It might be May, but you’d never know it

The coldest day in May on record. I haven’t seen the record: I go by the fact that today, I sit at the computer in my fuzzy anorak over a sweater, and can still feel the cold right through my jeans. It’s been gray skies all month long. The tops of the trees out my window sway in the chill breeze. I’m not even taking a chance writing this column ahead: I know it’ll be overcast at some point on the day you read it.

I’m sure there are people all over this town who have quit their jobs, ended their marriages, gone crawling back to their shrinks, opening cereal boxes from the bottom by mistake, sure that life has suddenly taken a bitter turn, that it’s hollow. The gentle dog people in the park snarl at each other, and people everywhere are deciding they’ve had enough bad weather, it’s time to move to California. Then they remember this is California.

And all the time, all they are missing are the blue skies, and the May sun. This cold, unhappy spring has thinned our wires until they sing painfully at the slightest touch, vibrate in the merest breeze. Especially mine: You name it, and it has become annoying.

Yesterday I marched into the accounting office at work and said I was going to buy my own lamp and expense it, since I couldn’t get a light over my desk after four months of asking; 10 minutes later, while I was on the phone, a man came by and screwed a light bulb into my lamp, and it came on.

That night my VCR chewed up “The Shawshank Redemption,” and after I had Morgan extract it from the machine with a screwdriver, I found someone had taped it together with Scotch tape. I marched to Blockbuster, already furious with them for not believing me and charging me for the wrecked tape, even though they hadn’t said anything yet. In fact, when I got there they took it back without comment. Mother’s Day was cold, Patrick’s birthday was freezing, we went skiing at Tahoe yesterday under slushy gray skies.

When I was a child in Marin, I waited for the sun each year like an acolyte waiting for her seer. In April, my boyfriend Johnny and I would hitchhike out to Kent Lake, a reservoir, strip to bathing suits, and sit there shivering on the bank of the lake, goosebumps popping up on our white skin, trying to pretend summer had arrived.

By May, though, it was always here. May was a month you could count on, even in San Francisco. When Patrick was born on May 16, 15 years ago, it was a gorgeous summery day. The boys across the street were on their tar roof with their towels, and the towels didn’t have to be anchored by radios and books. I looked out the hospital window between pains and thought, What a waste of a beach day.

Weather matters. It’s no surprise to me that Portland, where it’s raining or overcast 260 days a year, has (I have heard) the highest suicide rate in the country. Weather matters in L.A., where the hot Santa Ana winds roar out of the canyons, driving people to murder on Sunday afternoon, making them wonder what the point is of returning an overdue video.

And weather matters here, where we are so good at keeping our spirits up month after windy, foggy month, where all we ask is a small succession of warm days in May, and then a solid month of them in September. When we get exactly two days of sun in May, we are like Oliver Twist looking at his bowl of thin gruel. We are not happy.

But of course, we don’t know we’re not happy about the weather, because we have nearby objects to blame, like burned-out lamps, wrecked videotapes, marriages, jobs and families.

We won’t know what we want until the day the sun comes out, and all we can think is, as Kenneth Patchen said, “Great mother of big apples it is a pretty World!”

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on May 25, 1995.

In April, my boyfriend Johnny and I would hitchhike out to Kent Lake, a reservoir, strip to bathing suits, and sit there shivering on the bank of the lake ... trying to pretend summer had arrived.