Spring, Again
Spring is a flirt this year, having shown just enough ankle to get us believing in love again without committing to anything more than a sunny afternoon. But still we believe, and don’t dress warmly enough and get caught up in the budding of the yellow rockets and the smell of Chinese takeout from the place down the street on brief, warm breezes. Then: evening or a rainy week, and the illusion is broken until the next warm day.
This hot-cold dance takes me back to older springtimes, when the flowers were crocuses and the smell was a bubbling soup at home, or when the blooms were yellow daffodils and the scent was dozens of burgers grilling at University of Richmond’s dining hall across the endless lake. Regardless of participants, each scene has the unexpected shiver of a cold wind across patches of green grass that were warm and sunlit just before; flowers below and dense, autumn clouds above. These fickle springs have the risk of late frosts and yet they are somehow better than one that comes in March and stays as if she has nothing better to do. I think that is the real delight of nature: we know what will happen, and yet we are never quite sure.
The inverse of this is modern conveniences, in which we are sure what will happen, but we never quite know. I think in particular of the gas wall heater next to my desk, which can put off reliable and balmy dry heat except that it is attached to a thermostat. The plastic menace registers the ambient temperature and acknowledges my preferred setting, but the circumstances under which it tries to balance the two are unknown to me. I am convinced that part of the process involves calling Gavin Newsom’s office and, since he is so frequently out of state, waiting until he can be reached on his cellphone.
With neither spring nor Gavin returning my calls, there is little else to distract me from the distractions of the news: further advances in AI, further declines in public sentiment, violence, intrigue, celebrity trials. These engender a different sort of tweet than the kind brought by spring afternoons. All important, in their own way; it is probably bad to stay uninformed. But I do marvel — and this is Thoreau-ly old hat — at the amount of time we spend each day thinking about what happened under this particular sun while spending little time marveling that the sun rose. You will not be able to bond over the new time-saving tools powered by ChatGPT with your grandchildren; but you will be able to enjoy a morning together, and what spring feels like when it plays with your heart, and in that context it is easy to regret a lot of how our time is spent. I think the collective conscious of Twitter knows this, and tries to make itself a bigger deal than it is. Sometimes, it succeeds.
This sentiment is probably why I make a poor tweeter (and a worse newspaper editor, but that’s a story for another day); I am genuinely comfortable with, at best, yearly updates for most things in life. This is opposite of Elon Musk’s grand vision for the platform he donated $44 billion to last year: a modern town square where truth and goings-on can be discussed in “real-time,” which is the speed of conjecture in a vacuum. Still, in hopes of getting discovered in the modern way, I will continue my resolution of at least one snide comment on Twitter a day. But spring is more my speed; one grand time a year, just like last year.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think Gavin is on the line.
