Funny the difference between a perfectly blue sky and one with a touch of haze, hot but not bright. It is one of those things a human being is well-tuned to notice.
Yesterday, the sun came up just that way, the day starting with a blue but hazy sky.
By 8:00 or a little after the bike paths are packed and the roads, much as they ever get that way in Amsterdam, are busy with cars.
At a crosswalk, a dad pushes a pram with his new son aboard. His daughter keeps one hand on baby brother’s buggy while she makes sure to hold mom’s hand with the other. The people, and their people, are on the move.
At lunch, the deli has its line and the supermarket gets busy. The construction guys redoing a hotel sit on the stairs and eat and smoke and check their phones. In a world of people doing the pretend work that happens on screens and with keyboards their dust gives them authority and gravitas, at least as yuppified expats like me troll by.
By evening the loose parade home begins, but it is hard to identify the formation. The summer sun, setting as it does after 10:00 PM, jostles who is doing what and what “evening” is. A person rushing home looks like they are on holiday if they ride along a canal, a biker ablaze in the glow of an ongoing day; you can only walk so purposefully along water as the sun widens out to announce its descent.
Today I sit at one of the places I come in the morning to write. I look out at a particularly busy intersection, the one the family crossed yesterday. I’ll be here for the next three hours as people come in for coffee and then move on into their lives.
Except that the sky is a clean blue, today will be exactly the same as yesterday. Indeed, it is 9:30 and I’ve just watched droves of beautiful girls and gorgeous boys, skipping kids, and engrossed parents go by me, each of them drumming out time by moving through it. Exactly the same as yesterday and entirely different.
I am reminded of a line in a Gillian Welch song:
And every day is getting straighter
Time's the revelator
As I listen to the song I think “straighter” a problem. But as I sit here, with so many things to get written and all the life just outside this window I wonder if I am too still to enjoy the right angle of days.