AUTUMN LEAVINGS

Now that the cherry trees have lost their leaves in swirling crowds and clusters of color that I have to hand-pick off the baby spinach, and as the oaks toss their own gold all over the landscape and the chestnut reluctantly begins to shed in single swirling scarlet flashes, the widening access to open sky is rendering me increasingly vulnerable to the perturbations of satellite tv, the growing signal each day affording me more disquieting flashes of world events via CNN, glimpses of movies issuing from the seminal forge that is Hollywood, some benign documentaries, a couple of cooking/gardening shows, some sitcoms, gobbets of pixelfluff into my life, glimpses that leave me unhungry for more, though there is a bit of mental nourishment there for a hungry mind, tantalizing crumbs of how good a medium television could be if it were left to the devices of intelligence and wisdom, rather than to the claws of marketing; by and large, though, I'm grateful that Spring will bring the leaves back to the trees.