Getaway Car

Hello World, What is so rare as a day in May, indeed! Recently there have been isolated times around here when the weather has not only been not as horrible as usual, but actually pretty pleasant, as hard as that may be to believe, at least for us local folks, and I ought to know. On the whole, it's been one heck of a cold and damp Spring, many degrees below normal for this time of year, and not much to recommend it in any way. I'm sure that people have grown tired of hearing me say that it was warmer in February than it is now, and I despaired at the idea of going camping in just about 7 weeks, under the current conditions. But lately there have been one or two warm days, with glorious sunshine and gentle breezes, that can't help but revive the spirit and give new hope for brighter days ahead - and I don't mind saying, it's about time. Of course, all too soon, we'll all be complaining about the heat and humidity, heaven knows, which I suppose only goes to prove that things can always be worse - and with the latest spate of "Franken-weather" cropping up everywhere, there's a good chance that might be an understatement of epic proportions, I dare say. Raining frogs and plague of locusts, anyone? Speaking of nature run amok, I see that the bright green and multi-color Monk Parakeets have returned to the neighbors' feeders for another season, which surprised me because they're such noisy birds that we usually hear them before we see them. But there's no mistaking their spectacular plumage, even from inside the house (through dirty windows, I regret to admit) and across the driveway, their showy presence is impossible to miss, even for me. And while they don't qualify as a harbinger of Spring, as late as it is, it's still a treat to welcome them back, livening up the place as exotic visitors, and giving the local wildlife an unexpected shot of color that never loses its appeal. So I guess you could say that even though there isn't a 90's punk rock band in sight, this is still our very own Green Day. Meanwhile, outside of the local area, the NHL playoffs have come down to the final four, before we know who will compete for the Stanley Cup as the last two teams standing. They have already left in their wake many tens of thousands of disappointed fans in cities as diverse as Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Nashville, Anaheim, New York (and associated boroughs) Dallas, Los Angeles and Washington D.C., of all places. The Capitals swaggered into the post-season with a phenomenal 120 points, and all to no avail - in fact, of the clubs with the highest total points, only St. Louis and Pittsburgh are still on their feet, the rest were soundly defeated by lesser teams with worse records. Or as we say in the wonderful world of sports wagering, "Go figure." It's really true that the regular season and the post-season are two completely different animals, so to speak, and success in one doesn't necessarily correlate to success in the other - which is why they make them play the games, and not just assume that the teams with the better records will automatically beat the teams below them. Across the boards, the NBA playoffs are also down to four, and that moaning and wailing you hear is from the likes of Houston, Portland, Memphis, San Antonio, Boston, Atlanta, Charleston, Miami and Indiana - and even worse for two-sport cities like Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles, where the hockey and basketball teams were both booted out of the playoffs at basically the same time, thanks not. On the outdoor scene, a quick glance at the baseball standings so far shows the mighty Yankees with a lackluster record of 19-22 and at the bottom of their division, while the junior franchise fares slightly better at 23-18 and in 3rd place. On the other hand, the surprising Cubs are running away with the Central division and sporting the best record in baseball by far, so it goes without saying that the standings in May can be a wildly inaccurate gauge of how the season will actually turn out. As Brian Hyland once famously observed, "See you in September," and that's not just the Cracker Jacks talking, believe me. Last weekend, our neighborhood association had their annual Boathouse Opening Party, as they do every Spring, full of the same rituals and traditions for generations on end, heavy on the fun, capped off with groaning tables piled with food, and not to mention, copious amounts of wine, wine, and more wine. A day after the festivities, all of the neighbors received a frantic email from one of the residents, posing the musical question: "If anyone found a little pink car with a girl in it - it's Kaleesha's. Please let me know." Far be it from me to be flippant or unhelpful at a desperate time of lost toys, but I couldn't stop myself from sending back a reply saying, "You obviously need GPS tracking on that thing!" She laughed. Also on the vehicular front, I happened to be out in the parking lot at the real estate office where I'm working now, and found myself in the corner of the lot where the fence company had hung a sign on their chain-link handiwork, no doubt many decades ago at this point. In fact, it would only make sense nowadays to those of us "of a certain age," because the sum total of the sign consisted of the following: ================== GUN HILL FENCE FA4 5000 ================== The fence has been there so long, and the sign is so old, that the company still had an alpha-numeric exchange like they used to (ours at home was Ivanhoe 3, and I'm sure all the rest of you geezers out there can remember yours just as easily to this day) and never a thought of an area code, fax number, email address or web site to clutter things up with. I realized that young people these days wouldn't even recognize it as a phone number in the first place, since they never knew those sorts of numbers existed to begin with, and would just assume that it would be some sort of product code to identify the type of fence, or some such. In retrospect, the amazing thing is not only how sturdy the fence is (after discovering the pertinent artifact that reveals its original time period) but also how the sign attached to it has more than stood the test of time, down through the years, in spite of all that friend or foe, man or beast, machine or Mother Nature, could throw at it, and stared it down with implacable defiance. I happen to know that the fence company is still in business, but like "The Man in the White Suit," I have the feeling that the sign company has long since gone under, as the superior quality of its indestructible signs eliminated the need for repeat orders to replace the worn-out originals. By contrast, in the modern world of high technology and specialized manufacturing, we have products that don't even outlast their own warranty, much less set endurance records with impunity. This is what is known as "progress." Elle