BAY AREA STEW -
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BAY AREA STEW -
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I walk out into a morning of slick streets.
The sky droops low with clouds and fog. Mist brushes across my cheek and filters through my mind. I have a sudden, jolting thought, It’s back. I open my umbrella and start walking, squinting, questioning, into the rain. “What’s back?” I mutter. Until now, I had no clue that anything was gone. The rain patters down on my umbrella. Around me is a hazy mist, a translucent grayness. I stop, look around and think I know: People define this city in terms of precipitous hills, quaint Victorians, clanging cable cars, sometimes in fog, often in sun-- but almost never in rain. So, after years of drought and little rain, it’s the milieu, the simple change in atmosphere of a rainy day that’s back. With this rain, the balance between bright and shadow, sun and shade has been temporarily restored, and this town has become, however fleetingly, almost another world. I turn around. Water sprays off my umbrella. I realize what else the rain has done: In this now-skewed world of rain and clouds, there is a change in tone as well as ambience, and the city, and I in it, have taken a ruminative, more brooding turn. The rain falls harder. Eyes misting up, I peer into it and imagine I see, intertwined with slashing, sleeting raindrops, a soggy, but strangely real-seeming, story-thread. To my right, a clump of fog floats by. Water splays out of it and a poetic fragment bounces, trounces through the rain, aimed straight at me. I laugh, turn around and slosh my way back home. Tossing the umbrella away, I grab a pen, sit down and start to write: what I’ve seen, what I feel, what the rain has brought me. The rain splatters, batters all around my house. I keep writing. If this is brooding, I won’t stop. I’m a brooding soul, in a brooding city. I wouldn’t have it any other way. |
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University.
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Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways volunteer staff.
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