A Turtle's View of Autumn

About the photo . . .

The cool, lovely autumn trend we had going a week or so ago has given way to a run of much warmer weather, with high temperatures each day in the sunny afternoons near 80 degrees F (about 27 C). It feels more like summer than fall.

I was on campus early on Wednesday morning, and was capturing photos of the start of the foliage colors. At the duck pond, I was photographing the golden reflections rippling on the water, when I suddenly realized I was not alone: a turtle nose crested right in front of me!

Oh, yes, I've seen that nose before! (Or perhaps just one very much like it.) It was one of the painted turtles I've seen before at the duck pond. And what a lovely view the turtle had of autumn's colors!

I had the strong feeling, standing there, of being very well blessed. It was as though the moment was somehow meant to be: a gift waiting there for me . . . a perfect late-summer morning, a shimmering reflection, a silent friend, a moment shared . . . and then gone.

About the song . . .

The song to accompany this moment is by Survivor, and it has been a favorite since I first heard it back in the summer of 1982. I had just graduated from high school and was heading off to college at Penn State that fall. I had fallen in love with an exchange student from Brazil, and he had to return home at the end of the summer, so we were trying to make the most of the remaining time we would have together. I didn't know it yet, but I was getting ready for one of my first true heartbreaks, as I would never see him again after he left. (My exchange student and I had gone to the senior prom together, and I had no idea how appropriate our favorite "this is our song" song, Journey's Open Arms, would turn out to be. It's better, as they say, that the world is round, so that we can't always see what is coming.)

Every moment of that summer felt very profound and poignant. I tried to hold each one of them in my hand like a precious jewel. And you know how much more music means to you when you're living through a time like that. Maybe everybody else was listening to the new Survivor album for its most famous song, Eye of the Tiger (also known as the Rocky Theme), but for me, the true wonder of the album was this song: Ever Since the World Began. It begins like this:

"I'll never know what brought me here
As if somebody led my hand
It seems I hardly had to steer
My course was planned

And destiny it guides us all
And by its hand we rise and fall
But only for a moment
Time enough to catch our breath again."

P.S. If you enjoy the song enough to have another listen, Arnel Pineda and the Zoo do a fantastic cover of it, which you can find here. Arnel Pineda is the current lead singer of the rock band, Journey. The story of how Neil Schon of Journey discovered Pineda on YouTube doing covers of classic rock tunes and offered him the job of lead singer of Journey is a fun one, and you can read more about that here.