Who Knows The Changing Season?

 The past week has been both familiar and odd. The season is definitely changing—or, rather, the days and nights aren’t settling into one season or another.  It’s warm enough to go swimming at the beach, if the water were warmer. Then a wall of rain falls in the wee hours of morning. A clear sky is revealed at sunrise, but the air is colder than the sea you couldn’t swim in.  And patches of the most vibrant colors rise among meadows of mud that was the dust of last year’s leaves.

I haven’t ridden a lot of miles even though I’ve managed to get out for a spin, among all I’ve had to do, every day during the past week. For yesterday’s ride, I brought the usual things—spare tube, tire levers, multitool and pump—along with a can of Friskies and an aluminum foil plate from a takeout order.  I didn’t see the cat I sometimes encounter along the Randall’s Island shoreline, near the ramp to the Manhattan spur of the RFK Bridge.  But I left that meal—brunch? Do cats know it’s Sunday—anyway.

That cat, I am sure, understands the changing season better than I ever will: She (I think she’s female) has no choice but to feel it in her bones. I wonder how she sees the colors of the season, whatever it is.

Why I Rode

 This, on a Friday afternoon, in one of winter’s last moments:

I mounted Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear bike for a ride I needed to do for no other reason that I needed to do it.  Perhaps it had to do with the changing season: My ride took me to, among other places, a spot I reached in May, on the same bike:

I took that photo from a somewhat different angle,  but from the same street, the aptly named Cliffside Drive in Yonkers.

Then, in the middle of Spring, the lush trees and fog made for a lovely sight. On the other hand, those (mostly) same trees wove a wizened fractal pattern against the kind of blue sky and dark scrim of clouds on the horizon one sees only after a long, cold season.

So, since I am a self-indulgent writer, you, dear reader, may be forgiven for thinking that I “read” something about my life into seeing what I saw the other day, especially in comparison to what I saw last Spring.

Well, there hasn’t been a life-changing event recently—at least since my Japan trip— but I feel that this not-quite-finished winter has highlighted the passing of time, at least for me.  As far as I know, I am still in Midlife because I don’t know when my life will end. 

So what brought on thoughts of future becoming past? The seemingly endless, brutal (at least by the standards of this part of the world) Winter certainly has had something to do with it.  But something else—a dream about someone I hadn’t thought about in decades brought me to Google and an “In Memoriam” page for my high school class’s upcoming round-number-year reunion.

I looked up that classmate, whom I didn’t know well, but whom I could count as a friendly acquaintance. I couldn’t find an obituary or any other information about her death—or life since we graduated—because she had an extremely common name. She might’ve married and taken her spouse’s name, but I couldn’t even find any such account.

Was she recently claimed by one of those diseases that takes increasing numbers of people as they age? Or did she die, like another classmate, not long after we graduated in a motor vehicle crash? I hope someone, whether a jealous ex or some random stranger—whether in gang colors or another country’s uniform—didn’t kill her over so some conflict that would or could not be resolved.

You might think she’s the girlfriend I wish I’d had.  You would be at least partially right. Had I been less socially inhibited than I was, I might’ve known her better. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was what someone I knew would’ve called “presentable “:  in good shape (she was a basketball player) and always (as I remember) well put-together.  Most importantly, at least for me, she was (or seemed to be) the most intelligent kid in my school and had a sense of herself that I completely lacked at the time.

Perhaps I was riding for her.

Ride Into a Changing Season

 Yesterday I pedaled to Point Lookout via the Rockaways. This is an interesting time of year for such a ride: it’s almost or actually summer, depending on whom you ask, but the temperature difference between the “mainland” and beach areas still is, or at least feels, as pronounced as it is early in the Spring.  According to some reports, temperatures reached 85-88F (29-31C) around my apartment and in other central areas of New York City. But the lifeguard stations along the Rockaways Boardwalk indicated 72F (22C). It certainly felt that way, with wind blowing from 59F (14C) water.

I didn’t need to know the numbers, however, to explain something I saw: Many people walking or riding the Boardwalk but hardly anybody swimming. And those statistics couldn’t have explained the differences, however subtle, I noticed in the light and color of the sky and water.