the wisteria are in bloom

Spring is beautiful everywhere but, gosh, it's gobsmacking gorgeous in Berkeley. I don't remember wisteria being so lushly abundant elsewhere as it is here. I think wisteria must not do well in the hard Minnesota frost?

I don't know the names of many flowering things here. I knew the names of things in my Midwest. It is so satisfying to know names of things in nature.  Here, I am always walking alone. I have urges to turn to my walking companion to ask him 'what is the name of this?' but I have no walking companion. Not yet.

Lavender wisteria hangs in lush, plush thickness over gates and fences and trellisses. An Oakland public library in Rockridge is covered in wisteria just now.  I will walk down there tomorrow to enjoy the wisteria.

Red blooms, pink ones, blue ones. Lush, verdant.  There is lush verdant blooms almost all the time here but it is particularly burstingly lush just now.

I see wisteria and I think of Katherine Hepburn in one of her first film roles. She plays a very young woman, an aspiring actress, cast in a play. She has to say the line "The calla lilies are in bloom again." She is supposed to say the line with tragic tone and she does. The line works on many levels, revealing the young woman's angst and longing as well as the exquisite beauty of flowers being in bloom again.

The wisteria are in bloom again.

Today, I took a long walk home from my S. Berkeley medical appointment, down side streets so I could look at gardens. I kept hearing myself 'think', in Katherine Hepburn's dramatic reading of that calla lily line:  the wisteria are in bloom again. And I bloom with wistfulness. Not just for Rosie but for all the things that slip away, from me and from us all.

Remember the opening credits to a tv soap opera from long ago:  the viewer sees an hour glass with sand drifting through it and a portentous male voice intones 'just as the sands flow through an hour glass, so flow the days of our lives . . . ." or something like that.  I feel sad wistfulness for the sands of time. I want to turn this sadness around and feel joy for what the next moment will bring me, and then the next.

I have a date this evening.  I should focus on that instead of feeling wistful for wisteria.

That wisteria reminded me of Chez Bananas, a restaurant Rosie and I frequented in Minneapolis. It has closed. Restaurants do that.  It was a tiny little wrench but a wrench. I looked at the address for Chez Bananas on google maps and then I look at The Great Wall, our other favorite restaurant. Chinese.

Whenever we went there, they always asked if we wanted smoking or non-smoking. I always said non-smoking and then the Chinese hostess would echo me and say 'two no smoke', in a choppy English.  Once, when she asked me if we wanted smoking or no smoking, I held up my hand just like the hostress always did and said, just like the hostess always did, without thinking, without intending to be funny or impolite, just unconscious, I guess, I said "Two no smoke". The hostess' eyes widened in shock. I think she perceived my behavior as rude, maybe as ridicule.  I was not ridiculing. I echo the language I hear.  I pick up language and words in a musical way. When I said 'Two no smoke' I was hearing the musicality of the way that lovely Chinese woman said it. Rosie was embarrassed but then we were able to laugh about it. After that, many, many times, we got the other laughing just by saying 'two no smoke'.

I have not shared any experiences with her, on the physical plane, since 2001, since before the world trade center collapsed.