April morning

Irises in Pica's neighbor's garden

Through a glass, brightly; Pica and Numenius's house

April afternoon

I spent the morning out and about, dropping Pica and Numenius at the airport, then to Lisa's for our Thursday session memoir dictation; back home to take care of some e-mail business for bike club and a freelance project. By 1:30, I was ready to head out again, this time just for fun.

Stuck a Jane Smiley novel (a very old one and not one of her best) in my bag and walked downtown, the temperature just about perfect, light breeze, no chill, not hot. Lateish lunch at Burgers 'n' Brew, across from Central Park, where I sat outside in the spring air, eating slowly and reading. Was offered a refill on my diet Coke, and took it so I could keep reading. Finally stirred myself to walk to the bank to make a bike club deposit, then windowshopped along Second St—Acquarius with its crystals and incense (it always smells wonderful in there), DeLuna's, filled with bling, The Naturalist (windchimes and pretty dishes decorated with bird eggs) and then to the Avid Reader, where I bought a book of Mary Oliver's poems. On to Samira's and to the Paint Chip, then slowly home. Everyone's garden is abloom, lots of roses already and, my favorite, the bearded iris—so many colors, each so clear and delicate. Rode my bike to P & N's to feed Diego and Charlie, play with them, check on the garden, take in the sheets from the clothesline. There, too, flowers in a riot of color—bright orange poppies, deep blue ceanothus and more iris.

Years ago, I saw these lines by Gary Snyder from a poem called, I think, For the Children. I wrote them on a yellow Post-It and stuck it on my Sierra Club calendar over my desk at work, where it stayed and stayed, moving from momth to month and year to year:

Stay together

Learn the flowers

Go light.

And this evening, I read this, from Sometimes, by Mary Oliver:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

I'm looking for another Post-It note.

Let's get organized! Or not . . .

I got a new Levenger catalog in the mail today with a cover blurb touting "60 NEW Organizing Solutions." How, I wondered, could there be 60 new organizing solutions in there? So I checked, but the only "new" things seem to be the colors stuff comes in; no miraculous gizmos or methods for making one's life simpler or less cluttered. Just the opposite. Levenger is big on the 3x5 card method for taking notes, and for a mere $138, you can purchase a letter-size 3x5 Zip Action Folio (junior size, $98; $6 extra for monogram, $12 if you want your whole name). This thing is filled with card-sized pockets that hold 3x5 cards, which, once this treasure is in your hands, will be jotted on and arranged thus and so, and perhaps so and thus.

Just thinking about this kind of thing makes me want to lie down in a dim room with a lavender-scented hankie. I used to try to devise systems to keep track of stuff, but none of the Big Guns (Franklin, DayTimer, DayRunner, or Levenger) could overcome my natural inertia. In the ancient past, when I worked in the Reference Dept. of Shields Library, before all of us got so bloody busy that we needed more stuff to help us keep track of our stuff, I kept a steno notebook that I'd write in. Every day, I wrote the date, then whatever I needed to remember or keep track of got written down. Didn't matter where I started on the page, and when the book got filled up on one side, I flipped it over and started on the back side. The cover got the start and end dates. Worked fine, best system I ever had, and cheap cheap cheap.

We are the champions

The Sacramento RiverCats won the 2007 Triple A championship. Thanks to Gishi, we have T-shirts to commemorate the occasion, and we wore them to our first game of the 2008 season Saturday evening . . .
Our team: Bill "Dinger Dog" Sbarra, Susan "Put Me In, Coach!" Gishi, Babz "Duck and Cover" Anderson, and Liese "BatBabe" Schadt.

It was a perfect night for baseball—mild, T-shirt weather, good crowd, fireworks at the end of the game, even the dancing usher is back, now appearing as the dancing vendor—rendering the Cats loss to the Las Vegas 51s less painful. Also pain-reducing was getting to see a couple of former Giants, left fielder Todd Linden (who hit a home run) and catcher Justin Knoedler (whom we met a few years ago when we were all in Scottsdale for Giants' Spring Training).

Baseball . . . it's what's for summer.