Following an unbearably protracted election season of negative campaigning and raw-throated public “discourse” in which the emphasis always seemed to be on some form of taking, getting, needing, wanting, denying, deploring, demanding and deceiving, isn’t it nice, at long last, to enter the season of giving and thanking?

The simple virtues always disappear at election time. Even basic decency goes out the window, as candidates circulate the most hideous images of their opponents they can find. The opponent is usually depicted in grainy black-and-white, either with a mug-shot sneer or captured at an off moment with eyes closed to slits or mouth wide open, laughing inappropriately.

By now we are ready to move beyond all that and into the sweetly innocent realm of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday of the year, a time of blessedly simple rituals and little fanfare. That the holiday has survived in such an unspoiled state seems almost miraculous to me. It’s like a piece of pristine land—surrounded on all sides by the encroaching, half-crazy commercial sprawl of Christmas—that has yet to succumb to the bulldozer’s blade.

But now, at last, the great day seems to be in real danger. For years, retailers have been nibbling away at the barrier between Thanksgiving calm and Christmas madness. For a while they were content to open at 6 a.m. on the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. Then the opening crept back, earlier and earlier. It was camped for a couple of years at midnight. But now the stores have made a brutal leap, like zombies breaking through the doors and windows of a farmhouse. Target has announced it will be opening at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Tanger Outlets in Westbrook followed with word they’d be opening at 10 p.m.

Clearly, it won’t be long before the sprawl of Christmas is utterly triumphant. All the stores will open all day on Thanksgiving. It will be a move, like all the other encroachments, that gains the retailers very little (after all, we still buy presents no matter when the shopping season begins). But it will cost the rest of us—especially those who value family, home, peace and quiet—a great deal.

In reading all about how Tom Foley lost to Dan Malloy in this week’s election, I have yet to see any reference one of the most vexing reasons: The Republicans paid almost no attention to the underticket it put together in support of Foley. In fact, as political party leadership grows weaker in general, this once very important political art form seems to be gradually disappearing from view altogether.

If building a winning underticket is indeed an art form, John Bailey was its Michelangelo. When he was the Democratic Party Chairman in Connecticut, it was never hard to see his guiding hand at work in building a winning, or at least formidable, team. Diversity was the key, and so was political experience. If you had a somewhat less than dynamic Jewish candidate for governor in Abe Ribicoff in 1958, build support for him in the lieutenant governor spot with an affable Irish pol from Putnam, John Dempsey. And when it was Dempsey’s turn to run in 1962, get an Italian-American woman, Ella Grasso, onto the ticket, along with African-American Gerald Lamb from Waterbury. You can go back and look at the tickets during all those years and you will see Bailey’s formula hard at work. Give the voters someone they can relate to, someone who will make their community feel proud, perhaps even someone they know. And get political experience into the mix as well – people who know how to campaign and who have friends and associations all across the state.

I saw this philosophy at work first hand in 1986, when I worked on Bill O’Neill’s gubernatorial campaign. Bailey was gone from the scene, but his lessons had been learned. O’Neill’s ticket included a world of experience, not only his own but also that of Comptroller candidate Ed Caldwell of Bridgeport, Lieutenant Governor Joe Fauliso of Hartford and Attorney General Joe Lieberman of New Haven (born in Stamford). Each had spent years working in the State Capitol and circulating around Connecticut. Each was a seasoned campaigner with his own constituency. Add in a capable man of color in Francisco Borges and a woman, Julie Tashjian, and you had a ticket ready to go to war.

Compare all this to the ticket put together by the Connecticut Republicans this year (although using the term “put together” is probably giving credit where none is due). At the top you had Tom Foley, an unsympathetic one-time loser so uncomfortable in politics that he once had to take lessons from John Rowland on how to work a room. Even so, there was a chance that this was the year Foley could topple Malloy, not by outspending him, not by outthinking him, but by assembling a willing, experienced, competent, diverse, charismatic underticket. Which didn’t happen. At all.

