Nathan, One Minute Old
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I left my Lafayette office late one summer afternoon and, pushing through the door, was blasted by a wall of heat. This wasn’t regular heat; this was valley heat, Sacramento-style, the dry kind that gets hotter through the afternoon and doesn’t peak until six in the evening. With the temperature well over 100 degrees, maybe pushing 104 or 105, I loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves, tossed my suit jacket over my shoulder, and made the short walk to the BART station. I was sweating through my shirt when I climbed the stairs to the platform and was glad when the air-conditioned train arrived to take me home to San Francisco.
Forty-five minutes later, I stepped off the BART train and out onto Glen Park’s frozen tundra. A chill wind scattered leaflets and paper cups across Diamond Street, and the ocean fog that was pouring over Forest Hill and into the little hill village was so thick that the illuminated yellow sign for the Chinese restaurant just one block away was barely visible. The temperature here was fifty degrees colder than Lafayette, but the gusty fog winds blowing through my clothes made it feel chillier than that. I cinched my tie, buttoned my jacket, crossed my arms, and leaned straight into the arctic breeze as I walked up Joost Avenue toward our house. The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the furnace because this was August in San Francisco.