Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Gloom of Neighborhood

There is a post office at the corner of Hyde and Golden Gate in San Francisco where you cannot mail a letter.

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The wellsprings, for a friend

The rains come down gentle, kissing foliage, or they pound down hard and forceful, lashing the trees; they arrive as steady, dull and gray as a morning commute, hour after hour, or the waters reach us not as rain at all, but as mists and fogs, as the heavy morning dew drenching the rags wiping car windows.

It runs off the leaves and soaks into the ground then wicking up the stems. It runs over saturated ground as rivulets and streams, even into rivers, or it may find fissures and cracks, trickling down deeper and deeper into darkness, ever pulled by gravity yet stymied by stone.

Heated, it may rise as springs, even slithering sideways to surface on the slant of mountain watersheds. Creeks forming with more creeks, water oblivious to our rivers of words for it, just tumbling foaming waters gathering more and more as they lemming on, pulled on by the evangelical gravity of oceans, the crashing, bible-thumping incessant waves of the sea, or it may peter out in deserts, sucked down into aquifers to wait, to coolly wait, for decades and centuries and more.

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Destinations and homes

ybonesy of redRavine had a post the other day about seatmates on airlines. Toward the end, it reminded me of a coincidence that happened to me once, three years after I moved to San Francisco.

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Systems, Systematically

Do you have an activity where, when you’re through with it, you just toss all the equipment or parts or stuff into a box and stow it? So it gets higgledy-piggledy after a while?

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It’s nice to make new friends

While visiting Paul and Kathy in Minnesota, good friends I’ve known a long time, I also got to know some new members of the family. Pictured is Leia (with dog tags), who Paul believed was at a height disadvantage in her efforts to get to know me better.

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Of Special Relationships, and Cozy Ones, Too

The BBC coverage of French President Sarkozy’s visit to the US this week was highly entertaining. They even ended one segment with BBC correspondent Kathy Kay visiting Winston Churchill’s statue in a park in DC and asking forlornly “whatever happened to our special relationship?”

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What Is It About Dentists?

When I go into a grocery store, I don’t get a bunch of clerks scolding me for buying cheddar cheese or fat-laden salad dressing or a bag of lime-flavored taco chips (god love ’em). If I go see a movie the ticket-taker doesn’t admonish me for watching such prurient trash.

How come it’s so hard to find a dentist who’ll just clean my teeth or fill my cavities and take my money without giving me the same tired lecture?

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Strangers in a Familiar Foreign Land

We watched a very engaging movie last night about four North Africans who volunteer to fight for the French. Part and parcel of the story is that these men are fighting for a nation that has colonized their own countries. As soldiers in Europe they find themselves in wonderfully ambiguous places, confronting scenes and situations familiar to audiences yet novel for the characters; generally sweet, likeable young men. (Those who’ve seen Amelie will recognize Jamel Debbouze.)

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Onward, Foggily, into Obscurity

Incredible fog this morning. When I got up at what my clock radio says is 4:40 but which I know to be 5:40 (damned Congress futzing with daylight savings time! I’m stumbling over dogs in the dark and it’s their $#%& fault!) I looked out our large bedroom window and the streetlights had that hazy yellow-white halo effect they get when we’re socked in.

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