Turning to November

The day after we returned to San Francisco, the first storm of the year rolled in. It rained half the night and into the morning, let up for lunch, came down hard around 1:30, then departed. That was nice. Winter is truly here.

(We don't have much of a fall. We have summer through September, then we have a short Indian Summer, and then after an interim it starts raining. The interim, during which it gets a little darker and colder, is what passes for fall. Go up to Marin County, to the town of Ross -- a fine back-door access to Mount Tam -- if you want to see pretty leaves; otherwise, blink and you miss autumn.)

While it seems I'm fascinated with the weather, it's really the seasons I'm interested in. The heaven of an early June day when everything is blooming and all the flora is fawning; the cold spectacular clarity which usually occurs on January 1; the livewire excitement of the first evenings after daylight savings time starts and it's still light at 7:00; or in this case, the first heavy rain of winter, pouring from the skies as if in relief.

These seasonal signs, and other signs of change that mark the border between one state and another, or one time and another, are what excite me. The road from the interstate to our family's house in Illinois, back in the 60s, passed a Holiday Inn, back when Holiday Inns had those huge green signs with the big stars on top. The enormous sign, towering over the state highway, represented much more to me than a hotel. It was the whole adult world of freedom, of having your own car and enough money to travel the country and check into any motel you wanted.

But what I really wanted was to be driving by at the exact dusky moment when the sign sprang to life. It would be the moment between the dreary day and the exciting, neon-lit night, the moment when lights meant something.

No wonder I turned out queer.

So the first storm of the winter is one of my favorite moments. It means things are turning toward all the ending moments of the year, toward the holidays of lights. It's the moment when the lights start to come on.