Foley’s running mate, lieutenant governor candidate Heather Somers of Groton, seemed a mere appendage to the GOP effort. Malloy actually picked up votes over 2010 in Somers’ part of the state, including her own town of Groton. This is not what you want from your running mate. The others on the ticket were standard-issue Republican suburbanites: Kie Westby from Southbury, Tim Herbst from Trumbull, Sharon McLaughlin from Ellington and Peter Lumaj from Fairfield. All earnest, no doubt, and perhaps more than competent, but nothing to stir a voter’s soul. And among them there was virtually no experience in anything other than local politics, and suburban politics at that. Why not find a candidate or two who could go into New Haven, Hartford or Bridgeport and at least stir things up a little bit?

But Republican party leadership apparently has no taste for that, even in a year that could have been a good one for them. I admit that times have changed since Bailey was running the show for the Democrats, and that with easier primary challenges it’s harder to forge a ticket these days than it once was. But it’s not impossible. You just have to be aware of the human aspect of politics and what might appeal to voters as they make their decisions. It’s not necessarily something you can feed into a computer or throw money at, but it might just win you an election.

“Slow, slow!” cried Robert Frost to the fleeting days of October—and we who live in Connecticut know exactly what he meant. Even with his immortal gifts, Frost couldn’t slow things down any more than we can. Maybe his name worked against him. Anyway, October is a month that always seems to pass much too quickly; we barely have time to savor its colors and light before it disappears (and we with it) into the darkening uncertainty of November and the cold embrace of winter.

We do love October while it lasts, though. Polls and surveys invariably show it to be the favorite month of Connecticut residents, and I heartily agree. It’s the one month of the year that without equivocation allows us to feel superior to those who live in other states (especially those who have homes in Florida and spend all winter obnoxiously sending email and Facebook weather reports back north). We are at our best in October. There is a briskness to our step, a delight in our surroundings and a busy energy that in some sense must harken back to our harvesting forebears. In any event, I can’t imagine devoting a column like this to any other month.

Some years ago, I laid out some of the very specific reasons why I think October is the best month of the year in Connecticut. Most of those reasons remain true today, of course:

• It’s too late for mosquitoes, and too early for the holiday hullabaloney to begin. October is a delightful transitional period in the annual cycle, a gentle easing down into the cold and dark (and let’s try not to think about last October’s freak snowstorm). The foliage is just a spectacular bonus.
• Tailgating. One of the most wonderful of all social activities: Congregating near a field or stadium before a football game combines eating and drinking, the outdoors, people-watching and often the renewal of old acquaintances.
• Cider. Is cider the eggnog of October? No, it’s far superior. You can drink more of it, drink it more often, and, unlike eggnog, it actually can be enjoyed with certain foods. Doughnuts, for instance.
• MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA. Call it Jocktober? Once you’re done communing with nature, it’s good to remember that this is the one month of the year when every major sports league is in action. It’s also the month of the World Series Hangover Syndrome, a condition identified only since Major League Baseball and the TV networks decided their Eastern Time Zone fans didn’t matter all that much. With many playoff and Series games now ending around midnight, true baseball fans regularly stumble into work still woozy from the night before. But there’s a camaraderie in the sleep deprivation that’s actually kind of enjoyable.
• Indian summer. October usually provides one unseasonably warm Saturday or Sunday afternoon, one last sweet drink of golden light for us to carry until spring. I have always called this phenomenon “Indian summer,” but learned the last time I referred to it as such that, according to the dictionary, a true Indian summer is “a period of mild dry weather, usually accompanied by a hazy atmosphere, occurring in the U.S. and Canada in late autumn or early winter” (emphasis mine). My informant went on to suggest that “Indian summer” really should not be used before St. Martin’s Day—i.e., Nov. 11.
• Canadian Thanksgiving. It’s celebrated on Oct. 8 this year. How do the Canadians celebrate? I have no idea, but one of these years I’m going to find out. As a big, big fan of our own version of the holiday, I’d be delighted to add another to my calendar.
• Halloween. Skeletons, ghosts, mummies—a holiday about death? With candy? For kids? What’s not to like, except maybe the way adults are increasingly claiming it for their own?
• The smell of decaying oak leaves on the ground on a chilly night and the sound of people walking through them. This spot once would have been reserved for the smell of burning leaves, but those days are long gone (although sometimes I’ll set a match to one leaf and breathe in the smoke just to recall those thrilling October dusks when our whole neighborhood seemed alive with piles of burning leaves, flying sparks and running kids).

