Into the Fog

The weather has reneged on its San Francisco September promise of sunny, windless, 70-degree days and blanketed my neighborhood with cold, grey, windy fog. My now chronic dizziness is back after a teasing promise of a one-day relief. The damn rainbow ball keeps spinning when I try to type on my laptop. The promised code sent to my phone to open my e-mail has not arrived and looks like it never will. The video I needed to download on Google Drive had 15 minutes left to download after an hour and then disappeared and I have to start again. To top it off, the omnipresent evil afoot usually in the distance suddenly feels uncomfortably close. Looks like Alexander and I are doomed to share a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  Not the best time to praise the beauty of this world or the blessings of my own life. 

 

But perhaps it is the best time to dig deeper into resilience and hope and conviction that the roses are as real as the thorns. That we can bear a few scratches for the gifts of the fragrant scents, deep colors and exquisitely-shaped petals. And that alongside the roses, the dahlias in front of the SF Conservatory are in full bloom. That alongside the grief we feel for the stellar human beings who have left us recently is the comforting echoes of their words, their music, their (mostly) exemplary lives. 

 

So in spite of this two-minute video someone requested I sent to a group meeting to discuss one of my books somehow filling up 166 megabytes and refusing to upload to my Google Drive, teasing me with the blue line around the circle getting close and then dropping back to begin again, in spite of the relentless grey and the branches of the mayten tree out my window waving in the too-fierce wind, in spite of the 40 spam e-mails amidst one genuine one, all constantly promising STUNNER! DROPPED THE HAMMER! THIS IS HUGE! or DEVASTATING DEVELOPMENT! DISAPPOINTED! CHOKING BACK TEARS! or sign this! /get that!/— in the face of it all, I’ll step out the door straight into the fog, find some pianos to play at Flower Piano before my official performance there tomorrow, walk to the still-open Green Apple Bookstore and look for used copies of masterpieces I’ve somehow neglected—George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Virginia Wolf’s To the Lighthouse, for starters— and do my best to keep my heart open, my mind receptive, my body well-exercised. If the sun comes out, so be it. If not, that’s fine too.