save it for a rainy day

We've been having summer showers today. They make for a delicious invitation to nap. I declined only because I slept so late into the morning, not that that eliminated the possibility of napping. We need the rain. People seem to say that when it rains, whether it's true or not. It's just part of the script. Like, in old Westerns someone would mutter, "It's a good day for a hangin'" and some tumbleweed would roll by across the parched main street of the town where the gunfight was supposed to take place. A good day for a hanging? That's rough. You would hope most think the opposite, as if no day were good for a hanging. Not if you were the hangee, that's for sure. Rarely, if ever, would the black and white movie depict a hanging. And if it did, the execution would be sanitized and visually bowdlerized so as not to acquaint viewers with anything resembling the real act, for fear of ruining that line about its being a good day and for fear of having viewers throw up and just maybe walk out of the theater, or the living room, opposed to the death penalty. The sound of rain on the metal roof of a car while you sit inside and watch the rivulets form on the windshield and wonder if there's a pattern to it, and then you don't care but just enjoy it. The Beatles had a song about rain, eponymously titled. Bob Dylan wrote and sang "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," but the words "rain" or "rainy" never show up; "stone" and "stoned" appear about 347 times. The Beatles song derides those of us who shun direct contact with nature, be it rainy or sunny. Has there ever been another song about rain itself, as opposed to rain involving romance or remorse or love or love's loss? When it rains it pours. Then it's pissing down, in the United Kingdom. If you want to get biblical about it, "...for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45). Save it for a rainy day. Save what? The sunshine, allegorically? Save the rain from the last rainy day? No, save money, they say. To mean: in halcyon or sunshine-imbued times, sock away some cash for the less-sunny, the rainy, times. As if people do. Most don't in American society.  I have read that Germans are adept at saving it for a rainy day. Save it for a rainy day doesn't quite work for attributes of beauty, fertility, pleasure, or luck. It's not as if you can horde it, whatever the "it" is, until a time comes for splurging. But we try. I do. As if that one great time, thing, event, person, episode, or instance can be cast in amber and later melted or have its DNA reconfigured for later cloning. Like those rivulets on the windshield and the saturating symphony on the car roof. 

rain

the deliciousness of pluvial abundance pouring down no other direction for it 'cept sideways 'round through trickling rivulets sky to yawning earth running rushing to unseen fate and transport pure wanton freedom of rain its indiscriminate blanketing biblical in scale and equality "rain" one of The Beatles' most underrated songs celebratory simple childlike in delight if you will rain in my memory a clear vision the Eighties Times Square walking to my desk at Random House driving torrents rain inverting umbrellas into skeletal art cascading splashes from tires of Yellow Cabs arrested by the sight of a pedestrian inundated by a curtain of rain's results splashdown no splashup her own miniature tsunami personal impersonal and I swear she stopped and smiled even laughed as if what are you going to do might as well exult in it and here I was lamenting my soaked feet she never knew what I witnessed never will never can this benediction this rainworthy anointing

pre-Iceland: phase 1

Sheets of Sunday rain cascaded onto the thwacking windshield wipers of my 2007 VW Rabbit. Dark, windy curtains of driving rain greeted me as I sailed south on 81. Much of the time, I left the radio and CD player off. The rain was soundtrack aplenty for the drive that would take me to dear old friends in Florham Park, New Jersey, before flying out of EWR on Monday evening to Reykjavik, Iceland. Around Scranton, fumbling for decent music (rare), I tuned in sports-themed radio stations (FoxSports and ESPN). They delivered second-hand reports of the Seahawks-Vikings playoff game, but I soon tired of their false camaraderie and juvenile banter reminiscent of locker room towel snapping. I mildly rooted for the Vikings (after all, look where I am headed), but I later learned they lost a heartbreaker. Vikings. Heartbreak. Are encounters with Viking descendants the perfect cure for broken hearts, minds, or souls? That question is a shade too cute, even for this writer prone to the showy, cutesy turn of phrase. I suggest it is more accurate to say my Iceland journey is just that: a journey, a reset -- not so much a "cure" for anything. By encountering new vistas, fresh air, new sounds, new people, it will be like taking the Etch-a-Sketch and turning it upside down, shaking it, and scrubbing it of the angular, jagged drawing that was not working anyway. As for this first phase of the trip, I was consoled by my own company. Per her request, I texted trip updates to my youngest daughter back in Syracuse. In Pennsylvania hills before the Poconos, I heard the Rosary intoned. The Third Glorious Mystery: The Coming of the Holy Spirit. I resisted changing the station. Why not? I figured. Each Hail Mary was begun by a male voice who prayed up to and including the word "Jesus." The ten Hail Marys in each decade (dekkid, a severe nun of my childhood pronounced it) were finished by a female voice ("now and at the hour of our death. Amen."). They both had vaguely Irish accents, and the echo in their recitations made it sound like they were in a chapel. As I was listening to this, on a hill to my right, a billboard proclaimed "ULTIMATE MASSAGE. 24/7. No waiting." At a rest stop just inside New Jersey, shortly after the dramatic escarpments of the Delaware Water Gap, I texted my friend Hoagie telling him to tell Brett I had just driven through East Stroudsburg, the area where Brett used to live. By the time I was in the Garden State, the sun blazed through amidst wind-scudded cumulus, casting shadows on hills visible for miles. Temps in the fifties. And after arriving in Florham Park (the second locus of a ten-year stay in Jersey, where two of my children were born), conversation and coming and going. Then eloquent grace from Randy and a grand dinner with nine or ten around the table (family friend Michelle and I the only lefties and seated accordingly), vegetarian delights (couscous, spinach pie, eggplant), stories, laughter, and absence (with the patriarch gone almost a year ago). Today, departure. Like a nervous Nellie or eager child, I fret whether all my documents will be in order or some snag halts the progress of this narrative. Time will tell. It always does.

