Seven o'clock, no signal given: first "unified lighting" of Autumn Window Day

At 6:40 p.m. the hardware store opened proceedings, as everyone expected. Its owner, 71 — who was putting out lights before anyone asked him to — was twenty minutes early again this year. "Jumping the gun is part of the custom. A custom includes the parts people don't do properly." As seven approached, the lights advanced unevenly down the street: a battery lantern by the greengrocer's register, three candles in the coffee shop's upstairs window. The association head, 58, set his own light, surveyed the street, and pronounced: "Everyone's clock can differ. 'Seven, more or less' is this shopping street's idea of precision."

The bay monorail ran the two extra services it had been considering. Nobody yet knows the proper etiquette of watching: some stood, some photographed, some simply counted as they walked. One of the coffee shop's candles went out in the wind. A small boy cried "It went out!" — and the owner came out unhurried and relit it. "You just light it again. Besides, a light that might go out is the one people actually watch." Asked about origins, the association head tilted his head, as he does: "Who knows. Some say it's a second chance for shops that missed the summer lighting; some say you turn a light toward the shore in Remembrance week. The only certain thing is that two years ago, somebody started it without asking anyone."

At the far end of the street, past where the campaign was supposed to reach, lights sat here and there in apartment windows. A student, 20, had set a bulb on his second-floor sill: "My family's out on the bay islands. Instead of going home, I light this window. I can't explain the logic myself." The line of lights seemed — seemed — a little denser toward the shore. It may have been nothing. The bay's permeation index read "low" that night. Arrival Remembrance Day comes on the 7th; for a while yet, windows will remain a place where lights are set.