Speaking of leaves, Norton has just published in book form a new edition of Henry David Thoreau’s final essay, October, or Autumnal Tints, written as he lay dying in 1862. With an introduction by Robert D. Richardson and watercolors by Lincoln Perry, it serves as a fitting memorial to Thoreau’s final days, and to life and death in general.

We began this column with the words of one New England master, so why not end with those of another? Here is Thoreau, in a subsection of the essay called “Fallen Leaves,” writing on one of October’s many glories:

“By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal leaf-harvest, the acme of the Fall, is commonly about the sixteenth. Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as small Hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously, as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the Hickory, being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first touch of autumn’s wand, making a sound like rain.”
And since I hate to quote a line of poetry without putting it in context, so here is Robert Frost’s “October.”

“OCTOBER”

By Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

Going through some of my father’s stuff, I just stumbled across the Congressional Record from November 25, 1963, the first day Congress reconvened after the assassination of President Kennedy. The Record that day 50 years ago is a truncated version because both House and Senate only met briefly before marching off as a group to view Kennedy’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda in preparation for his funeral. However, several members and others paid tribute to the fallen leader, among them Speaker McCormack, Chief Justice Warren and Sen. Dirksen. All the remarks are well worth reading, but the most notable eulogy to me was that delivered by Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield.

Seeing “60 Minutes” apologize to its viewers today for reporting apparent lies as truth in a recent story about Benghazi reminded me of an earlier time when Mike Wallace picked up a phone and apologized to me:

If one thing was true about Mike Wallace, it was that you didn’t want to see him standing in your driveway with a camera crew, or even to hear his voice on the other end of the phone.

And yet, my one contact with Wallace was the time he called me as editor of Connecticut Magazine to apologize for something he had done to one of our freelance writers.

In 1993, the freelancer, Karon Haller, had written a terrific story on a West Hartford man who, during the act of assisting in the suicide for his ailing father had put a pillow over the old man’s face and suffocated him, thus stepping well beyond the normal parameters for an assisted suicide. Wallace and his producers at “60 Minutes” had decided to do a story on the case and on Karon’s reporting of it. They’d invited her to come to New York to be interviewed for the program, a request that raised all sorts of red flags for her. She declined. Next, Mike Wallace was on the phone with her, asking if she’d be willing to come down and talk to him in his office, not on camera, so he could have a better understanding of the story. Karon relented and they set up a meeting.

When she arrived at Wallace’s CBS office, Karon thought things seemed a little strange. The lighting was very bright and Wallace appeared to be wearing make-up. Still, she didn’t see a camera, so she spoke with Wallace and seemed to have given him all he needed.

A couple of days later, media writer Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post called Karon and me to say he had been told a hidden camera, secreted in the curtains, had been used for the interview. Not only that, but others on the “60 Minutes” team, including Morley Safer, had watched the proceedings from an adjoining office. In effect, Wallace had used the same sort of trickery he employed on crooks to get what he wanted out of a person who had done nothing wrong.

Kurtz’s story caused a sensation, and eventually that rarest of things, a Wallace apology. And not only that, but an on-the-air apology.

