Thursday, September 21, 2000

 

11:36 a.m. Today's the big day -- the first day of fall. Autumn is in the air, even here in California. All my systems are now on full alert! I must do everything in my power not to let this wholly natural, obviously scheduled *change* affect me negatively!

To whit: I'm posting in the morning. I'm getting out my crinkled file of old stuff and scanning. I'm going to go to bed, as my mother says, at a decent hour tonight instead of 3:30 a.m. (That was last night, the last moonset of the summer, and I was there for it.)

Today is now and I'm a modern woman and I can cope.

The weather today is hilarious. It's California's movieland version of what an autumnal moment is like -- it's gray and it's a little nippy and after a few more hours, we'll all tire of the charade and the sun will burn through and it will be time for the girls in their dental-floss bikinis to arrange themselves on the promenade once again.

This marine layer is a very strange phenomenon. Last Sunday we went out sailing (yes, we did!) and since I was still on my mental vacation, I resolutely did not take the camera and so I could not take a picture of what I saw ahead of us as we headed out to sea.

Unfortunately, it's when you don't take the camera and you think you're on vacation and not actually working that the major imagery rolls across your retina, never to be forgotten. I'm doomed now to create those thousand words about that one lost picture.

Picture this: it's unbelievably hot and the sun is really blazing down. Even I, the lubber of land, agree that we should be two sheets against the wind, slathered in suntan oil if we want to cool off. We pack up, drive to the boat, start the motor, do it all ... we're properly greased up and slithering out of the slip and sliding into the channel behind a smooth line of boats going out.

We efficiently do a little tacking and go-backing and after a bit of headway, I look up from the rows of bows on my Mae West.

"What's that?" I point and ask; the very soul of pure innocence.

Ahead of us -- way ahead -- is a patch of mist. Well, ok. It's more than a patch of mist ... it's more like a ball of furze, a blotch of fog, a stormcloud of huge, chaotic proportions. If I had been writing a journal entry that day, it would have been: Da dah! A Topic.

But instead, it was a glowering mass of low-flung weather right square in front of us, and from which was issuing all the boats you'd ever want to see, all returning from the sea, and most of them even had their headlights on. It looked like an enemy invasion emerging from the mist. A well-heeled, soft-sided pastel invasion to be sure, but an invasion nevertheless.

I remained muted in my "disappointment" that we weren't going to be able to go roiling about on the ocean after all. The mist closed in around us and blotted up the last remaining rays of morning sun as efficiently as a hungry wino hunched over his over-easy sunnysides at the local shelter.

By the time we re-docked and tied up and sponged down the boat, it looked like a pretty gloomy day, but oddly, we merely had to drive across the street to the market to be back inside a bright cloudless afternoon. Go figure.

Now, if I had been actually working this past Sunday instead of recreating and vacating, I would have brought you the most amazing photo, and my day would have been neatly summarized and filed away here at the web site. Instead, it's been a vagrant tugging at the loose threads in my brain, demanding to be told, and held, and examined.

And now, now that I've told you about the one photo I should have taken, now maybe I can go on with my week.

Yar.