First Lightening

It was hot at noon, hot in that way that should be Miami and isn't Marin. A stripped down and not uncertain sun and humidity pooling at the pavement. The birds were having a field day. Towards the afternoon the wind came up suddenly, tailed by massive and ungainly thunderheads. More like dark bulwarks, dark before dark.

So I went to have my hair cut. With one eye on the weather and one eye on the shears. By concensus I am growing my hair out. Both of my dear friends, colorist and cutter, concur that I have worked the pixie passed it's date of expiration on my head. Am solidly en route to a charming blond bob. This inspite of my protests. I can't work a blow dryer to save my soul, and so many brushes and products perplex me and drive me to doubt my girl credits. Why did I fall in love with the hairdresser, to have a year of good hair, naturally. I still have long hair dreams all of the time. Dreams in which I braid, ponytail and pigtail, dreams where I am still on my back, pegged beneath all of that hair, dreams where I thought it was short and run my fingers through it only to be delighted as if by an old friend.

Driving through Sausalito at a maddening 15 miles an hour, the bay and the branches are in disaccord. And there are still patches of calm in the baylet between Sausalito and Tiberon, as flat and glassy as an icerink, but big, fat splotches of storm are starting to peel off my windshield, and the gulls are wheeling in.

On the bridge my windshield is bleeding brakelights, bright red rivulets between swipes of the wipers, bridge toll, long grey streamers of traffic, merge to the channel, hold your breath through the tunnel, make a wish, Lake Street. A bright white streak of lightening over the peak of UCSF, wait a beat or so and miss the thunder, maybe the music is too loud, maybe it's all electricity and no fury.

The windows come down. Atmospheric ionization is sexy, thunder or not. There is enough electricity to make the hair on my arms rise and I keep waiting for that much wanted rolling thunder, and one eye cocked on the road and the other searching the sky, for that bright, white break in the early winter sky.

And wouldn't be just my luck, that I roll into rock star parking and the skies magestically clear, when what I really wanted was a doozy of a gale to knock out the power lines so I could sit in the tub with all my (scented) emergency candles ablaze and listen to the angels bowl*. (some baby sitter we had when we were living in las vegas taught me how to count thunder and lightening, also told me that God and the angels were bowling, thence thunder, and somehow, it captured my fancy, and I have never let go of SHIT (she/he/it/they) and the hosts in rented shoes, stinking of anti-fungal spray and bumbling towards victory, poorly shirted and swilling cheap beer.) Somehow that image pleases me, like I'd kinda like to imagine God as Randy Quaid in that bowling movie, you know the one, the one where he wakes up with a tatoo on his ass and woody harrelson loses his prosthetic hand... yeah, that one.

Heavenly hosts in bowling league shirts aside, no thunder rolled over me, and my power is still on, and with the windows down and the windows open in my apartment and the curtains modestly drawn I am perfumed in ozone and cigarette smoke. I'll recline in the tub regardless and try to reconstitute my very own thunder.