As for his phone call to me, he of course began by challenging the things I had been quoted as saying in the Post’s story. But at length he said he was sorry for the way he and his team had treated one of our writers. Sensing that with Wallace on the defensive I was in uncharted territory, I told him not to worry about it and hung up the phone.

Today has been an excellent day for apologies. Already, and it’s still only morning, President Obama has apologized for his Obamacare roll-out fiasco, CBS News has apologized for using a liar’s account in a “60 Minutes” Benghazi report and the editor of Guns & Ammo has apologized for allowing mention of gun control onto the pages of his magazine. So, with public apologies seemingly more popular than ever, it seems a good time to revisit my own thoughts on apologies from 2012:

“An apology? Disgusting! Cowardly! Beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he may be.”—Steve Martin

Are you increasingly worried about the sorry state we’re in? Well, I’m more concerned about our “sorry” state—by which I mean the endless stream of public apologies, and public calls for apologies, that threatens to plague our every waking hour and make us all miserable.

This has already been a vintage year for apologies in Connecticut, and the political campaigns haven’t even gotten fired up for November yet. John Rowland apologized to Gov. Dannel Malloy for calling him “a pathological liar.” UConn coach Jim Calhoun apologized for NCAA recruiting violations. Hartford Courant cartoonist Bob Englehart apologized for a blog posting. The Connecticut Post apologized to the New Haven Register for giving the impression the latter was ceasing publication. Gov. Malloy apologized to a New Haven school teacher (“If I’ve offended you, I apologize”) for something he’d said in his budget address. And those are only a few of the highlights. The fact is, these days you simply cannot claim to be a legitimate American success story if you haven’t publicly apologized for something.

These apologies come every which way, in all manner of tone, scope and language. CL&P Chairman Charles W. Shivery tried to make up to customers after last October’s devastating snowstorm by saying in part, “I realize that we did not meet the goals that we set for ourselves and upon which many of our customers relied, and for that I apologize.” Aetna was contrite 150 years after the fact for profiting from slavery. Similarly, the Courant expressed sorrow for running ads touting the sale of slaves or recovery of runaways.

Sometimes apologies come in bunches. Former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons had a bracing week apology-wise in May 2010, when first he called on Richard Blumenthal to apologize for misrepresenting his (Blumenthal’s) service in the Marine Corps Reserves (Blumenthal, of course, apologized). Then a few days later, Simmons felt he himself had to apologize for saying fellow Republican Linda McMahon would not be able to win her senate race against Blumenthal (“I probably shouldn’t have said what I said. I talked too much and I’m sorry.”) Of course, Simmons was right about McMahon’s chances, and he knew he was right, but he apologized anyway.

Bristol Mayor Art Ward has also grabbed both ends of the apology stick. In 2010, he demanded an apology from radio’s Rush Limbaugh after Limbaugh for some reason described Bristol as nothing more than “ESPN and a couple of cheap hotels.” Two years later, Ward himself had to apologize for telling an irritating Bristol councilman to “shut the fuck up” during a public council meeting.

The language of the apology counts for a lot. When East Haven Mayor Joe Maturo was asked earlier this year what he might do for his town’s Latino population in the wake of a cop scandal, he said, “I might have tacos when I go home”—a wiseguy remark that immediately went viral and at last put East Haven on the map. Rocking back on his heels, Maturo soon uttered the classic non-apology apology (usually reserved for ill-Tweeting professional athletes) when he said, “If [my comment] harmed anybody or hurt anybody, I apologize.” But ultimately he was reduced to the supine “My sincerest apologies go to the East Haven community and, in particular, the Latino community for the insensitive blah, blah, blah.”

