Slowing With the Flow
Summer again in Southern California, and things . . . have begun . . . to slow . . . down. Feel the air. It is hot enough to singe the smell from the roses. In the valleys, dogs plop down under orange trees and don’t move for days.
The gardening calendar says you’ve long since missed your chance to plant new flowers. All you can do now is water, and pray. This is good, because watering is the only thing for which you can muster the energy: watering, which has come to feel prayerful, in its way.
You come home from work. You slip off your shoes. You walk out into the thirsty grass and grab the garden hose. If you have toddlers, they run to help. In a blink, they are jaybird naked. Water policies, droughts, Cadillac Deserts--such things scarcely flicker in your scorched, weary mind as you stand mesmerized, watching the metallic arc splash up and out.
Ahhh. Feel how it cools your hot, pinched toes. Feel how it washes away your sins. The toddlers romp in the mist, their chubby legs pumping full-speed. You could stand like this for an hour, and do. And do.
*
It has been said that this is the land of endless summer, but only by people who haven’t been here long. There are, of course, many seasons in Southern California, and high summer is one, beginning around the time the morning haze burns off in mid-July and ending around October, when the last Santa Ana blasts through.
More than dates or weather, though, summer here is a kind of a mood, so languid you feel almost hypnotized. Brush fires rip through the chaparral and you just watch, transfixed. Traffic clogs on the freeways for no reason other than wandering minds.
It is an entirely different mood than summers in other cities--not at all like, say, New York in August, with its echoes of abandonment. No one abandons L.A. in July. People are poolside, maybe, or out at the beach, but they stick around. It’s just that they’ve entered a sort of dormant phase.
People are here, and they’re not here. Jobs get done, and then again, not. Whole weekends pass without anyone accomplishing anything. You mean to say such-and-such to so-and-so, but it slides effortlessly from your mind. You mean to take a vacation, and don’t quite get around to it.
Conversations change pace. On Melrose, fashionable Westsiders sit in restaurants, exchanging long, beatific smiles. In Boyle Heights, a stunned-looking grocer creates an 8-foot outdoor display of rose-colored mangoes, then stands before them wordlessly, letting them sell themselves.
In the snack shack at a suburban high school water polo meet, teenage girls can’t give away their Rice Krispies squares. It is too hot for sweets, and they turn to talk:
“You know that new roller coaster at Magic Mountain?”
Long pause.
“Someone told me your stomach hardly drops on it at all.”
“On the roller coaster?”
“Mmmmmmmmm.”
Extremely long pause.
“Tomorrow, wanna go to the beach?”
Only at the shoreline, where the surf has marked its own time all year, is there the sense that things have been timed this way all along. The waves swoosh in and swoosh out, in sync with the season, in sync with the metropolis, in sudden sync with life.
Facing the breakers, you wade in--hip deep, chest deep and now under--the saltwater not as cold as it seemed at first. You catch a wave, and though the blue ocean feels like the very hand of God Almighty beneath you, as the kids say, your stomach hardly drops at all.
*
It is a rare gift, this bliss of suspension, the frail, useless beauty of the in-between. Summers here conjure a deeper rhythm, bathe you in the essence of things.
In bed at night with the windows open, I hear the crickets. I am sleeping and not sleeping, floating underwater, meditating, in prayer. The thought occurs: How much time have I spent waiting every year for summer, only to wait for summer to end? I wonder if someone out there is laughing in the cosmos, wondering when I’ll put off the waiting and surrender to the flow. The night murmurs. The summer rises like liquid. Life, it sings, is but a dream.
At dawn, the sky is already burning, and yet it seems there is all the time in the world. It is so quiet, you can hear the shhk-shhk-shhk of the sprinklers in the yard next door, the music of the season, of reverie.
Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com
