Distance and Time
Some things are easier to digestThis Spring's in some need of psychotherapy. I can't tell whether it's ADD or bipolar disorder, but it's weather madness for sure. Maybe I should take some Lithium and Ritalin and toss it high in the sky. If it never came down then I'd know the jet stream had swallowed them whole. I'm not too certain how effective it'd be though. Perhaps we'd get a solid week of good weather before it returned to its chaotic pattern and then the swings would be worse than they are now, hurricane rains and Santa Ana winds doing the two-step on adjacent days.
Too many names for too many conditions. Too many drugs and too many physicians.
Maybe it's not the weather that's too unpredictable, maybe our forecasts are too unrealistic. And instead of adjusting our expectations, we alter our states. Maybe that's why the crazies are all in California, everyone's trying to leave their lives for more temperate climes. Come to think of it, maybe it's not Spring that's in need of therapy, it's me.
There's an itch I'd like to scratch. I hate mosquitoes. This isn't quite a true statement. The truth is, I find mosquitoes annoying because of their propensity to bite me and because black, flying things tend to make me flinch. But that takes too much breath to say, so I may stick with my original statement. Except that I think people tend to throw around the word hate too much. If love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, shouldn't they be used with the same reverence? Lamentably people throw around love like its Starbucks coffee, so I might not have much of a soapbox to stand on here. Still, I'd like to see people start treating love&hate like the wine that it is. People who drink a lot of the fine stuff often drink it too early. Things such as these have to be left in a dark cellar somewhere at an even temperature and brought out only on special occasions. Only then does it have time to develop in complexity, otherwise all you get is this bitter, tannic stuff that you paid entirely too much for. Sigh. Now my thoughts are all red and puffy. Damn mosquitoes.
At 3:00am this morning I realized that jet lag was not something to be taken lightly. It's colder here in my house at this hour than in any place we stayed in Europe; I think my house is getting a little too comfortable showing me its colder side. Not to fear though, I'm too faithful to this place to believe the warm promises of a Swiss spring. When I left two Fridays now past, a high was lingering over the area and somehow in the time I've been gone things have turned awry. If April showers bring May flowers, I wonder, what do March showers bring? I think Clem's a little angry at me since she missed out on all the sunshine and now has to drag my sorry and sleepy ass to and from work in the rain and across potholed puddles. Such things do little to dampen my memory of the recent week.
We landed in Zurich under the threat of snow. Petulant as we were, nature decided to dumped fierce flurries upon us as we made our way through the passes to Innsbruck to spend the night. After a surprisingly delicious and late night supper at the Hotel Alt-Pradl (complete with canapes, petit four and viennese coffee) we dreamed away the lost nine hours in a fall of snow. The next morning we added to the pristine perfection of coruscate snowfields with a trip to the Swarovski Kristallwelten. I felt a little uneasy as I drove our little VW Golf -- which was surprisingly big on the inside -- through the possibly icy parts of the mountains and past the towns of Mittenwald and Garmisch-Partenkirchen on our way to Munich. We passed the better part of the night in the famous Hofbrauhaus (which, by the way, I thought had only average beer and food) before retiring to our rooms. The next morning D. and I drove up to the Audi factory in Ingolstadt while the ladies did some shopping around Marienplatz. When we returned in the afternoon we visited the grounds of Nymphenburg and the temporary BMW museum in the Olympic Park before ending our day with with some Greek food (if you thought greek food was hard to understand, try reading it in German).
We drove to Dachau the next morning for a few sobering hours among the museum and memorials and 30 plots of snow covered land where people, not numbers used to stand. Then made our way back to Munich for some palaces and museums before partaking of the wonderful Degustation Menu at the Nymphenburg Hof. We left Munich the next day and visited Neuschwanstein and the lovely city of Bergenz before eating a quick dinner in Bern and arriving back at D. and K. lovely little apartment in Lausanne. Whilst D. and K. went back to work then next day, C. and I explored Lausanne and tried to manage the rest of our vacation with out our guides. We bid our gracious hosts adieu the next morning as our time in Europe grew short and tried to see as much as we could of Bern and Luzern before finally bedding down in Zurich in preparation of our last full day in Switzerland.
Our final day passed in a blur of shopping and strolling the streets of Zurich. We caught afternoon coffee at a wonderful little cafe with rich, strong cappuccinos and delicious home baked cakes. Our best shopping find of the trip was the Ted Baker store which was going out of business and I managed to fit a pair of pants for around 70% off. Our last supper was another degustation menu at the trendy Cafe Josef in the more industrial part of town, west of the Hofbahnhof. We left Europe then next morning as the weather turned to a more traditional spring and parted ways at JFK. After struggling to stay awake on the six hour flight home, I am more than ever on Eastern Standard Time.
Many thanks to K. and D. Without you we would have been lost.
I walked outside and took deep breath, the kind where you can feel the world filling you up and spilling over and smoothing your rough edges. With my eyes closed I could smell the flowers and the herbs in the planters chatting aromatically about spring. And then, as I opened the door to the bookstore I was greeted by that now familiar smell of books laced with cinnamon and nutmeg wafting down from the cafe upstairs. I think maybe publishing companies are starting to put essences of vanilla and crushed cacao beans in their pulp. On the walk back to my building, I looked up at the absence of clouds. They seemed to erase the narrowness that sometimes constricts my life and for the first time in a while, everything seemed doable again.
I got a call from a friend today telling me that she just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Welcome Madeline Tsoi. Methinks this baby thing is more than a passing trend. Strange, at first I thought that getting old meant getting closer to death. Now I see that it brings us closer to that other end too. On a more sober note, I'm glad that everything worked out. I've known the mother for a long time and a long time she's wanted to be a mother. Sacrifices had to be made along the way and as innocent as she seems, she's more experienced at living than most I know.
Yesterday, as the day neared six, I noticed that there was still light left in the sky. The sun is beginning to work longer hours and sunset made it's way from one side of dinner time to the other. Which is to say, this site has been dormant for a good part of the winter and spring is nearly here. The past few months have been a bit of a bear, both in the markets and at work.
There's quite a backlog of things that deserve to be written up: A review of Valentine's Dinner at the Grocery, Dinner at A16 and a bottle of 1994 BV George de Latour Reserve, and a performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto D Minor, as well as other odds and ends, but there's no time today.