that by having two, it'll be less clear which two but they'll know it was two and be satisfied. it has worked pretty well. but four, five bags of candy aren't enough. we run out two thirds of the way through the night.

let me try to explain what i mean by saints' day and souls' day. i'll say right out that i don't believe in heaven and hell as separate places outside of the world we live in, that somehow some of us are going in a bad direction and some of us are going in a good direction. i believe it is true that we are divided based on the direction we are going in, but we aren't heading to some separate place where everyone's 100% one way or the other. in my observation, very few of us are 100% and that may be why we're here. why should we be going anywhere when the earth has plenty of souls and bodies for us to occupy when we're done with the vessel we are currently using. but we need time to think about what's happening here - we have a soul, the soul is in a body, it's learning or not learning, it occupies that body, then it leaves. that's what we know. it may be impossible for us to leave this particular cycle, but it's silly to imagine parts of it that we somehow hope it will turn into. it's not turning into anything. and we are getting stuck with our own karma repeatedly, both in this life and in whatever life we are moving along into.

so in a way i'm celebrating, or at least recognizing, the possibility of reincarnation, the stuck-in-the-middle nature of life here, the plight we are all here sharing. happy saints' day; happy souls' day, happy sadie hawkins day. carry on.