M. Beisenherz: Sorry, I’m here privately
Hard but autumnal
© Illustration: Dieter Braun/stern
As soon as the first leaves fall, our columnists are overcome by melancholy. But that really has nothing to do with age.
By Mickey Beisenherz
It was clear that this day would come. And yet there was this uncomfortable reminder that this summer is irretrievably over, as the waiter at my local coffee shop handed out blankets to those who wanted to sit outside. Of course they wanted. After all, we just sat outside for the last few months. In the sun.
What about the patio heaters this winter? Restaurateurs who unsuspectingly turn on the gas faucet of the heat dispenser quickly find themselves bitterly accused by angry residents of “playing in Putin’s dirty game.” It will be the fall of the spread blankets.
Melancholy is sadness that one wants to afford
So I sit there with my glass of Augustiner and the olives and look at the cobbled market square in front of me, while the wind rains the brown leaves from the trees in the backlight of the almost embarrassingly golden autumn sun. The wonderful “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” by the Arctic Monkeys rings in my ears. A song that, with its exquisite sentimentality, serves my post-alcoholic melancholy so precisely that tears almost come to my eyes. Help, that’s nice.
Melancholy is sadness that one wants to afford. A warm, heavy blanket that you put on.
what a year A turning point in the Bundestag, Grandma dies, the little one starts school, the Queen is buried, the nephew turns 18, and above all this seemingly endless summer.
Will he stand up again? Will I once again get the opportunity to lie on the jetty, jump into the Dove-Elbe and let the aroma of seaweed water carry me back to my childhood while I politely drink duck shit like instant coffee?
Something has changed. For the past few decades, I’ve been gulping down the summers, eating away the months as if lifetime were an all-you-can-eat buffet, but I’m slowly but steadily realizing that all of this is finite. “Oh, that was a nice summer. I’m looking forward to the next one.” Yes, stop. Then I’m already 46. Definitely closer to 50 than to… 30?
I have to accept it: summer is over
It usually takes me two or three days to accept the nagging inevitability that summer is over. So now I’m sitting here in a cardigan mood and enjoying this constant alternation of sun, light rain, wind. I look forward to these days. The autumn, the winter. The seasons that are more than just the dividers on life’s checkout line.
As desirable as it sometimes seems to me to move to places like California, where the sun never fails to shine, I am grateful that our time is so clearly divided into sections.
Through constant change, we learn to appreciate our existence and to enjoy it more intensely. Instead of squatting in Malibu, in a tub of sunny days, until one day you look at your shriveled hands and spontaneously realize: Oops, I’m already old.
It’s the constant change that makes life exciting. The different qualities. Even the worst day is worth a coffee bean in the middle of a wine tasting.
You see, I lied to myself about it all pretty neatly. Ask me again when I come home soaking wet from the first mud…