Stash the Light

“In order to remember where they cached all their food something that varies winter by winter, chickadees, have evolved the mechanism of a featherweight brain that turns over easily…discarding what no longer applies and bringing in a fresh batch of impressionable brain cells. By spring, their brains have shrunk back down, no longer needing quite as much space to remember all those stashes.”

—Natalie Angier, The New York Times, 1994

The expression ‘Sunday Scaries’ is way too cute for what it ostensibly describes but it is the case that every afternoon has a Sunday evening feel when this time of year rolls around. I started noticing the days shrinking, however slightly, in mid-July. The creeping dread when this begins, and I feel it bodily, is not due to my love of frolicking for hours upon hours in the gentle clasp of Summer’s warm-weathered embrace — that offers another kind of pressure entirely. Activity! Joy! Everything is possible! All the live long day! The stunted light anxiety is really a soul thing, and probably a nervous system thing, too. My serotonin seems to go down with the sun. Or some other chemical. Maybe it’s a hormone. I don’t actually have any idea what it is, which, the older I get, seems more and more true. I don’t really know why most things are the way they are, and also? Plenty of people in charge of knowing things don’t either.

Serotonin is a great example. Turns out, despite it now being thirty-five years after their invention, no one can say with any certainty why SSRIs help the people they do. Yes, maybe some forms of depression are at least partly caused by a particular chemical or bunch of chemicals we don’t have enough of swimming around up there and these medications reinforce what’s missing in the brains of those of us for whom it is, but if you ask any decent psychopharmacologist they will confess that the reason people respond to them could also be a pure placebo effect.

Anyway. At some point in the relatively recent past, my thought patterns about the darkening months ahead changed, as the amount of foreboding I experienced around the Fall equinox became increasingly untenable. A cognitive adaptation for self-preservation, perhaps. Where my level of despondency used to correspond with our proximity to the Winter Solstice, that point in the calendar now exists as a kind of mental buoy, bobbing out in the middle of the dimming sea — just make it to December 22, I tell my sighing brain, then the light turns around and we can start counting the minutes back to late June.

As a result, I’m in possession of a Rainman-like ability to look at a large collection of days spilled out in front of me and determine quickly and exactly how many more until the light returns. On any given date, I can tell you how long before the Solstice arrives and the next round of Daylight Saving begins. (81 and 160, respectively, as of this writing.)

In 2022, Congress, which you may or may not realize is in complete control of time and The Darkness, toyed with my entire human experience by announcing they would end Standard Time altogether. Specifically, the Senate said so. This is infuriating for a number of reasons. First, it was Marco Rubio’s bill; he’s been championing it for years. I hate Marco Rubio, but I love this bill. In fact, I need this bill, which means I have to expend precious energy rooting for Marco Rubio. Second, the House (not this current clown car of nihilist numbnuts, the last one) decided to fuck it all up for everyone by letting the bill stall in committee. So now, because time ran out in that session to pass it, the bill is dead, which means instead of not having to turn the clocks back for the first time since 1974 as the Senate promised me (yes, me personally), we will be forced, in 35 days, to rewind an hour once again. And that means very soon afterward, it will be pitch black outside at 4:30 in the mothereffing afternoon.

In case you’re unaware of the history governing American time, and without getting into the origins of Daylight vs. Standard (having mostly to do with World Wars I & II) the last law that temporarily made DST year-round was enacted to save fuel during the 1973 energy crisis under Nixon because, you know, money. It was quickly repealed after there was a series of morning traffic accidents that killed eight children in Florida. They blamed the accidents on the earlier darkness even though there was no definitive way to prove that, and, as it would turn out, the average number of pre-dawn road deaths during that time rose by a total of two over the previous year, while afternoon fatalities decreased.

I guess Big SADD wasn’t up on Capitol Hill lobbying hard enough on behalf of the Sun or the brains that would’ve benefited from it shining on them past the airing of $10,000 Pyramid. (Did I make certain this was broadcast at 4 p.m. in 1974, yes, and you’re welcome.) Another reminder that at any point, Congress can pass or repeal laws on behalf of its citizens’ urgent well-being. Eight kids were too many, so they turned back TIME. Imagine if, in the same spirit, and where the evidence is unequivocal, they altered something else, like, just for instance, legislation related to the leading cause of death among American teenagers and children currently being G U N S.

But I digress.

In previous experiments with songbirds, Dr. Nottebohm and his co-workers demonstrated that parts of the brain believed responsible for song learning undergo annual cycles of cell death and regrowth, very likely as a way of allowing birds like canaries to forget last year's tunes and instead master new ones. Now, scientists have shown that neurogenesis also takes place in the songbird's hippocampus, presumably as a way of keeping the creature's foraging skills and territorial maps up to date.

Not long after my father died, someone reminded me that your entire body effectively regenerates every seven to ten years. I remember wondering if that’s where the seven-year itch comes from. Do people feel like scratching off old love when those original cells start shedding? If cells die from an acute injury, then they swell up to bursting and spill what’s inside of themselves onto their neighbors (Rude). But the ones that die naturally, they’re programmed to do so, and the deaths are orderly, they’re neat. Towards the end of their time in your body, these dying cells send out a signal, like a taxi turning its light on, that tells other white cells to eat them, for fuel. It’s all very efficient and intelligent.

…birds require enough brain power to get them through a dozen difficult seasons. However, their airborne ways limit the potential size of their brain. They cannot meet the demands of their long lives by entering the world with weighty minds and copious room for new knowledge. So, instead… they have evolved the mechanism of a featherweight brain that turns over easily, discarding what no longer applies and bringing in a fresh batch of impressionable brain cells.

The only thing my Dad might have loved more than watching sports and my mother’s egg salad sandwiches was lying on a fold-out lounge chair doing the crossword, in the sun. The man owned three radios so he could listen to that many different games all at once, and I’m pretty sure the best weekends of his life were spent eating those sandwiches with the sports on while doing the crossword, in the sun.

He was a light junkie is the point. Both my parents were. They met floating on separate rafts in the Mediterranean and got married on the longest day of the year. Endless Summer!!! they would shout to each other defiantly at some point every September.

So I guess it’s possible my cells, the original ones, were programmed the same way.

I put this photograph I’d taken of the sun setting over the bay in Sagaponack on the wall of his ICU room during that first week of September, thirteen years ago. The week, when even as the doctors insisted otherwise, I knew he was leaving. I wanted that light to be what my father saw if he opened his eyes and I wasn’t there.

So he’d know where he was going.

He would have called me around now, definitely on a Sunday, to bemoan the ever-earlier darkness just like he giddily did as soon as it began getting lighter past seven. When we were getting off the phone, after I said I love you, his deep voice would bellow in reply:

You!

It was hard for him to say all three words to me in a row out loud, but I was lucky because he didn’t have to.

I prepare for the famine by scavenging.

I am a chickadee. I am a chickadee replacing old neurons to remember where I left what I need.

I am a canary. I am a canary forgetting last year’s songs.

I keep a cache. A scattering. Hidden inside my phone. I build a path with it. A path to the longest day in June.

I stash the light.

And I left some for you, too.