‘June gloom’: Just think of it as a tax on paradise

Here’s how it goes pretty much every year. Sometime just after Memorial Day, you get home from work and even though it’s past 7, the sun is still shining, filling your backyard/terrace/kitchen window with a light so warm and lush you feel as though you could scoop it up in your two hands and use it as bath oil.

Summer is practically here and even though this doesn’t mean what it once did -- three months off to run barefoot through sprinkler-wet grass in perpetual pursuit of badminton birdies and the Good Humor truck -- it still means something fairly wonderful. An imminent trip, perhaps, or just a series of cloudless, sunny days long enough for even the most dug-in office-dweller to enjoy.

Then, the very next morning, you open your door to a day so damp and gray and mist-infested you find yourself peering anxiously into the swaying fog, listening for the doleful clop of horses’ hoofs that will herald the inevitable arrival of a black-liveried carriage, sent with the sincerest compliments of “the count.”

Welcome to June.

Angelenos have often been accused of having long-term memory issues. This is untrue, of course. Many Angelenos can point out, with unfailing accuracy, the motel on Franklin Avenue where Janis Joplin OD’d or tell you the free-throw stats of every Laker ever born or describe exactly which booth Sean Penn was occupying that time they saw him in Patrick’s Roadhouse in the early ‘80s. Likewise, they know to the minute when Hollywood Bowl traffic will make Highland Avenue impossible in the evening, or when the price of strawberries will drop from $12 a flat to $9.

So, considering the amount of truly important information we are constantly juggling, it’s not surprising that many of us forget, each and every year, that June in Los Angeles is not the sunny, sprightly affair it is in other parts of the country. “June gloom” we call it as soon as we remember it, which is usually after three or four days of shivering in our hopeful tank tops and muttering things like: “Man, what is with the weather these days?”

Every year it is explained to us -- the rising temperatures of the land hit the still-chilly air of the Pacific, often with the added weather-phenomenon bonus of the “Catalina eddy” -- and every year, sometime around Labor Day, when the Los Angeles summer is just getting serious, we completely forget about it.

Part of this can be put down to our native meteorological optimism -- of course we can have Christmas dinner on the back patio, why wouldn’t we? But it’s also a function of a more dangerous tendency to buy into our own P.R. -- the image of sunny skies 24/365 fits right in with the “Kid, I’ll make you a star,” streets-o’-gold mythology that has destroyed so many young dreams and fueled so many bad novels.

June gloom is an atmospheric reminder that if you live in a land of milk and honey, you’re going to have a fly problem.

Beach-bound blues

June, and sometimes much of July, is also the price you pay for being able to afford to live at the beach. Even as the sun breaks through midday inland, a trip west on the Santa Monica Freeway at any hour hits a wall of fog almost exactly at Bundy Drive. Not that this stops everyone. There is nothing quite as poignant as the coconut-y smell of suntan oil on a June Saturday so socked in by fog that cyclists can barely navigate the bike path.

This is why wedding planners flinch when they hear some winsome young thing say, “I want a June wedding at the beach.” Well, OK, but it’s kind of hard to bead and embroider Gortex.

Some people love the overcast days, the misty, moisty mornings. Natives of the various British Isles suddenly feel quite at home, and all the creative types who pine for the leaky, consumption-provoking garret and blame the cheerful weather for their failure to become the next Tolstoy or Kafka or even Fay Weldon, can hunker down over their anise-flavored decaf and talk about how great it would be if Los Angeles were like this year-round.

These overcast days are also a good test of one’s true geographical flexibility.

It’s always amusing to watch those restless and irritable friends who threaten, year in and year out, to leave this wretched, soulless land for the cultural bounty of, say, San Francisco or Seattle. Four straight days with barely two hours of sun later and they’re kissing the sweet ground at the 405-101 interchange and making plans to buy something in the North Hollywood area “just as soon as the real estate market cools off.”

And after we get over the original shock, June gloom is kind of fun. We know it won’t last forever -- and look at all the great sweaters we get to wear for a few weeks. June gloom almost makes up for all those awful Santa Ana days. Dermatologically speaking, June in Los Angeles is better than a week at Two Bunch Palms -- think about every photo you’ve ever seen of the Irish and Welsh. They always have such great skin and hair, don’t they?

Like the perennially surprising jacaranda and nocturnal perfume of the Victorian boxwood, June gloom is a geographic bonbon. And maybe our forgetfulness is intentional -- like tucking a $20 bill in the pocket of your winter coat before you put it away, just so you can have that windfall feeling when you find it.