It is apparently even okay for one person who has issued an apology to comment  critically on the quality of apologies issued by others. Radio jock Don Imus famously called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hoes” back in 2007. He later went to New Brunswick where he apologized face-to-face to the team and its coach. This act evidently gave him license earlier this year to call Rush Limbaugh an “insensitive pig” and a “pill-popping pinhead” for his less than abject apology (“I didn’t mean to personally attack her”) after three days of on-air vitriol directed against Georgetown University grad student Sandra Fluke, who’d angered Limbaugh (he called her a “slut”) for defending what she considered to be attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

For the record, I have two favorite apologies. One is from the movie A Fish Called Wanda, when Archie (played by John Cleese) says, while being held out a window by his ankles: “I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way a fair comment and was motivated purely by malice. And I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.”

The best, however, was the work of Samuel Clemens, toiling before his Mark Twain days as a newspaper editor in San Francisco. After a local poet objected to a comment about his latest verse, Clemens wrote, “Of course we apologized, but this wasn’t enough. The mustachioed hero wanted ‘a written retraction.’ Well, we have no objections; and, accordingly, to save further trouble, we offer this ‘general explanation’ as an apology for all the imaginary offenses of which we have ever been guilty, or with which we shall be charged in the future.”

Copy and paste, all you politicians and loudmouths. It’s the ultimate CYA.

The whole scene in this clip is so cool I can barely stand it. It’s a performance of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two” by Anita O’Day at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.  It’s not only the singer and the songs I love, but the audience, too. The girl eating the hotdog, the one reading “Camille” in paperback, the young priest, all the people in the odd straw hats. Who are they and what became of them all in the last 55 years? The clip is from a documentary, a great one, called “Jazz on a Summer Day.” And if you want to know more about O’Day (and there is a LOT to know, including how out-of-her-mind stoned she was during this performance), you might like the DVD “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer.”

As Babe Ruth, the most glorious figure in baseball’s long history, readied himself for the 1930 season, he was approached by reporters who had learned the Babe’s new salary, $80,000, would be $5,000 more than President Herbert Hoover was earning. When questioned a little too closely on the subject, Ruth, then at the height of his powers, grew impatient. “What the hell has Hoover got to do with what I make?” he supposedly snapped. “Besides, I had a better year than he did.”

Ruth

True or not, it’s a good story. At the time, especially after the economic collapse into what would become the Great Depression, it seemed impossible that a mere ballplayer could earn more than the president. Still, an exception could be, and was, made for Ruth, the great fan favorite whose prodigious slugging and outsized personality had helped lift the game from the dark days of the 1919 Black Sox scandal to unprecedented levels of popularity a decade later.

And, indeed, Ruth was the exception. For the game’s first 100 years, beginning in 1876, players’ salaries seemed generally to be in line with the work they did. They made more than the average Joe, but often had to supplement their earnings with off-season jobs at car dealerships, beer distributorships and the like. My favorite player, Jimmy Piersall, was an off-season ambassador for Cain’s mayonnaise, making appearances at grocery stores to sign autographs for kids and convince their moms to break the Hellman’s habit. Just before free agency was legalized in December 1975, the average player salary was $44,676. At that point, ballplayers still walked among us, blessed with great talent, to be sure, but not yet separated from us by moats of wealth and privilege.

Then came free agency. It was a much needed corrective at first, giving players freedoms long denied them to move among teams and negotiate terms. But that brief period of sunlight and equity has since turned into an ugly, out-of-control greedfest in which players and their canny agents have picked the owners’ pockets as if they were a bunch of hayseeds in an old vaudeville sketch—while the owners, in turn, have done the same dirty to fans with ever-escalating ticket prices and other costs at the ballpark. Now, any major leaguer who earns less than the President of the United States is barely a ballplayer at all—a reclamation project, a late-season call-up from the minors—and probably a source of economic embarrassment and pity among his teammates. The President’s salary at present is $400,000 a year; the minimum major-league salary is slightly higher than that, around $410,000, and the average is now $3.24 million a year.

