As I shiver this March morning, I think back to America’s favorite weather sage, Mark Twain, and an obscure quote of his which is overshadowed by his more famous weather utterance: “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait five minutes.”
(Twain never said “the coldest summer I ever spent was in San Francisco.”)
In a speech to the New England Society’s Seventy-First annual dinner (in New York City which is not in New England), Twain said:
“The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about “Beautiful Spring.””
So warned I will not wax poetic this season about baseball’s opening day (which was today, in Japan of all place, between the Mariner’s and the A’s), spring harbinger cliches like ospreys, herring, shad bushes nor Mustapha Kunt.
