Spring Follows Pseudo Spring (and Faux Fall)

The four seasons can be terribly inconsistent

By Ed Goldman

Sacramento, where I live and try to avoid work, is like a lot of places with so-called Mediterranean climates (with the exception being most of the actual Mediterranean region): It has a Pseudo Spring and Faux Fall.

While the real Spring began just eight days ago, Pseudo Spring is characterized by seductively mild days that interrupt the waning days of winter. Then, without warning—unless you watch the news, have a weather app in your phone or actually go outside now and then—you’re engulfed by a “surprise” hailstorm as you arrive for lunch at an outdoor cafe. Yes, this really happened to me a week ago.

Coils just wanna have fun

Faux Fall offers the reverse. Just as you’re thinking that the seemingly eternal, scorching summer is done and you can start to break out your tweeds and mufflers to endure the brisk days and crisp nights of autumn, Snarky Summer strikes back—even hotter and angrier than before. Where I’ve lived for the past 49 years, that anger shows up with the added bonus of humidity, thereby putting the lie to Sacramento’s long-lived/long-lame defense of its 100-plus-degree days: “Well, it’s a dry heat.”

As you know, climate change has been canceling many of the generalizations one can make about a place’s weather, unless you live in Hell, which stays pretty consistently hot—or so I’m being told by a guy who claims to actually own the place. (I ask him, “How can you ‘own’ Hell?” “My wife gave it to me before we divorced,” he replies. After the rim-shot, we climb into our DeLorean DMC-12 and leave the swingin’ 1967 party at Hef’s.)

I’ve lived on our country’s right and left coasts (New York and California) and even though their temps are quite different, each has its own versions of the four seasons.

When I lived in New York City, for example, Spring would announce its arrival as the snow on the sidewalk turned to slush and the street cleaners went on strike. Winter strikes were reserved for garbage collectors while Fall strikes were for teachers, just as kids returned to school. The only sector of workers who’d strike in the Spring would be professional baseball players. I believe this may be the natural order of things, whether or not you stop using an aerosol deodorant.

In Southern California, where I lived from 1958-1976 (no matter how diligently I prayed to be elsewhere), Spring would emerge looking very much like Winter, whose own transition from Fall was barely noticeable unless you kept your eyes on the retail sector. Those folks would remind you it was August because Halloween decorations would begin to dominate in-store displays and print advertising. September reminded us that Christmas was just around the corner—and once December ended, it was time to get tickets to high school performances of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

In truth, the weather really did change, if mildly, between the seasons. But unlike in many climes, Summer rarely became unbearably hot, Spring was perhaps a few degrees warmer than Winter and so on. I seem to recall changing my outfits merely to reflect that it was a different season—and even then, changing the colors more than the fabrics. In other words, I’d wear a seersucker suit with brown stripes to my job in the Fall and one with blue stripes in the Spring. In the Summer, everyone gave up and wore gender-indifferent Polo or cabaña shirts, whereas Winter saw the more dashing among us toss an acrylic scarf around our necks and walk fast enough to suggest there was a cold breeze making it flutter.

I’m not joking about any of this. It’s one of the many reasons I’ve loved living in Sacramento for almost half a century. It’s about 500 miles northeast of Long Beach, but isn’t exactly the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I do wear flannel shirts on occasion, but mainly to imply I really could change the tire on my car if push came to shove and all the AAA tow trucks were on other calls.

But it was when I had a place in San Francisco for a few years that I experienced near-total weather stasis. While Mark Twain famously said the coldest Winter he’d ever spent was Summer in San Francisco, the point about that City By The Bay is that with a few exceptions, the weather feels about the same all the time. Summer seemed cold to Twain because it was the same as the weather would have felt in San Francisco in Winter, Spring and Fall. Just not in the Mediterranean.

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Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).