Autumn sneaks up on you, where I grew up. The weather doesn’t get that much colder as the seasons turn and leaves fall. Oak leaves are not as ubiquitous as the maple or sycamore. In fact it’s the ghostly limbs of the oak as thick as a grown man’s thigh twisting and branching out that you notice. The cedars, junipers, and evergreens, popular in landscaping along the coasts of California, are the same hue of jade in October as they are in April.
Just outside Los Angeles, 800 feet above sea level in Simi Valley, home of the Reagan Presidential Library, the Santa Ana winds were the most common reminder of autumn’s approach; the hills are shades of amber and brown then as June. It meant the dangerous fire season was upon us, which would burn the scrub off as the Santa Ana winds, blowing at up to fifty miles per hour, would whip through the dry valleys; but even that didn’t stop the football game against Hart High School one October night in 1970 …
Our team captain kept talking about saving his horses, and our hearts just weren’t in the game that night of fire and hell. The fans left the stands to protect their homes as flames ringed the hills; a conflagration so bright the new night-lights in the stadium could have been turned off; yet we played on. I never quite figured that one out, why the game went on with such an emergency, while our hometown was being destroyed.
That was a bad one. Usually one or two homes got it. This night dozens burned along with murderer Charlie Manson’s hideout just miles away, the Spann Movie Ranch. Most of us couldn’t go directly home after the game by car, so many of the roads were shut down. So each of us walked home through the smoke and fire-lit cinders whipping around us on LA Avenue to help water rooftops, and fight for more important things than football.
Life lessons come unexpectedly but life goes on, and youth-filled we barely noticed the oak trees regain their tiny hand-shaped leaves that next spring.
The boys of fall 1970 have been engaged in daily chatter via email for more than a week now. Something spontaneous, like a benchmark alerting you to a point of no return, as six of us have been reliving the glory days of youth; days we then thought would never really end.
Now, forty years later, we are ready for one final scrimmage back home.
So between the emails — the reliving — we also offer the realization that the rules have changed. No tackling, no blitzing, no hard passes, “no” to a lot of things. Arthritis, heart stints, bad joints and body parts that used to work no longer serve us for the leap into the air to bring down that impossible pass from Scattereggia, who now too is gone.
I recently visited Simi Valley, and stayed with Mark May on a hill that burned to the ground in 1970 while he and I played football. We reminisced. We looked out over the valley we grew up in and loved, and for a few hours we hadn’t grown to be our fathers’ age …
I uncovered the single home movie from my last football game, which was on November 6, 1970. We watched and laughed, and became boys again, impressed with our lithe running and agility, which included getting clobbered only to get up and take it over and over again.
It was the game of my life, played on a muddy field against another personal friend, the team captain from Newbury Park High School, Mike Carlisle.
I visited his grave last month and was eighteen for a moment again. We didn’t know he would have two “falls” left to live back then, or that any of us were not immortal. Others would fade from life all too quickly just as leaves do, long before age turned its back on agility and youthful heads turned gray.
Oh autumn … Where did your quiet approach, hardly noticeable then, disappear to?
I live in the mountains now. It snows here. Leaves turn amber gold and blanket the lawn, and the aspens quake among the evergreens.
I became as old as some of the oak branches back home on the coast, and shudder at the cold that is coming upon us as I realize the golden youth of so many autumns is but a dream …
Regrets fade with the falling leaves and blow in the wind as success blankets the harder memories. But living life fully means there is still someone to love, friends to be with, family to embrace, a country to defend, and faith in God to still grow.
The boys of Simi High’s 1970 team are emailing me again. We have a forty-year scrimmage to plan, and a football film to watch, and life to review and maybe we’ll be back for one more autumn. Maybe …
James Michael Pratt is a New York Times bestselling novelist and non-fiction author, CEO of PowerThink Publishing, public speaker, Op Ed writer for The Daily Caller, and Founder of Reagan Revolution 2. His creative work may be reviewed at www.jmpratt.com. Email: james@powerthink.com.