I had seen him several times at Café Central, a.k.a., Borrone, always vaguely associating him with someone else.  There was, after all, another guy I met through my first wife and have long associated with the place.  But he was clearly another guy.  This guy was this guy.  And what caught my eye, or my mind, was his frequent appearance at the café, coupled with his circumstances.  He always sits alone.  Frequently, he can be seen in the company of an iPod, or somesuch, Read more [...]

It is 25 May, and there is no excuse for rain.  Lunch date made infinitely more complicated, or easier, by taking the train all of 1.1 miles to Palo Alto.  On the platform, the tracks present their banal secret, an unimpeded vista.  Cars, ever smaller, appear at one point, then another and another.  The most distant ones are probably crossing the tracks in the next town, Atherton.  When the train's headlight sparks into tiny yellowish life, the locomotive may be in Redwood Read more [...]

Rolling down my wheelchair ramp at 7 AM, the wind overwhelms my bodily defenses.  The latter must be scant in the temperature sensing and regulating departments.  Only a few hundred meters from my home, the whole expedition seems marginal.  Turning around could be wise.  I don't, of course.  This is supposedly May, and by all accounts this is Central California, renowned for its late spring warmth.  Unless I have forgotten.  What I do remember is to make sympathetic Read more [...]

Ah, yes, I thought, parting the curtains that slightly conceal the shelves just inside my kitchen door.  The perfect thing.  Cinnamon bars or seed-and-nut bars or whole-wheat bars, whatever they were called, they seemed the perfect, slightly healthy, complement to a morning cup of tea.  Why not?  Because there is always just the slightest possibility that they are past their pull date.  But aren't we all, I tell myself, rolling into the bedroom where Jane awaits the day's Read more [...]

I have a way of opening the front door to my apartment almost any morning, including wintry ones, though the practice is more frequent this time of year.  At night, the warm duvet that sufficed through April has begun to overpower me.  I am slightly too warm.  It is almost pleasant to throw the thing off and feel May.  Which is finally what it should be.  The morning air does not assault.  In fact, I welcome it in the open door, a temperate breeze wafting through the Read more [...]

My neighbor's little girls are running from the hail.  How there can be hail, let alone precipitation of any kind in this part of California, in this part of May, eludes me...just as the girls elude the hail.  Thing is, they aren't.  They are screaming and yelling for their daddy, and at the same moment they are running in the opposite direction, away from his front door.  Now they are screaming and running back toward it, now running away.  It helps that there are three Read more [...]