5.08.2007

Challenging Question of the Day

This appears on an envelope that just arrived in the mail:

************
From: Bill Richardson
111 Lomas Blvd., NW, Suite 200
Albuquerque, NM 87102

Which Democratic presidential candidate had the courage to say this?
"On my first day in office, I'd end the war in Iraq.
On my second day, I'd announce a plan
for achieving national energy independence."
-March 28, 2007

[] Hillary Clinton
[] Barack Obama
[] John Edwards
[] Bill Richardson
***********

Hmm. I wonder. Maybe...I dunno...was it Barack? What, no? Hillary? Sheesh, well, maybe John Edwards? What? Really? REALLY?

Note to the Richardson campaign: I would've enjoyed living with the mystery, at least until I'd opened the envelope.

5.07.2007

Robert Frost, killjoy


When I woke this morning to the second day IN A ROW of delightful summery weather, my mind snapped immediately to Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." You know: the poem from the Outsiders? The one that inspired "Stay gold, Ponyboy?" This one:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And, well, it's a downer, for sure, but it's also true enough. I've been wearing garb appropriate to "actual" summer (short sleeves! cropped pants! no wool jacket!), rather than to the sad shadow of same we have here in San Francisco, and spending as much time as possible in my back yard, and mainlining the cherries and strawberries I bought over the weekend, and generally floating around in a damn silvery cloud of weather- (etc.-) induced bliss.

But at the same time I'm swooning with love for this weather, I'm also resignedly waiting for it to end. Because it will end. Quite likely soon. At which point you'll cease getting my shmoopy posts about how gleeful I am and will return to getting my morose posts about how I tire of wearing fleece and multiple layers in mid-summer.

So enjoy it while it lasts. That goes for all of us (you, too, Frost).

5.06.2007

MPL

On our way to the Minneapolis airport last weekend, Josh and I drag our heels.

It's partly that we don't relish returning to real life in San Francisco, with phone calls and clients and appointments already stacked heavily throughout the week. But it's just as much (if not more) that we've both fallen moonily in love with Minneapolis, and we just don't want to leave.

We take the light rail out to the airport, passing through the city's outskirts at golden hour, when everything is an impossible and heartbreaking blend of green and blue and amber, and watch downtown recede. Goodbye, Graves 601, our beautiful temporary home. Adios, Foshay tower, Walker Museum, Mississippi River, Warehouse District, Chambers Kitchen, tax-deductible everything. It's been nice. Really nice.

In a few hours we're back on the ground in San Francisco, back into wind and fog and reality and missing what, for a while, at least, was a blissful idyll.