Gray fun in the summertime
I'd almost forgotten what summers were like in the city where I spent my first 42 years until my sister reminded me yesterday. She and my brother-in-law had procured some freebies to the ball game -- they've got a semi-pro team there -- and in relating how the game went, she mentioned the weather.
"You guys got fog?" I said, rather dumbly.
"Look over the hills," she said.
I did. It looked as if a napping giant had tossed back his ash-gray-and-cobalt blanket and left it laying rumpled atop the 3,000-foot range that serves as a buffer between here and Monterey Bay. We've been getting morning overcast for the last week or so, since the temperature abruptly dropped from 92 or so to 75, but Over There they're under the "dense marine layer" all day during summer -- actually, from about May to September or so.
Memory's a funny thing. Most of my summer recollections involve cruising South Main Street on nights warm enough to leave your jacket on the back seat. The Summer of '74 was a re-enactment of "American Graffiti," only most of the cars were newer. (It was a toss-up whether the fastest car in town was Dave's '56 Chevy or Artie's primer-gray Camaro. As far as I know, they never raced each other.)
There were a lot of overcast evenings then, though. One of 'em was the night a cop I knew came up behind me and gave me a half-second blast with his siren. I jerked my '66 Chevy to the curb, jumped out and said, "Wha'd I do???"
"I'm lonely," Ossifer Vic said. "Let's go have coffee." And we did.
I remember, too, being on the playground in grammar school -- the basketball court, usually -- and having a couple of panic attacks (long before the term was coined) on overcast days and concluding with the logic of an 11-year-old that the weather was somehow the cause. Prior to that, I'd surmised that it was sunny days. Both proved incorrect, though cloud cover has always been a source of mild depression, as have those winter days when the sun seems to never quite come up all the way and it's gone by 5:30 p.m.
I went to a lot of those ball games too. Some years ago we had a minor-league team and I went to virtually every home game for eight seasons, on the house since I wormed my way into being the team photographer. I loved the overcast then, since it provided flat contrast and I didn't have to spend way too much time in the darkroom trying to get those godawful cap-bill shadows off players' faces.
But about the fifth inning, when it got too dark to shoot (old minor-league ball parks are notorious for bad lighting), I'd take my place with the other "bleacher creatures" behind the home team's dugout. But for a couple of weeks in July, we braved the prevailing wind that blew off the bay and onto our backs. (Beer helped. It also helped in July when the weather was great.) Finally, we made a deal with the GM: He paid for the materials and we worked a couple nights covering the back of the bleachers with plywood to stave off the wind. It helped, a little. It also gave us something loud to pound on during "rally time."
I just looked again, and that blanket's still laying atop the hills. Makes me think you can go home again, but right now I'd rather not.
7:28:13 PM 
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