Not one, but two flashes and crashes of thunder over San Francisco.
Not rumbles. Crashes.
I have become a complete sissy about thunder.
Tag: weather
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Good Lord, what a gray, still day.
Sometime yesterday afternoon Red Pants came and got his little black device. Michael’s right. He was probably recording the birds, who were very loud in the emptiness usually filled by the rattle of cables, the hum of cars.
They were loud yesterday, anyway. Not a peep right now. Not a black speck of a bird in the sky. Not a leaf stirring in the treetops down the street. If it weren’t for the single car I see slowly climbing the hill in the distance, I could be looking at a photograph.
I wish now I’d gone up to the roof yesterday, when the sky was blue.
Aha! He’s back! Wearing black sweatpants this morning, and this time he’s set the dark rectangle on a different part of the roof, though still near the street. Now that I have a better view, it looks more like an Ipad or a laptop computer than a radio. He turns to walk away, dialing a cellphone and raising it to his ear. Bye-bye Mr. Sweatpants!
I listen carefully. Yes, I can hear birds after all. Just not as loud and raucous as they were yesterday.
Now that I have a sense of when I’ll be able to access healthcare without risking bankruptcy, the three weeks until May 1st seem terribly long. Can I stay healthy until then? At least if the lock-down ends in May, I won’t be quite as afraid of going back to work in the office downtown. Which right now seems like an impossible dream.
Years ago when I worked for Waldenbooks in Greensboro, one of my co-workers told me about how she had gone through a terrible illness. She was young and strong, but got knocked flat by a virus that almost killed her. She told me that while she was sick and confined to her bed, she felt so horrible for so long that she stopped believing she’d ever been well. Maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was the high fever, but she literally thought there had never been any other world for her but the weak, nauseated, head-pounding, hard-to-breathe present.
On colorless days like this, I can’t believe I ever had the option of leaving this apartment. I never went for my weekly walk down Polk Street to the Marina Pier, never hiked all the way to Cole Valley or climbed through the gardens of Telegraph Hill. Michael and I never took Muni Metro to go to a movie at the Castro Theater. We never rode out to the avenues for broth dumplings. I never spent an evening listening to the marathon Moby Dick readings at the Maritime Museum.
The opposite was true yesterday, when the sun was out, the sky was bright, and I had work to do for the library. At the end of the day, as I fixed dinner, I had to remind myself that I had not actually gone in to work but had done everything at my desk here. That’s the difference a blue sky out my window can make.
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After last night’s dinner I sat on the couch with Michael and we read our ipads and mulled over the days news. A bird began singing so clearly I glanced at the window to make sure we hadn’t overshot and stayed up until dawn. The night was still black, and a glance at the time told me it was only a little after 1:00 AM.
A lovely sound, but I associate it with morning, and I wondered if it would keep us from sleeping. I wish I knew enough ornithology to identify the song. Was it audible because the nights are now so quiet? Normally at about that time we’d be hearing the hooting warble of night clubbers making their way home from Polk Street.
Maybe we heard it because birds in the city have become bolder, like a lot of other wildlife. Videos are popping up showing coyotes strolling casually on San Francisco streets. Maybe birds that normally roost in the leafy parks or suburbs have moved downtown too.
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The promised second storm has blown in and unlike yesterday’s, it is truly a storm, with everything beyond the western hills lost in gray and gusts of wind that make tree-tops pitch, windows rattle, and rain hit the panes like handfuls of gravel. It’s always the wind that makes a storm in San Francisco. Windstorms have been known to knock out the power city-wide, blow out windows, and turn the Golden Gate Bridge into an enormous, thrumming harp. This one is not at that level, but it darkens the apartment to where lights have to be turned on, and it makes me grateful to be inside.
During the Friday Zoom meeting our head librarian said the sidewalks around the public library in the Tenderloin are almost impassable with tents as the homeless do their best to “shelter in place.”
