Mid-September to mid-October has been a real problematic time for me. Most people with seasonal depression either have trouble with the deepest part of winter, or else the entirety of the season; I don’t know anyone else who has trouble with this specific time of the year. Even after I started teaching, the joy I feel after the first weeks of teaching new students has worn off by this time, and as the equinox approaches I find myself having a more difficult time feeling good about much of anything. This year has been even harder for me due to family health problems, and even though I start teaching at a new school later this week — my first time teaching in Michigan in over five years — I’m having a hard time feeling as excited about this new opportunity as I should be.
Even though each solstice and equinox is a time of change, the autumnal equinox may be the most readily-visible for me, at least as a Toledoan. We usually have snow on the ground before the winter solstice and vernal equinox, and not much happens around the summer solstice except for the leaves and grass darkening a little. Even though it’ll be a couple of weeks before the leaves change colour and fall down in earnest, some of that always starts to happen just before the solstice, and it’s an undeniably harbinger of what’s to come over the next few weeks. I’ve always been more of a warm-weather person than a cold-weather person (although not as warm as these awful summers we’ve been having lately), so that probably makes the change of seasons even more difficult for me.
It’s been hard not to think about change lately, between family stuff and politics and a host of other factors, but there were a couple of recent changes here locally that kind of hit a nerve with me. They’re the kind of thing that shouldn’t bother me much at all, especially given that today’s modern technology has rendered the changes mostly meaningless for me, but they mark a passage of time that isn’t so easy for me to cope with when I’ve got so many other things that I’m trying to handle.
I listen to our local public radio station, WGTE-FM, an awful lot; I’ve practically got it tuned in on my car radio all the time, and I call it up on TuneIn a lot when I’m working on things here in my bedroom. (I’m listening to Music from the Hearts of Space as I’m drafting this blog right now, as a matter of fact.) The huge change to come to American public radio this year, of course, was the retirement of Garrison Keillor from A Prairie Home Companion to work on other projects (and, I hope, to give me permission to use “Lake Wobegon” in the title of that novel I’m still trying to get published), and although Keillor’s show will go on without him, there’s no denying that it won’t be the same without his regular presence.
WGTE-FM took the opportunity after Keillor’s last show this summer to make some changes to their programming lineup, and to be fair, these were all changes that they made after consulting with some of their listeners. I don’t begrudge WGTE-FM for making changes that their listeners asked for, but that fact doesn’t make the changes any easier for me to deal with. The first of these changes was that WGTE-FM immediately replaced A Prairie Home Companion with a different show, not even giving the new host of A Prairie Home Companion (who hasn’t even debuted yet) a chance to retain Keillor’s fanbase. The show they replaced A Prairie Home Companion with is a good show, don’t get me wrong, but it’s hardly the institution that A Prairie Home Campanion is.
They made a number of other changes to their programming in the days after Keillor’s retirement, but the other big one for me was replacing their Friday night and Saturday night airings of Jazz After Hours with another jazz-centred broadcast. I’m not even that big of a fan of jazz music, or Jazz After Hours in particular, but not having the same voice greet me at midnight on Saturday after Electronic Currents ends is still kind of jarring, and not entirely welcome.
Now, let’s back up a moment and look at this from a purely functional standpoint: I’ve already said that I listen to WGTE-FM in my room through TuneIn. With just a few taps of my smartphone’s screen, I can load up any number of American public radio stations that play Jazz After Hours right when I’m used to it starting at midnight (and I’ve done that more than once). Not only are lots of those same stations still playing A Prairie Home Companion every week, but there’s even a dedicated Internet radio station that plays nothing but Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” segments twenty-four hours a day. I’m hardly at a loss for the shows that WGTE-FM stopped airing, and listening to them requires just a couple of extra seconds of screen-tapping.
Why, then, has WGTE-FM changing its programming lineup affected me so much? I think it goes back to something I mentioned earlier this year on the musecast about my generation and MTV; lots of people from my generation miss the days when MTV played music videos, even though we haven’t watched MTV for over a decade (and probably wouldn’t watch them even if they started playing music videos again, just because the music videos coming out today can’t hold a candle to what was coming out in the mid-nineties), and even though we can watch pretty much any music video we want to at any time on YouTube (and in higher quality than the VHS copies of videos we used to watch over and over back in the day). Back before Internet technology made all this stuff so easy to access, radio and television channels that played the things you wanted to listen to or watch, from giants like MTV all the way down to local public radio stations like WGTE-FM, were destinations, and the fact that they played the things that you wanted to listen to was kind of a validation of your tastes, a way of making you feel better about liking a certain show or musician or what have you.
As much as modern technology has granted us the kind of convenience that was unimaginable when I started listening to A Prairie Home Companion in the early nineties — and I certainly wouldn’t give it up for anything right now — it’s caused us to lose the special bond that many of us used to feel with traditional broadcast channels. I probably listen more to WGTE-FM during the week than I do any other radio or television channel, but now I’m listening to them less than I did before, and I feel kind of sad about that. I’d donate to WGTE-FM if I had the money to spare (and I’ve donated to them in the past, back before I finished school and I could still afford to do such things), and I still like them an awful lot, but my relationship with them, as trivial as it is in comparison to family relationships and the like, has changed over the past few weeks, and certainly not for the better.
Change is ultimately what the solstices and equinoxes are all about, and the autumnal equinox, with its reminders that what was once bright and vibrant will eventually wither and decay, is hard enough for me to deal with even at the best of times, let alone when I’ve got the problems that I’ve been dealing with these past few months. While I still appreciate WGTE-FM and listen to them regularly, it feels like my appreciation for them has withered a little with the recent changes they’ve made to their programming. I want to think that I’ll still be enjoying WGTE-FM as long as I live, but if the autumnal equinox teaches us anything, it is that decay is inevitable and unavoidable. Some days that’s not such an easy fact to accept.