let the rain come

and today the rain, off and on, no two drops the same, no two downpours or showers ever the same, bestowing sound and sense and nurture and nowness, bountifully; would that I could share it with my farmer friends in parched California

against the rain

Ever notice how people, including me, typically hunch their shoulders as they walk or run through pouring rain? (Not so much for snow or wind or ferocious sunshine.)

Does it mitigate by one drop the amount of rainfall falling on one's self?

Hashtag metaphor.

summer rain

a sudden downpour
not quite
a deluge
morning cleansing
soon over
hashtag metaphor

rain

Rain. Its delicious, seductive tap on my roof and my windows. Amend that. My? I rent a space in a former garage, barely joined to a house, a place becoming increasingly crowded physically and metaphysically. Not mine. (What is mine? Or yours? Or anybody's?) I must be leaving these premises. Hence, "my" apartment search. The baseboard heating now and again makes pounding sounds. I always liked the Beatles song saluting the rain. Your rain, my rain, the rain. Speaking of yesterday's topic of aimlessness, the rain (in Spain, or elsewhere) has no aim, does it, save downward, sometimes aslant, but ever downward, into the ground or into a drain or a river or a lake and a tiny bit back up again into the sky, so not so downward there, but content with no other aim but rainness.

hard rain soft ground

Welcome, rain. And welcome to the miracle of percussion on the car roof, the slapping wipers, rivulets, deluge of downpour, and song of pelting. The ground was hard. Aching for relief. And what softened the compacted soil? Water, in force. Something softer and more transparent than the dirt. The repetition of softness yielded softness. And a more pliable ground upon which to walk.

torrents

When it was pouring so torrentially (forgive the redundancies), I had to stop and think: is it March? September? It's mid November. #globalwarming

apocalyptic torrents

rain with pea-sized hail with nearly horizontal wind with virtually no visibility with flooding with sheets of driving rain with rain upon rain upon rain upon rain did I say rain? raining down upon us in downtown Syracuse eddying whirlpools of urban riverine flow lacustrine lustre water you know watery wending of drops upon buckets of rain

focus

It has been said the whole universe is found in a drop of water.

I saw it today.

Extending my arm out the car window to send out some cards (hand-written communication? how quaint!), under the lower-right lip of the mailbox's mouth, one plump drop of rain held itself suspended (or was held suspended), waiting, frozen but melted, pausing, seemingly still.

walkin' in the rain

The song was hot. The Shangri-Las who sang it were too (too hot). Walkin' in the rain. Lo, these many years I thought the sound of rain on a car roof or any tin roof was among the most evocative and lovely on the planet. Numero uno. Then, on Tuesday, I took an umbrella from the porch, was it blue and white or pink and white, slightly in need of repair with ribs unattached to fabric, and walked down Whittier in a torrent, a bit torrent of raindrops pelting the umbrella, with this laptop safely tucked in my backpack on my back. The exquisite pounding of the summer shower on the canopy of safety over my head. The delicious rain we are divorced from in our cars, SUVs, trucks, buses, trains, planes, apartments, homes, schools, universities, factories, country clubs, office buildings, coffee shops, garages, grocery stores, megamalls, and convenience stores open 24/7. This rain on the umbrella. My very own rain. My personal sound machine. A memory flash from the 1980s, when I worked in NYC: I was walking to work, at Random House, and a car drove by and inundated a young lady, probably also on her way to work. A taxi just launched a wave right over this woman. Kapow! Was she pissed and enraged? No, she laughed! She looked delighted. I remember that, I don't think I'm conjuring it up from nothing and nowhere, and even right then I got it. She got It. It with a cap T, oh did she get It and thank you. And as my friend Dr. Shiva said later Tuesday, "And why not? God who gives us the sunshine also gives us the rain. They are both from God." Rain, another good song.