For me, sleeping late is 7:30 am. Michael, quite sensibly, is still in bed. Even the cat, who normally demands her breakfast before dawn, stays in the bedroom next to her radiator, and if I so much as peek around the door at her she mrrrs irritably at me without opening her eyes or raising her head.
A friend posted the figures on the numbers of those known to have the virus, and the largest number seems to be those not considered at risk, the young. This may be due to the false sense of security that comes from not being in the “vulnerable” category. Yes, some of the young went out and partied, but in our neighborhood at least, many of them offered to help by delivering food, running errands, volunteering to manage the lines at grocery stores, etc. They now may be paying for either foolishness or unselfishness. I hope the statistics on the severity of the virus hitting older folks harder stand up, and those young people suffer only a couple of weeks of sickness.
11:10 am
Both Michael and the cat are up now. The cat is on her customary spot on the sofa behind me, Michael at his desk, and rain is steady for the moment. The wind has died down, Grace Cathedral is broadcasting its service, and the shadows and the steady patter of rain are all tied together with the meditative rumble of an organ.
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San Francisco is supposed to have been hit by a “storm” this morning and later today. Currently the “storm” I see now through my window is little more than a sullen gray sky and occasional droplets on the windows. Maybe there will be hail tonight, winds that shake the panes, or even the Bay Area’s half-hearted thunder, which tends to be distant thumps and scrapes high overhead, like someone moving furniture in the attic.
In any event, there will be no walk on the roof today. For now, we sit writing at our respective desks, Sam Phillips singing “Strawberry Road” on the CD player. I’ve showered, brushed my teeth and washed my face, but I’m not sure I’m going to bother changing out of my pajamas. Our kitchen is well stocked now with roast chicken and veggies and aside from this and working on my novel, my one stab at productivity will probably come tonight when I make the blueberry muffins I promised.
Our century-old, rent-controlled apartment is a two-bedroom by San Francisco standards, which is to say, it has a living room and a dining room in addition to an actual bedroom. By tacit consent, the first part of the day is generally spent in separate rooms at our desks, mine in the living room, Michael’s in the dining room. That way, when we emerge from our working comas late in the afternoon, we act pleasantly surprised to see each other.
The cat divides her time between sleeping on her stand next to my desk or in her box next to Michael’s until the steam heat comes on. Then she retreats to her spot near radiator in the bedroom. At about 10:00 PM she emerges to tell us it’s time for us to go to bed.
At the end of the evening, we’ve gotten in the habit of watching Sky News, which, at about midnight, shows us a live, British morning news show. Judging from this, morning news shows are now about as apocalyptic as everything else is these days, with intro themes similar to the music from the Stephen Rea “Here’s what’s about to happen…” scene in V for Vendetta. One expects at any moment a shot of a gloved hand knocking over a domino.
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The sky behind the buildings is like a piece of gray cardboard. The street is the same hue, so on the steep slope beyond Van Ness it disappears into the mist. Not a leaf stirs in the tree-tops. San Francisco fog is rolling in, not in dramatic billows but as a sort of creeping erasure,.
No cars. No young men smoking joints on the roof, no yoga ladies, no lively conversation in the gazebo, no squawking parrots. Just a robin two doors down on the rail of a fire escape. It hops a couple of times, then flies away.
Today I will not run my laps because my right foot has gotten sore, and I should perhaps not put too much weight on it. Instead, I will ride my stationary bike — but cautiously. I found two large screws on the floor near it, and can’t figure out exactly where they go, and I fear the thing falling apart beneath me. A trip to the ER for even a minor injury could be catastrophic for us both. At least the aspirin we ordered from Costco arrived the other day.
I just looked up at my window again. I can make out a pillar of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, but everything has faded. If I look carefully, I can see the texture of the wet air, tiny droplets suspended almost in a pattern.
A car just passed and its tires hiss as it goes by. On days like this in the city, water does not fall from the sky. It just appears on every surface outside. Perhaps this will burn off by the afternoon, but at the moment, the twilight seems impenetrable.
Pam Troy 