spring

At home I have a copy of the April 21, 1986, issue of 'Sports Illustrated.' I'm on the cover with the blurb, 'Can Lou Do It?' I'd just arrived at Notre Dame, and with spring football underway, I was the focal point of that week's coverage.

It was easy being healthy when I was young. I was full of energy, so sports and physical challenges were fun. But as I got older and the spring left my step, exercise became harder, and eating, drinking and watching TV became easier. By the time I was 50, I'd put on 50 pounds.

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

The spring of love becomes hidden and soon filled up.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.

Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it__ still money and people smile at that. It__ the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction__ather it__ a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses_ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

If there comes a little thaw Still the air is chill and raw Here and there a patch of snow Dirtier than the ground below Dribbles down a marshy flood Ankle-deep you stick in mud In the meadows while you sing "This is Spring."

Yet Ah that Spring should vanish with the Rose. That Youth's sweetscented manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the branches sang Ah whence and whither flown again who knows?

Came the Spring with all its splendor All its birds and all its blossoms All its flowers and leaves and grasses.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.

Yes, I deserve a spring__ owe nobody nothing.

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

Here I find the true nature of the tree - not in the bulk of its shape but in the way its form alters my vision of the world.

A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun__he readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.