Remembering November

And all that the autumn of life can bring

Photo by Niki Clark

I’m thinking a lot about November today.

Not because it is the month in which we find ourselves, or that it the month of my birthday, or that it’s the month when the holiday season begins, but because it the month that symbolizes change, and in the haze of a campfire smoke sparks reflection. The season of harvest leans us toward winter, the world’s last smile before year’s end.

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“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honey-sweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters on Cezanne

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As leaves fall to reveal nature’s skeletal form, we see the bone structure of the world and of ourselves. November reveals as no other time of year can do.

Here is a segment from my memoir, Daylight Saving Time about the undercurrent of emotions, and reflection that only the month of November can bring.

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

One of Andy Warhol’s last works, “Camouflage” was created a year before his death. The scale is massive, nine feet tall and thirty-five feet wide, displaying a pattern that is both unnerving and all encompassing. Brown and green blotches, the camouflage pattern of war used to disguise, vaguely obscures the image of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”.

My son is in town from Seattle. Thanksgiving is tomorrow and we are spending the afternoon at the Art Institute. The main exhibit is an immense Warhol collection. My son doesn’t remember ever being at the museum when he lived here, something I find hard to imagine, so, we first hit the museum’s highlights—Picasso’s “Old Man with Guitar” and Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”. We then spend two hours in the rooms that hold Warhol’s images of soup cans and Coca-Cola, celebrity and tragedy, and camp. In the final room, the exhibit reveals—just as was done at the end of the artist’s days—that Warhol had lived a life of secret piety.

Moving as close to the work as the guard will allow, I find the face of Jesus. It is there behind artistic concealment, Warhol’s faith hidden yet apparent. It is said that nearly early every day for many years Warhol slipped into a back pew at St. Vincent Ferrer in New York. He spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at a soup kitchen. He helped put his nephew through seminary school. He carried a rosary in his pocket. Warhol was brought up Byzantine Catholic in his hometown of Pittsburgh and maintained his faith despite his image, despite the life at his studio—The Factory—where the hallmarks of the 1960s were evident—drugs, sex, and radical politics. Warhol never spiritually swayed from his Catholicism and its traditional tenants. Even as an openly gay man, he did not publicly support the gay movement. Many say it was his strict faith, and some say he made those daily visits to St. Vincent Ferrer to pray for forgiveness.

“He was a complicated man,” I say to my son who stands beside me now before Warhol’s work.

“A provocateur,” my son adds.

In one’s art, the layers are exposed, yet never truly explained. Warhol played up and on the American obsessions with money and fame. But was that a statement about him or about us? Who was Andy Warhol, really? Who are we, really?

Leaving the exhibit, my son wonders aloud about the idea of art. He wonders if blown-up silkscreen images, one of Warhol’s trademark processes, are truly art or just a cheap vehicle. He’s using someone else’s image, my son says. That he did. But Warhol also used his own Polaroid pictures, I add. Is that art? I don’t have the answer, but I argue that what we see as art is in how the images are used, how they are presented to the world. The art is in what we see and maybe in what we don’t see. It is found in the mystery of things, deeper than face value, like Warhol himself.

Warhol’s memorial service was held at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was a celebrity event that included Liza Minnelli, Calvin Klein, and Yoko Ono. The famous filled the church. But in the eulogy, his friend John Richardson reminded those who gathered that Warhol had fooled the world into believing he was consumed with fame, and what he was really doing was exposing society’s appetites and revealing how we camouflage what’s most important—our humanity. The real Andy Warhol and his art didn’t truly come into focus until he was no longer there.

Standing inside the exit door, I detect a freshening wind outside and stop to pull my coat’s collar to my chin to prepare for it.

“He was only 58 when he died,” I say.

“And how did he die?”

“Heart issues, I believe.”

When we leave this world, we will not know what will be left behind, what secrets will be unwrapped, what truths about ourselves unveiled. We can only hope to be who we are today, in the here and now, as honestly as we can.

To the left is the Art Institute’s gift shop. My son nods toward it.

“You sure you don’t want an Andy Warhol grilling apron or something?”

I shake my head and smile.

“But I kind of think maybe old Andy would have liked the idea of an apron with a superimposed image of his Marylin Monroe.”

We walk outside to the Institute’s concrete steps. I am satisfied, believing I have untangled something, a kind of clandestine truth. From somewhere once hidden, I have an instant memory of my father drawing images of people on a napkin after a Sunday dinner, lingering at the dining room table with a cup of coffee at his side, entertaining his boy with his pen. Draw me something cool, Dad, I would say. My father’s artistry was a passion never fully realized. The faces he would create on the napkins were of men with sharp jaws and full heads of hair. Sometimes he would draw them smoking. My father loved to sketch in delicate lines, the smoke lifting from the tip of a cigarette. When Dad died, I found dozens of his drawings in a large envelope tucked away in a drawer, one of them, a charcoal sketch of famous boxing champ, Billy Conn. My father loved boxing as a kid and revered the man they called The Pittsburgh Kid. Before me in this single image on decades-old discolored and tattered drawing paper, was the evidence of two of my father’s passions—art and sport. Dad did not hide either of these passions during his life, as Warhol did with the depth of his faith, but like all artists, secrets or not, my father had found what artists always seek—devotion.

My son and I begin our walk to the parking garage, trying to shield our faces from the wind between the skyscrapers. At the crosswalk at Jackson and Michigan, we wait in the biting chill for cars to pass, while the noisy city captures our senses like prisoners and refuses either of us the opportunity for independence. Yet, for a single moment my eyes are free, and I think I see my father waving from the other side of the avenue.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.