Fall: Two; Spring: nothing!!
The Bay Area is a lovely place. Mark Twain has a famous quote about the weather there: "The
coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." There
are times I speak of wanting to someday live in The Bay Area, as
perhaps the only acceptable alternative to living in New York.
These days we seem to have gotten hold of Bay Area weather in the NY
area. Actually, the entire NorthEast seems to have become the Bay
Area. We were in Boston for a quick in & out trip last
weekend, and it was downright cold.
Memorial Day is around the corner. You know the holiday once
meant to celebrate the memory of those gone by, now a full-fledged
commercial event which is capped off by outdoor barbeque celebrations.
Yes, the holiday weekend known to many at the unofficial beginning of Summer.
Then why is it that we are having Autumn weather?
The mornings are crisp, brisk, even a little chilly. During the
day it can be a touch on the clammy side, that hint of
precipitation in the air, a sort of humid and threatening,
not-so-nice-out type feeling. And adding insult to injury,
allergy suffering is not in keeping with the weather. No,
allergens in the air are in full spring bloom. One cannot
necessarily breathe these days. Dry eyes, itchy nose, ears and
eyes, and a runny nose or all that sneezing.
Maybe this is some subtle way the terrorists are winning skirmishes,
completely unbeknownst to us. Washington keeps telling us this is
a new kind of war, with new tactics. Bio- and Eco-terrorism are
major concerns. Are the enemies spreading tree mold?
Now if this was The Bay Area, the cold nights and mornings, the
need for layered clothing, the blanket-to-the-baseball-game weather in
the evenings would be normal. One could argue that it is Fall
weather almost all year in San Francisco. But this is not
the west coast, the Bay Area.
This is New York! What's going on?!
A number of years ago I read a funny little item in the Metropolitan
Diary in the NY Times. It was a poem, befitting the absence of
Spring (and Spring weather)., almost a Haiku, but not quite:
In New York,
Spring's a bummer.
First its Winter.
Then its Summer
And so it is, yet again. Except that this year we seem to have a
full-fledged Autumn descending upon us in both April and May.
June begins next Wednesday - will it be time to break out the flannel
again?
So this year the 2005 seasonal weather score goes like this: Fall 2,
Spring 0. Yep, it seems like football weather. And there's
still Basketball being played. Didn't the Basketball season
always end sometime in early April?
Oddities are all around. It began with the Yankees losing the
ALCS after being one game away. Then the Red Sox won the World
Series. There was no Hockey Season at all. Despite economic
woes and outrageously high gas prices, a slim margin of
Americans voted for Bush,keeping him in office. The Democrats ran
a horrid campaign.
Well, that's not so unusual. But the Republicans figuring out the
net and using it for strategic benefit clearly proved them to be the
party making the best use of the net. And this, even after
various media
sources had crowned Howard Dean as the victor., the great beneficiary
of internet campaign initiative.
Madonna, a famously lapsed Catholic (remember "Like a Virgin" and "Papa
Don't Preach"), espouses Kaballah. There's so much wrong with
that picture that it goes beyond just oddity.
I expect to wake up tomorrow morning, have the cat speak to me (in
English), tell me the weather, and then I'll fly -Jetson-style- to my afternoon
appointment. Nothing seems to be as we once knew it. At
least I will feel prepared and unsurprised when everything is out
of kilter.
Of course, I never knew exactly what it meant for things to be "in kilter," but that, however, is a different subject for another time.