It is Only a Matter of Springtime

There are about three weeks left of spring, but the plums on the tree outside my window have a ways to go before they are ripe. When I was 19 and had my heart broken for the first time, my Grandmother took me out to lunch and we sat next to each other in a crescent shaped booth. She told me “It is all about timing.” Although the context was about birds and bees and boys and girls, it is sage. It is all timing. You can be patient or surprised when things occur, but it is just a simple matter of instance meets coincidence–think right time, right place. Like how I got to my car right when the meter maid was there and somehow dodged a ticket (that is lucky timing). Seasons change, and change back again, according to that 365 day cycle, the sun, and leaves on trees. So now, in between the ‘sprung’ of spring and the start of summer, the special liminal space, fitted with mid-week San Franciscan 80 degree days, it is all the matter of time until the next one sometime soon.

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The Monday morning soundtrack featured the low humdrum toll of the fog horn. It seemed apt for a Monday morning after a particularly sweet Sunday. The kind of Sunday where things just rolled into each other and the sun was up. 

We played catch in the park–the kind with leather baseball gloves. Then one friend and another slowly began to join our claim on the grass. We found out that Ethan makes paella and according to him, good paella really depends on the quality of saffron. The afternoon was a breezy sunny one, the kind that feels like molasses. It helps that the sun at this point in the year will not set privy to eight thirty. 

Then there was a scheduled walk with a guy from Idaho. We wandered from the Conservatory of Flowers to the casting pools. We sat and talked and watched this woman cast her line aiming for colored rings in the water. It was the kind of three hour conversation where there is no lack of things to say, but in retrospect of the Monday morning after, you really are unsure about the particulars, but have a feeling that it was good. Anecdotes were said in between this woman’s attempt to reach certain rings. Sometimes the line would get tangled around her and she stood there in the thigh high water undoing her practice fish lasso and I sat on a bench hearing about this Idahoan’s Memorial Day Weekend itinerary. I wondered if she could hear us trod down the path of conversation and if she saw me cross and then quickly uncross my legs because the guy from Idaho had just crossed his legs and because I saw I did, then undid. 

Later on, after a successful empty fridge pantry raid pasta that restored my faith in anchovies, capers, garlic, onion, and olive oil, the evening became one about a near empty cocktail bar. Campari was sipped while discussions of dating and drinking habits ensued. Like anything that is capable of having a leash around it, some people date and drink too much, others know their limit. I guess it is all a dance between balance and timing. The night was a singular drink Sunday, which is the best kind. A toast to the weekend had and the week ahead. Cheers to making good time, having good times, good luck, and a good weather report that makes it seem like no fog horns, but who is to say? That can change in an instant.