Happy Spring!
I just got back with the family from a week of baseball-oriented activities. My son’s baseball team had a tournament in Phoenix (we won!). We were pale and soaked from weeks of rain in Seattle and now feel sun-baked, ever so slightly toasty and ready for work.
I started off the trip by reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and was about halfway through when I started crying in the terminal while waiting to take off. It was a short, good, wow-that’s-beautiful kind of teary-eyed cry and my kids stared at me briefly (Mom’s crying over a book; interesting and amusing). A first for me. I usually cry during movies, not while reading books.
While in town we went to two spring training games at the Peoria Mariners/Padres facility. What a great way to watch a game. Big lawns for kids to run around, not as crowded, blue skies and beer.
Then I needed my plant fix. The family slept in while I set out early in the morning to treat myself to a 2-hour walk at the Desert Botanical Garden.
Spring is a beautiful time anywhere that has seasons, but spring in the desert is such an ephemeral time that I felt blessed to experience all the flowers blooming on the cacti. There were different bold colors, the smell of the creosote bush and the singing of this bird on a saguaro cactus. (bird people, I think it’s a Curve-billed Thrasher?)
As I walked in the botanical garden an older guy walked up to me and said “What’s A24?” I’m a huge fan of A24 films and have a cute cranberry baseballcap with pink letters with the logo. I talked to him about how it’s a film production company that makes good movies. Movies that are different, heartfelt, weird, thoughful, original. This guy was so interested. “My wife and I talk all the time about how the movies they put out now aren’t as good as they were”. I think what he meant to say was, I don’t know where to find movies like the ones A24 puts out, and he said he’d check it out.