The Grey T-shirts
Tuesday. Another good night's sleep to awaken to a cold morning, the windows on cars parked on the street frosted white. Still, the sky is clear, the sun is out and all will be well in another hour or so, breakfast safely in hand, the papers (almost) read, the day ahead. Indeed. Here in California. Northern California.
There is some surprise to all of this. How many winters have I experienced in this life, not only in California, but in places where they have snow and the trees turn flaming yellow and red before their leaves fall and the maple syrup people hammer pegs into the trunks and attach plastic tubing that feed into great bubbling iron pots on wood burning fires? You'd think there would be no surprise at all, but something in the body reacts as if it's not seen any of this before, or, if it has, it's surprised to see it again. Time to get a Christmas tree (I haven't gotten a Christmas tree in so long I can't even identify the decade in which I had the last) and drink rum. Or something like that. Eggnog comes to mind. I'm sure they're selling it now at the supermarkets, something I'll have to remember.
Cold, the head aching a bit but clear, the attitude good, the various meds in place, what's for an encore? What sort of pictures to take? Where to walk? What to do? Maybe shut up and the day will fall into place.
Later. Put on a jacket, headed out the door, went down to the bus stop, stood for about a minute colder than a young man should get, found my ambition for taking a walk had left, returned to the apartment and turned up the heat. It's ten-thirty. The day’s not over yet.
Later still. An hour later, overcast, cold, another attempt, this time a bus right as I reached the stop, a ride downtown to tour (finally) The Cathedral gallery at the base of a pie shaped building selling million dollar condominiums where Telegraph ends at Broadway giving me an opportunity to photograph some of the sculptures I'd been seeing (and photographing) this last month through the windows. I do like them and, if I hadn't been such a spend thrift these last several months, might have thought of buying one. Silly me. Silly I. But then I'm a photographer. Take a photograph, blow it up, hang it on a wall. With lemons you make lemonade or something similarly sickening. A walk back through the chill, the weather people saying the temperature plunged to the depths of thirty-two degrees last night and I would agree, feeling the air temperature this day at noon.
Is the little California boy shivering in his boots?
Boots are very sixties and seventies. We are twenty-first century people here and I'm altogether current. Well, except for those old Halston jackets and maybe the shoes. And the jeans. And the grey t-shirts. Why the grey t-shirts?
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