The weather, or something else

"Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else," wrote Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. But is the first sunny day of the year really so complicated?

Spring in Paris marks the end of interminably long stretches of gray winter days, which are enough to give the whole city le flegme (that heavy, lazy feeling) or even a Baudelarian spleen.

So on the first warm day of April, my friend Kathryn and I, and seemingly everyone else in the 17th arrondissement, found ourselves in Parc Monceau exposing our un-pigmented upper arms to the sun.

Though it's technically forbidden, we sat on the new spring grass and looked around.

Across from us, a lanky shoeless boy slumped against a tree, his thick book growing heavier as the afternoon sun grew warmer.

Two groups of high-schoolers, boys and girls, were lounging a flirtatious distance from each other. Soon, contact was initiated by way of cigarette. "Je peux te taxer un clope" -- the cigarette offered, the light retrieved, the head inclined into a moment of brief intimacy with a stranger.

A more established couple spooned on a towel they had laid out on a flat patch of grass by the path. Their gauzy obliviousness was broken by the insistent whistles of the gendarmes, who were making the rounds in their humorless navy uniforms to chase us off the grass.

Even they seemed to regret depriving the sunbathers of the simple pleasure of laying out on this first day of spring.

The boy with the book slowly put one sock on after the other, prolonging the process beyond any imaginable necessity. And everyone else reluctantly obeyed as well until the gendarme was safely out of sight. After she left to spoil other people's fun, we returned to the grass to re-spread blankets, reopen books, and re-entwine ourselves under the spotty shade of still leafless branches.

Around 3 p.m., the gendarmes stopped making their rounds, realizing the futility of their task, or perhaps the mean-spiritedness of it.

Kathryn and I decided to stroll around the oddly decorated Parc Monceau, past an Egyptian-style stone pyramid, a pond ringed with Doric columns, and statues of young girls with braids draped admiringly over the busts of dead poets.

The gravel path was choked with laboring rollerbladers and kids careening on miniature Razor scooters. A few panting runners weaved through the crowd, their sweaty T-shirts exhibiting a perfect incomprehension of the spirit of the day.

Meanwhile, children dressed as miniature wizards, princesses, knights, and Spidermen chased each other in circles, dressed up for some holiday having to do with Lent, I think.

A crowd of tiny boys played soccer on an uneven stretch of dirt, the roots and bumps of their three-dimensional field transforming the game entirely. They played shirts versus skins, exposing sharp little shoulder bones thrust with pointed concentration.

As we approached the carrousel, a breeze carried the unmistakable smell of cr??pes au Nutella from a hundred yards away. The line of some three dozen parents and their impatient children, who clamored for cr??pes and pinwheels and other trinkets, deterred us, however, and we waded through the swarming tide of toddlers toward the respite of the shade.

We followed a narrow path out of the park, our cheeks pinked by the early April sun and the sensation of being surrounded by so much newness -- pale green buds, smooth-checked babies, first flowers emerging from the dirt.

That evening, dusk chilled the air again, definitively closing the brief parenthesis of spring.

I closed my window that night, trying to hold in the memory of the day even as I saw the navy clouds coming in over a black sky. I should have known that this warm blush would be all too short: it is often so with unexpected pleasures.

And so, as Wilde predicted, I find myself thinking inevitably of something else.