Every Cloud Has One

Sometimes silver linings announce themselves upfront. For instance, your sister (the one who works at the Bakery) calls you up as you're putting the kids to bed and says "Hey, if you give me a ride home from work I'll make it worth your while." And ten minutes later you and your groggy, pajama-clad children are cruising down a dark alley in Columbia City, and ten minutes after that you are all stuffing your faces with leftover chocolate eclairs. (Thank you, Lauren!)

Some silver linings take a little longer to materialize. Like, when you finally admit defeat at the hands of the Head Cold from Hell and retire to bed with a supply of aloe-tinged tissues, a thermos of lemon-ginger tea, and a stack of last week's crossword puzzles, you find that as the hours crawl by you have made it all the way through Edward Tufte's scathing analysis of the role PowerPoint presentations played in the 2003 space shuttle explosion. (A sample: "The vigorous, vaguely quantitative words 'significant' and 'significantly' are used 5 times on this slide, with meanings ranging from 'detectable in a perhaps irrelevant calibration study' to 'a difference of 640-fold' to 'an amount of damage so that everyone dies.'")

On day two of your confinement you are out of crossword puzzles and sick of lemon-ginger tea and painfully aware that it's a beautiful day, probably the last until May, and you could go skating at Alki... if you hadn't just been completely wiped out by a trip to the basement to flip a load of laundry. But in between restless half-naps you manage to stumble across a new Hans Roslings video, so that the next day, when you have no choice but to drag your stuffed-up head & aching body to the office, you are still significantly cheered by the image of a brilliant, wryly optimistic, middle-aged Swedish professor ripping off his button-down shirt and revealing a silver lining all his own.

Sometimes you have to get a little proactive in your quest for silver linings. Let's say you look up from an article you're trying to write about Taylor's Mill and Neopolitan pizza and think, "Christ, it's not even three o'clock and the sun's going down already." Then a little later, when you decide you have time to drop by the library and pick up that book on Italian immigration in Washington State, it might occur to you that it could actually get dark enough early enough for you to get a glimpse of your favorite Columbia City artwork before you have to go get the kids.

Yes, some silver linings have to be stalked. But if you're willing to sit on a cold parkbench for twenty minutes, scribbling away with gloved fingers as your lumber mill pizzeria story starts to take shape on the page, eventually you'll see those little blue lights emerging from the gathering gloom.


And if you remembered to pocket your camera, you can even share them when you get home.