Shorts. Sunlight. An April Evening In Seattle?
We stole a summer evening from the cellar where July is kept last night. If we’re caught, as Christopher believes we will be (see his comment to yesterday’s post), the penalty will be treble damages next winter. It was midday warm, over 80 degrees, when we left the house at 5:30 to walk to Mona’s (above). We had a drink and delightful appetizers there - ahi tuna seviche for me, an antipasto of carmelized onions, goat cheese, tapenade and peppers for my spouse, an arugula salad to share. A Mariners game lurched into the tenth inning on the silent TV above the bar, and I snuck looks at it (The Mariners this season are like a traffic accident you can’t quit looking at) while she nudged herself back and forth across a line that divided liking and not liking so much Underworld by Don Delillo. The book is 800 pages, which seems like it should have been bleeding meat in the shark tank of a good editor, and she, a fast reader, is having trouble making it to the end. I’m supposed to read it next, but I’m a painfully slow reader, and I’ll splatter myself on it like a motorcycle-jumper on a 2-cycle scooter trying to leap a line of city buses. To my credit, I was sufficiently engaged in this conversation that I missed the homer that won the game for Seattle.
We had carried jackets, being veterans of Seattle’s precipitous evening temperature drops, but when we left Mona’s, it was almost as warm as when we had entered. We decided to meander the 3 or 4 blocks down to Greenlake. Greenlake is a city park with 3-mile paved path that circumambulates the lake. My visits to the lake are usually for the purpose of running around it, and I usually dislike walking along the busy path, with its complicated mix of skaters, bikers, runners and walkers. Last night, however, the entire city seemed relaxed and full of weather-induced well-being, and walking along the path and perimeter of the lake was very pleasant. We stopped often to regard details that we have passed a few thousand times in the hyperventilated tunnel-vision of an evening’s desperate run: a large man with probably the tiniest dog he could have possibly been with; newly hatched ducklings paddling along the shore, the sunset glistening through their fuzz, now and again lunging upward to capture a bug from the shore-hugging swarms; and a skater on the path who seemed to be a refugee from the easter parade, or a Jack Finney time-travel book.