Nothing will ever get that pig back into the sty. Even so, it remains possible to forget about player salaries momentarily when the action on the field gets exciting during a close game or a gripping stretch of the season. But then some multimillionaire doesn’t run out a grounder, or refuses to sign an autograph, or gets stopped at 2 a.m. for driving his Escalade at 97 mph down a city block, and it comes rushing back to me—that inglorious moment when I realized I’d no longer be able to stomach major league baseball’s absurd salary structure, and when I knew the game had left me for good.

No, it wasn’t Alex Rodriguez’s $252 million contract with the Rangers or his $275 million deal with the Yankees.

It wasn’t Barry Zito signing for seven years and $126 million with the Giants (Zito’s post-contract record at this point: 31-43).

It wasn’t Jason Bay joining the Mets for $16 million a year for six years coming off a season in which he batted .267.

It wasn’t chronic malingerer Carl Pavano (Carl Pavano!) getting $7 million a year from the Twins after posting a 5.10 ERA the previous year.

It wasn’t the unknown Russ Gload (a first baseman with 28 homers in 8 seasons) signing for $1.3 million, or former headcase Rick Ankiel being paid $3.25 million after a .230-11-38 season, or journeyman Randy Wolf at $10 million, or sub-.500 pitcher Brandon Lyon at $5 million.

Rivera

No, my limit had already been reached several years earlier. That’s when lackluster utility outfielder (career average: .214-14-42) Ruben Rivera was voted off the Yankees by his teammates after it was discovered he had gone into Derek Jeter’s locker, stolen his glove and bat and sold them to a memorabilia collector for $2,500. The detail I almost didn’t notice at the time was that Rivera’s salary with the Yankees for that season was $1 million. One million dollars. Taking inflation into account, Babe Ruth’s 1930 salary of $80,000 with those same Yankees would have come to $860,000 in 2002—considerably less than that of even the lowly thief Rivera.

Knowing that one incredible fact—that baseball had regressed to the point where Ruben Rivera was more amply rewarded for his part in the game than the great Babe Ruth had been for his—who would ever again pay to see a game? Who could ever again raise a truly heartfelt cheer for the Yankees, or any other team for that matter? No, when it comes to salaries, baseball’s disgrace is not even open to debate.

I was 18 when I first heard “Song Cycle” by Van Dyke Parks and I haven’t been able to get it completely out of my head ever since. Its music was lush, swirling, convoluted, by turns lyrical and difficult. Its words were pretty much impenetrable. It was easy to dislike – and yet 45 years later, here I am, still listening to it. In a way, I guess it has haunted me, like the wind blowing through the trees in “Blow Up” or the sound of my mother’s voice calling me and my siblings home for supper.

The amazing thing to me is that Parks was only 24 when he made “Song Cycle.” He seems to have been from some sort of show biz family. Strangely enough, he played Tommy Manacotti, the kid from upstairs in “The Honeymooners.” His brother, Carson, wrote “Somethin’ Stupid” for Nancy Sinatra and her dad.

But “Song Cycle” was a real departure. It was full of confidence and nerve and the audacity of youth. It tried dozens of different things, everything, it seemed, that Parks could think of – some were wildly successful, some just went thump, thump, thump. But the overall result, to me, was breathtaking. Or, as the review by Jim Miller in “Rolling Stone” said at the time, “The album is hardly perfect, but familiarity breeds awe at what, for a first album, has been accomplished. “Song Cycle” presents us with the work of a creative genius.”  “Palm Desert” from “Song Cycle”

I see that Parks has a new album out. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’m hoping for some kind of bookend to his effort of so long ago. In the meantime, I urge you to give “Song Cycle” a listen, if you can. You probably won’t like it, but on the other hand you might get lucky like I did and love it for the rest of your life.

Here are two useless appendages to formerly winning teams (one robbing banks, the other playing baseball) that suddenly went very wrong:

Bonnie & Clyde getaway driver C.W. Moss, who went to the cops:

And Yankee rightfielder Nick Swisher, who couldn’t buy a hit in a big spot: