The indoor cycling class is over, time to walk out to the car and set out for home, lunch, and packing instruments for band practice du jour. The fitness place is busy during lunch hour. Actually, our "no information is too much" instructor asked just last week why she seemed to have a nicely populated class surrounded by a burgeoning club at this time of the week. A pair of people responded working hours were most variable in our changed times. But noon rush is yet apparent.

I usually park in a chewed up part of the lot closer to a fast food franchise from which, especially at this location, I may never have ordered a thing. I don't mind this and other walks for other occasions, with today's two year renewal at the front desk being a good tag line to casual fitness.

Something indeed looms over and into the cracked pavement and continues on the drive home. For two weeks the Valley has had mostly the eddy weather which used to demarcate our shifty spring into summer, a period we seemed to have missed in this form the last several years.

The one- to three-thousand foot ceiling, broken to overcast, is gone, and also the cirrus which seemed to wave the stratus back in for the evening. Gone! A token wisp is over the hills behind Sherman Oaks and in the opposite direction something in a hurry to evaporate over the mist-softened profile of a Verdugo. But I know better, and note the grey haze on the horizon, the undefined relative to gloom which wraps itself around the stores, and short shadows of pedestrians who seem, well, resolute about something.

Shadows, yes. It is sunny. Memories of school getting out but also how quickly the stale cartoons, soggy cereal and Mom's constant snarling about not measuring up to the supposedly enterprising other kids she thought she knew came. Back to today, how long did I think the clouds, at least in this system past, were going to stick around, anyway? It is sunny, the parked car will get hot, and "summer is y-cumin in".

With Sarah gone, that last phrase is for me to carry on, invoking the season.