November Was Much Less Horrible Than Predicted

November Was Much Less Horrible Than Predicted

Well, after all that fretting, November didn’t turn out to be so terrible, did it? After I made such a big deal about how it was the worst month of the year, bound to bring us to new depths of misery, it wasn’t actually all that bad.

Sure, it started off rotten, what with the results of the election. But that should not have surprised anyone. And soon enough, we’d mostly forgotten about it. (Probably because of all the lead in our drinking water and favorite kitschy vintage glassware.) By the second week of the month, we were back to being distracted by the foibles of Lebron James and Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matt Lauer playing Kanye West against President Bush, and royal engagement announcements and handsy T.S.A. agents, and Sarah Palin’s second book and Bristol Palin dancing on TV. From the no news is good news perspective, we were doing all right!

And then Patti Smith won the National Book Award, and Kanye’s album came out every bit as awesome as anyone could have hoped it would. And Aung San Suu Kyi was released. And, along with it’s new, media-executive boss, the New York City Department of Education will have an educator in a position of power after all. And despite the usual overindulgence in pie and fabric samples, Thanksgiving this year was actually not too unbearable.

But best of all, most surprisingly not-depressing of all, the weather was beautiful. The trees hung onto their leaves longer than expected, and the days, ever shortening though they were, were clear and crisp and brightened by a tastefully low-hanging sun. In fact, there was a time there, around the middle if the month, when, if you happened to be sitting on a folding chair in Madison Square Park around 4:30 on a Wednesday afternoon, because you just dropped your kid off at a nearby robot-building class (which, I don’t know… ask his mother), and you were lucky enough to be drinking a glass of red wine from Shake Shack, and reading Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (which, God, it’s so good — you totally should have read it fifteen years ago when your friend Jen first recommended it), and closed the book when it got too dark to see the words, and looked up and saw the setting sunlight reflecting off the Met Life building, and that there was a curtain of small blinking light bulbs hung in the center of the park’s main lawn (which, it turns out, is artist Jim Campbell’s installation, Scattered Light, which will be there through February), and noticed that the way that it billowed in the breeze made it look like nothing so much as a field in the country thick with midsummer fireflies, you might breathe a deep breath of the cool, crisp, yellow-smelling air and feel a truly rare sort of contentment, and think to yourself, Huh, at this moment, there is no place I’d rather be in the world. And then, How could I have been so wrong? November is not the worst month of the year, it is the very best month of all!

So mostly, the past 30 days offered further evidence to support the theory that the universe is controlled by an unseen power that works in direct opposition to whatever I think will happen. Or, in other words, in direct correlation to whatever will make me feel dumb. Or, more dumb. I mean, Jesus, publically apologizing to a full calendar month. That’s ridiculous.