Signs of the Season

Mistral, the sculpture that greets me every morning, sprouts its winter adornments. The wooden benches and flowers tempt me to enjoy the first cup in the dawn chill, but there's no time.

E-mail and voice-mail messages await upstairs, along with forms placed on my chair. Yes, I'll be sure to sign them, and I'm too timid to voice my annoyance about finding them on my chair because then I'll look like one of those OCD guys who wants everything in its place and a place for everything. Don't they know they should use my snail-mail inbox because I go through it every day....well, almost every day? When I need some documents tended to, I leave it on top of their keyboards, which seems to be less of an invasion of personal space. I wonder if my irritation stems from some primal Jungian threat to my "seat" of power? (And do you get irritated, dear reader, when someone talks about a subject about which he knows absolutely nothing, for instance a CPA ruminating on archetypes that he read about in Psychology Today?)

We see fewer T-shirts and more jackets as the weather cools.

The morning rush is exacerbated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, which raises fares and ignores its posted schedules with impunity. Muni services are supposed to be coordinated with CalTrain's arrivals, so that Peninsula commuters can transfer immediately to a waiting bus or light railcar.

On this morning some poor passengers had to wait 30 minutes for the N-Judah railcar that would carry us to Market Street. The CalTrain bullet has improved to the point that it takes only 22 minutes to travel 20 miles from the mid-Peninsula station where I board. Because of Muni, the last two miles to the office are the slowest.

New commuters fume, fret, look at their watches, and call their offices. Veterans accept their circumstances and use the enforced idleness to read a few more pages of a novel or magazine. Lately, I've been listening to podcasts while jotting notes in the day-planner. My quiet time in the midst of city noise.

The skating rink is back.