Spring Break
California was never like this.
On Friday the chill lifted slightly, and the length of State Street grew thick with college kids starting their spring breaks one day early. It's not warm out yet, but it's warm enough, and the rest of us threw off our scarves and heavy coats and ran out to join them.
It's like the whole city has opened up and gone a little crazy. There was an old, completely hairless man selling hot dogs on the street out of a corrugated aluminum cart and singing Gershwin songs in a cheerfully toneless cigarettes-and-whiskey growl. There was a tiny nuclear family of hippies, the youngest child dolled up with filthy dreads and birkenstocks and a baby-sized "legalize weed" tee shirt. There was a woman in a charcoal grey power suit eating ice cream and dribbling perfectly oval spots of strawberry pink down the front of her elegant camisole and clearly not caring at all.
These days never happened in California, you know? Easter comes at the end of winter for a reason -- the winter empties you out bit by bit, day after sunless day, and it's only at the end of it all that the spring comes and fills you back up again in one great rush, and suddenly you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Every day this place feels a little closer to home.
On Friday the chill lifted slightly, and the length of State Street grew thick with college kids starting their spring breaks one day early. It's not warm out yet, but it's warm enough, and the rest of us threw off our scarves and heavy coats and ran out to join them.
It's like the whole city has opened up and gone a little crazy. There was an old, completely hairless man selling hot dogs on the street out of a corrugated aluminum cart and singing Gershwin songs in a cheerfully toneless cigarettes-and-whiskey growl. There was a tiny nuclear family of hippies, the youngest child dolled up with filthy dreads and birkenstocks and a baby-sized "legalize weed" tee shirt. There was a woman in a charcoal grey power suit eating ice cream and dribbling perfectly oval spots of strawberry pink down the front of her elegant camisole and clearly not caring at all.
These days never happened in California, you know? Easter comes at the end of winter for a reason -- the winter empties you out bit by bit, day after sunless day, and it's only at the end of it all that the spring comes and fills you back up again in one great rush, and suddenly you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Every day this place feels a little closer to home.
posted by Peter at 9:28 AM
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