The Niles Star

I love this time of year. Love, love. Like, "Princess Bride," "as you wish," true love, love it.

By admin

Jessica Sieff: Loving the season of giving, thinking and surviving all odds

Published 10:10am Thursday, October 15, 2009

I love it so much that I just want to wrap myself up in it and burrow into the couch amid a fortress of books and magazines and television on DVD and never come out of my crapartment.

Well, okay, I’d come out. But only to jaunt over to some glowy interior – a restaurant, a Starbucks, a Barnes & Noble, a friend’s home where is smells like cinnamon and fabric softener and comfort.

Life is so much better in the glow.

I don’t even care about politics when it’s this time of year. Health care? Elections? Nobel Prizes for no good reason? Please.

Off you go now, Capital Hill …  I’m busy wrapping myself up in the beauty that is fall. I’ll hate you all again in the winter when I’m trudging in through the door with soaking wet and freezing pant legs and hands shaking from a bumper car style ride over icy roads lacking salt because our cities can’t afford it anymore.

I’ll seethe at those Wall Street guys who somehow, obscurely “make the money” in a way nobody seems to understand, banking nothing but bonuses. I’ll get annoyed later about how they’re putting cashmere sweaters and diamond earrings and a Lexus or two under the tree this year while the rest of us slip photographs into homemade picture frames with the macaroni décor. Right now … just don’t rain on my autumn parade.

When it’s fall, I rarely even indulge in my little guilty pleasure of shameless tabloid journalism. What?  Some B-list celebrity is getting married? Please.

I’ll pay attention to all that hoopla when it’s wedding season and all the weddings are trivial and trite. Give me a fall wedding any day. This is a season for true love weddings only. Real weddings, unique and filled with class and charm and real people, real friends (congrats again, Hope and Gabe).

But I digress.

Here’s the other thing I love about fall – for some odd reason, it seems to breed inspiration and invention.

The recent issue of The Atlantic features “27 Brave Thinkers.” They range from social conscious, politically conscious to the eco-conscious and even the Iraqi-conscious … and since it’s fall I’ll scrunch my nose and ignore the fact that President Obama is on it. (I like the guy but I mean, come on … what’s next? Homecoming King? A Heisman trophy, just because?) Again, I digress.

Who knew, for example, that an anthropological scholar was being used in a program to help United States soldiers understand the cultural terrain of Iraq in order to aid an understanding between both peoples. In some cases, what we deem as hostile can be viewed as welcoming in other cultures. Embracing an understanding of those cultures in order to navigate them better. That’s what I’m talking about.

Another on the list created a company and largely hired people with autism spectrum disorder. The work is good for this specific group of people, but it was the thought, the idea that just because someone is different – doesn’t mean they should be discounted.
There’s the Pennsylvania mayor of a literally all but abandoned town who is thinking reinvention, trying to bring artists into what was once an industrial driven town – a refusal to give up and die out. There is the New York Times leader who continues to cultivate his news coverage while refusing to diminish his workforce and the Arkansas publisher who refused to give away his content and charged for online services and is actually making money.

There’s the Dallas District Attorney fighting for those prisoners who were wrongly convicted and the politician who wants to reform the prison system.

They are, indeed, brave thinkers.

And inspiration continues to come in the form of the survivor. Last week I tried to speak passionately about those who survive the pain of domestic abuse and all of its violences, emotional and mental and verbal. And there are others. This month, for instance, we mark the survival of so many women diagnosed with breast cancer. I am always amazed at these women who under go physical and emotional trauma at the hand of disease and bounce back like tightly held rubber bands – with an inspiration that stings.

And Wednesday morning, inspiration was a photo of the once captive Jaycee Dugard.
The smiling woman on the front cover of a national magazine experienced a horror that some of us will never be able to imagine. And still, she smiles. She moves slowly, one foot in front of the other and she carries on and she does the work. And we may never understand just what it is she’s going through, but still – she smiles. And in the smiles of all our survivors and brave thinkers there is a sense of defiance against odds. A sense that anything is possible. And it’s comforting against the cold.

Now is the time, after all. It’s fall. The time when colors change. Non-conformity is in.

Jessica Sieff is a reporter for the Niles Daily Star. Reach her at:
jessica.sieff@leaderpub.com.