Despite waking up at such an early hour. It’s light out. Summer is coming despite the overcast weather, which is typical on the coast when it warms up over the mountains to the east and, I imagine, the rest of the country. The warmth causes this blanket of clouds to creep over the first 10 miles or so between the landmass and the water. This marine layer in the traditionally warming months produces a June Gloom here. The temperature stays at 55 degrees and we are buried under this rubble of cloud avalanche.
But, get on a plane and the impossible occurs, takeoff punches you through this gauzy layer into the brilliant sun. The clearing, lifegiving effect of its rays wasted there above the clouds where there are no gardens, no people appreciating its light and warm. It’s a desert of beautiful sky, just beyond reach.
Alternately, drive into the low foothills into the coast range, into the Klamath Mountains. You won’t get above the clouds as it might seem from the change in altitude, they just stop. Blocked by the craggy massifs and whatever physical law holds the fleecy clouds back from the mountain pastures, only letting in a few at a time.
With time enough, I’d take my family up there, to get above the clouds. Willow Creek has a nice café and a new skatepark. But we have to go early; the kids aren’t used to the heat of the unmitigated sun after growing up under this cloud blanket. 55 and cloudy is normal to them. They sit inside and pore over their Pokemon manga with the dull, silvery light seeping in from the windows and sliding glass door unaware that they are missing anything. And on mornings when the sun is out early, they are giddy without quite knowing why.
Gas is too expensive to justify the drive up into the mountains anyway. It’s only been a few days of clouds and it looks like it’ll break up in about a week for a day or two. So, we stay where we are, under this grey undulating mat, ragged on the eastern edge with the serrations of redwood spires and a solid line where it meets the ocean, looking like it goes on forever out there.
It makes me restless. Under the clouds, it’s hard to be hedonistic or even spur-of-the-moment. I am overwhelmed by a gray Teutonic need to “get things done” even when nothing needs to be done. The result of which is that the early light—it’s not even 6am—troubles me with the need to be awake and accomplishing. It is not the sun that wakes me up, but this nagging thought that I should be acting, forcing my impetus on the world.
I get up too early, drink too much coffee and struggle to stay on task. As soon as one thing presents itself as too involved, an undertaking—something I can’t finish in an hour—I give it up and look for something else to do, but the guilt of the unfinished task stays with me, so even while I’m accomplishing something else, there is no enjoyment, or rather the enjoyment is tempered with the frustration of not being able to get everything done—that there must always be something else to do—that the list won’t simply come to an end and the sun come out so that I can walk under it and be happy.
One day a month, I go in to work in the late afternoon. Starting in the morning the rest of the month, I always find this difficult to adjust to. Not only when I’m at work, but the entire morning and afternoon before. I try to be at home, but, knowing I have to go to work eventually, it’s hard to stay focused. It makes everything feel ephemeral and inconsequential.
With all this cloudy weather, my potted mango tree is getting blighted, so I went out to buy copper fungicide, even though I’d read it isn’t effective after the blight begins to appear. I thought about repotting it, but that seemed unlikely to be successful, and I didn’t feel like getting potting soil all over the place and getting dirty. Getting dirty is for the days when I don’t have to work at all. It’s a luxury of the weekend.
I sprayed the fungicide on the plant under a curtain of mist wondering how much the precipitation would affect the already impotent action. I looked out on the rest of the garden; the foxgloves were doing very well, the lilac was covered with healthy green leaves, but had no buds when all the others in town are blooming. The kiwi was doing something after being eaten by bugs last year; all the new pepper starts now looked bug-chewed and slightly crushed.
I went in to get my toddling daughter and returned to the deck. The mist was falling heavily enough now that I had to sit under the small awning by our door. We sat there while my wife fixed the broken bookshelf inside. I pointed out the cows in the field to my daughter, but kept my eyes on the colors, the growth, the life of the garden trying to wring some kind of satisfaction from it.
My four-year-old son was going to sing with his class for May Day, and I was glad to have the time off to go watch him for once. We walked out through this mist to his school, waited outside with all the other parents until the door swung open and the teacher overenthusiastically ushered us into the playground doing that thing people do now when they don’t make eye-contact with anyone even while being right up close.
Holding my daughter, I sat on one of the tiny chairs which had been arranged for us without realizing that there were more people than chairs. As others came in, I nearly stood up to give up my seat, but realizing I was holding a baby I thought, well, I suppose I’m justified in staying where I am, and it was nice being able to sit next to my wife like we were at the theater or something. Necessity is almost always moving us to different parts of a room.
In school’s courtyard, there’s an escallonia bush that’s been pruned into a tree. My son was standing where its shade would’ve been if the sun was out. The class was in a line, expectantly facing us. I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking around, swiveling his body, waiting in his patient kid way.
The teacher welcomed us again—less anxious now that she could address us as another sort of class— and took up a flute. The chorus of four- and five-year-olds began. None of them supercilious or mocking as we saw later that day with the second and third graders. At this age, this first performance, all of them slightly unsteady with the newness of the experience, but so earnestly singing, watching their teacher for cues, little hands placed here and there, little voices, at a speaking volume, reciting the practiced, sing-song words, little feet shifting unselfconsciously. So much innocence in that chorus.
I usually try to be community-minded at school performances and swivel my head to watch the kids more or less equally, but I’m also usually standing in the back with an impatient baby in my arms. Now I had the luxury of sitting with a quiet baby right in front of my own singing child and I was able to watch his effort, his absorption, and see his beautiful potential as the potential of all the children singing and shifting and holding their arms over their heads to symbolize the rocking sun.
My nose wrinkled and my brows clenched, I tried to keep the tears from coming to me eyes, but they wouldn’t. In my peripheral vision, I could see them falling down my wife’s face, too. What those kids must have thought, paraded out to the courtyard to perform a song of renewal for a line of crying parents under a cloudy spring sky, but all rituals are strange the first time.
