Tuesday, December 30, 2003 :::
 
Sometimes, people can be really nice. A Mind That Suits, living in a city that attracts aggressive folk, often dilates on quotidian brutality, because it is so often thrown in his face. Not so long ago, he was trying to board the Metro, but was slowed by the halting steps of a lady of advanced age. A remarkable number of uptight, hot-to-trot urban professionals were waiting for their elder to gain her footing when a man rushed toward a gap between A Mind That Suits and the Metro door. As it happened, A Mind That Suits was rolling one of those carry-on bags that day, and, without looking back, simply rotated the bag so that it filled the gap, thus halting the advance of the rude man.

But in the 48 hours from his return from NC to his arrival at the old stomping grounds in Palo Alto, he has been reminded that not everyone has sold his soul. First, friend Eddie and his delightful wife, from Macon and also from One Good Turn (see upper right link), were visiting Washington, and A Mind That Suits spent a very refreshing hour with them as they rested from interviewing candidates for professorial posts at their storied school, and he rested from a quick turnaround in trips.

Then, on his flight to San Francisco, A Mind That Suits met a bubbly and interesting family from Michigan who, after several interesting conversations across 2/3 of the continent, offered to drive A Mind That Suits to Palo Alto, 30 minutes out of their way. Chivalry is NOT dead.

However, it should be noted that it took said party an hour and a half to get out of SFO, such are the exigencies of cheap travel and heightened security.

A Mind That Suits, when a lad, worked at the Stanford Law School Library ,and so had to stay in Palo Alto for the last weeks of December, which months he remembers as being among the most dismal of his life.

The weather does not wish to disabuse him of his memories. In short, it sucks. And, as the campus shuttle is inoperative when no one is around, the days are filled with lots of splosh-splosh-splosh through clay-y mud puddles.

And yet California has its magic even then. If you check back to his previous posts about his return to Palo Alto after all these years, you will find that A Mind That Suits finds arresting that peculiar California combination of browns and greens. Lacking completely is the vast array of colors afforded in the deciduous East. But there is such a thing as monocrhome beauty, and California has it. Maybe not monochrome, but pauci-chromed (few colored, if such a word exists.) While some trees go dormant in the cold, the ground springs alive in electric green in the unaccustomed riches of wetness, and the dark wood of the eucalyptus trees take on amazing hues of golden red as they get soaked. It never ceases to amaze, even as one is forced to pick one's way carefully through the puddles.

Nonetheless, A Mind That Suits remains a Southern boy, and he feels not the slightest urge to crawl back into the womb, despite the undeniable magic.

Work awaits, and A Mind That Suits is paying for this in the most spacious Kinko's imaginable. So, until tomorrow, he wishes you all the best.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:40 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.