LITTLE ROCK — It finally came. Tuesday morning.
The first drops splattered on the bedroom windows like promises fulfilled. Like a child’s kisses. It had been so long it was hard to believe for a moment. But then there was the full-throated rain, pouring down like a mighty stream.
The sound of it, so long missing, swelled like music. Like a concerto.
First diminuendo, then climactic crescendo. You had to stop and just listen, then look out to confirm the good news, and delight in the drops and ripples and puddles, the full gutters. Praise the Lord!
I just stood still, riveted, lulled, accountably happy. Nothing else mattered. Not now. It was raining! I was reminded of the story about the old boy who said he sure would like to see it rain-not for his sake but for the children’s. They’d never seen it.
Downtown, the storm did what it could to clean the dingy streets, rinsing the sidewalks, filling the gutters, washing the parked cars, drenching passersby, opening umbrellas. The urban gray turned a little less gray. Cities, like people, need showers.
By the time I’d got home at the end of the day, the plants were glistening where I’d left them outdoors. They stood straighter. Life had returned. The dark sky above brought out the deep green below.
No need to turn on the sprinkler today. I threw the mail on the kitchen counter and forgot it for once. It’s not easy to turn off the mind, but here was my chance. Thought was being called on account of rain.
But the mind is restive and will not be soothed for long. Rain cleanses but it also replenishes, like memory. Seeds sprout. Questions arise. Like how to describe this respite from drought, from the incessant buzz of dry thoughts. But everything seems to cease except the here and now. As if it the mind had made its portage and entered placid waters. And there was no need to distrub them with loud, splashing words.
One of the great benefits of a rainstorm after a long dry spell is that one loses all interest in the news. The radio remains turned off. The most interesting thing about the morning paper at the doorstep is its throughly soaked yellow wrapper. Beautiful.
Nothing could be as interesting just now as the rushing sound of the rain. How put that wordlessness into words?
Thomas Merton did it as well as anyone. I went searching for a meditation of his I only vaguely recalled. It had to be somewhere on the living room bookshelves. I’m sure I put it there only years ago. Yes, here it was. The little book was still in its place, half-hidden between a couple of big, bulky self-important works. It had edged back on the shelf, as rare as calm in an election campaign. The page I was looking for was turned down, the words marked, as if they’d been waiting:
Think of it, all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody . . . . What a thing it is tosit absolutely alone . . . cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself over the ridges . . . . Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
Then, like all things, the rain passed. The thirst of the world was quenched for a moment.
Memory returned. The past stirred. Downstairs the old family photographs still waited, just where a friend had unearthed and arranged them. She was putting them inside acid-free covers for me. I hadn’t seen some of them in years. I’d started to look at them again the other day. With a pang.
The pictures were too powerful-all that childhood, all that time past. The names of friends of parents and grandparents came back clear and sharp as an incision just made.
. . . It hurt, sweetly, but it hurt.
The other night I heard Vivaldi’s La Folia, and for the first time it sounded like an elegy. Now the effect was chiefly visual. It called up rank upon rank of the dead, faces upon faces, thousands ofthem stretching so far back . . . . My mother’s was almost lost among them, looking exactly as she did in the gray picture of the boatload of immigrants to America. She and all her shipmates, too many to count, were crowded up against the boat’s rails, overflowing the decks, staring straight ahead, expressionless, dignified, endlessly patient, unchanging, waiting. Forever waiting.
It was too much. Even the old pictures downstairs, the pictures of ancestral faces, the hurt of their enduring and their passing, though softened by a century, still struck deep. I turned away. Some other time, maybe. I closed the album, but not before thinking: Every unhappy child knows he’s unhappy; every happy child has no reason to realize he is. We just think that’s the way it’s supposedto be, that happiness is normal.
We don’t even have a name for it.
Only later will we be filled with gratitude.
My friend says if I’d frame and display the pictures, instead of putting them aside to be looked at once in a rare while, they wouldn’t affect me so. I’d get used to them.
Familiarity breeds comfort.
Maybe. I don’t know about all that. Right now I just want to listen to the last of the storm, and let it wipe everything clean. Nothing else. I just want to accept, the way the plants do rain. That would be enough, more than enough. I stop looking for the words to describe the coming of rain. Maybe it is in the pause before the words come that meaning lies. Maybe that’s the power in the rain: It makes us stop and wait. And do nothing else.
Words break the spell. Thekind of inadequate, unsatisfying words that reduce meaning rather than transmit it. Words searching for meaning. But only nibbling at its edges. Words can’t compare to the speech that is rain. Man’s eloquence is as nothing before it, but there are some-the poets-who come close to cleansing rain.
Once again the rain sends me searching for a fragment of poetry I dimly remember, some lines by R.S. Thomas, the Welsh priest and poet. (But I repeat myself;
isn’t every Welshman a poet?) Ah, here it is, just where I’d put the book away for a rainy day, its power reserved, like that of the old photographs downstairs:
Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence . . . .
Prompt me, God,
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
This column by Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is based on an earlier one that appeared June 22, 2008. E-mail him at: [email protected]
Perspective, Pages 85 on 10/24/2010