There is a small park in Sausalito that most people drive straight past. Tiffany Park, a narrow flagstone terrace tucked against the foot of the hill on the west side of Bridgeway, a couple of benches and some landscaping and not much else. The view everyone is looking at is across the road, the promenade and the water and the city beyond it, so almost nobody turns their head the other way to notice the bench. My wife and I like it for exactly that reason.
We went down on a winter morning, the cold kind that sits over the Bay and does not lift in a hurry. Winter is the quiet season here, the summer crowds long gone, the waterfront left to locals and dog-walkers and the fog. It was still on the hills behind us. We brought coffee, took the bench, and looked out across Bridgeway at the gray water, not saying much, in the way you can with someone when there is nowhere you are supposed to be.
She had the Harbor Beanie in Mainsail on, the off-white one, which on a morning like that reads like the fog itself. It is the kind of layer you put on without a thought when the air is cold and then forget you are wearing. Nothing about the morning was arranged. We were just dressed for the cold and glad to be out in it together.
There is a version of this morning I take by myself, on an ordinary weekday, down at the harbor before work. This was the other kind. The same quiet, the same cold, the same slow start, but shared. Both are the reason I make what I make. Not clothes for an occasion. Clothes for a cold bench in a park nobody notices, on a Tuesday, with someone you like.
The best mornings here ask almost nothing of you. This was one of them.
Kevin
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