Today the daily work ended at a reasonable time, and although I had some kind of unhealthy desire to work for the rest of the night, I took the advice of a new friend and colleague who told me to “relax”, which is sort of like telling the wind to stop blowing, although this time I listened.  I decided to head up Baseline to  where a park opens up to a wide swath of grassland criss-crossed by some dirt trails right at the slope below the Flatirons.  I brought my my new little stowaway kite that I had purchased at Into the Wind last week — just a little Delta, beautifully colored.  These kites, by the way, are not your grandma’s kites of yesteryear. They almost leap out of your hand and rise energetically straight up in the slightest wind.  There’s no running, like Charlie Brown used to — they just elevate themselves and dance around as the wind shifts and twists.  There’s a little maintenance, and once the kite took a dive in a strong wind and I found myself wading through the tall grass to retrieve it, but if you pay attention and act accordingly, you can fly the thing almost absent-mindedly for hours.  And what a blast.  There is a sense of freedom to be connected, however tenuously, to a playful object that seems alive soaring high above you.

When I left the lowlands there wasn’t a whisper of wind but when I arrived at the park the wind was probably at about three knots — just enough to get started.  Then it began to gust up to about 20 which made for some interesting flying, and then a group of long, deep gray clouds came rolling over the Flatirons and after about an hour the first drops of rain began to fall.  I thought for a moment about Ben Franklin’s lightning experiment and decided that perhaps I should  call it quits.  On the way out a met a nice Boxer out for a walk with her Person, a happy Boulder native who was oblivious to the rain, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and change in light from the now black clouds.  It struck me how similar Boulder is to Irvine — they are bubbles of contentment, and for different reasons.  Irvine because of the affluence, climate, relatively low crime, and Orwellian corporate-style civic management, and Boulder … well I’m not completely sure yet, but judging from the real estate prices, affluence certainly has something to do with it.

Food, too.  I ate at Centro, and the food really was as the waiter described it would be, which was “delish …”.  The wine, a Spanish red, was fantastic as well.  I had something like “brown sugar encrusted lamb” (sorry, not a food critic) which was great, and the appetizer was a ginger plantain fritter with a sauce I could eat every day and not get tired of.

But the best part of the meal was that I took the opportunity to plug in the headset to my phone and called an old, old friend of the family named David Frair, who is now one of the few people left who knew well both my father and mother.  I told him how I remembered the first time I met him when he was probably twenty and I was about five — he had just a pair of shorts and sneakers and a headband and had just come back from a 10-mile run outside of Woodstock, NY.  Dave was one of the “hippie” generation in upstate NY that my father had befriended as a sort of elder, and who exposed their group to things like Jazz music and literature.  He was a journalist for the local newspaper, while Dad was a newscaster for the local radio station in Newburg, but in the late sixties they both quit journalism in favor of starting some kind of construction business with Joe Nicosia, who could actually build houses, and in fact built many.  Not that any of them made any money — I guess that wasn’t the point.  I think that was pretty much the last steady job my father had, which was fine, since my mother decided right around that time to start working.

But the point of this is that the conversation made the dinner that much enjoyable, and it was great to catch up with Dave.  If I had not been traveling, I suppose it would be much more difficult to find the time to spend an hour on the phone with someone I had not talked to in about twenty years.  But that’s something that needs to change.  Same thing with Chris and Linda — here they are less than forty miles and when was the last time I sat down with them?  Maybe a year.  No excuse for that.  Seems like almost everything I write leads me back to the fact that there is a paucity of time. An illusion, of course, since we know from experience that there is truly an eternity wrapped up in every moment we spend, dazed and overworked…