The Weather Report

(Originally published on 16 August 2010 on my now defunct personal blog.)

"It might just rain today."  I've always wanted to say that to someone I've more than casually but less than intimately known since over-hearing it years ago when I was still a young man.  It was spoken by one of two older men in a dusty pick-up park in a small southern Utah town.  If it ever rained there, I'd be a little more than surprised.

"Yep.  It might just rain today.  I think so." the other man nearly repeated.  Yeah, I thought, in Florida, but not likely here.  In Florida, the 3 p.m. beamer lets loose on the heads of the British tourists who've never heard about mad dogs.  It falls as no rain has ever fallen on England, just as a father, lowered to his knees, hand over shoulder of his young son, extols the glories of Empire on the ramparts of an old fort in north Florida.  Both are imagining tall ships in the inlet at Saint Augustine in the moment before Spain traded the whole of Florida to a burgeoning Britannia.  There, rain, like the American belief in Manifest Destiny and American Greatness, is a certainty.

Back in southern Utah, the line is delivered with less certainty, reflecting the probability rather than the certainty of rain, if not the desperation of old men for something to talk about.  It doesn't matter. It is something to be said now.  Overheard, it might even seem normal, if banal, conversation.  It is a means of making contact with the man who has been slowly inching toward the first, marking the ground like a hen scratching earth in search of feed.  I've taken the line too literally.  I don't notice, at first, that this little bare-rock park at the foot of a hiking trail is a pick-up place.  Here, it's about lonely hearts, and, bodies aching like the soil for rain.  Watching these two over the next few minutes is like watching clouds gather overhead.  The promise, of rain.

Here in England, I might just use the line with the quiet fellow who shares our communal garden, who tends its plants religiously.  But, I need to consider his reaction.  He's not a stupid man.  I am as certain of it as I am that he is intensely quiet.  The only sound I've ever heard coming from his flat was the sound track of a porn flick.  The bird gratifies the cock with her vocalizations.  -- Bird and cock, of course, being British slang.  Reminds me of the cock fights I witnessed in smoky Puerto Rican rings, where the winner gets the hen and the looser, well.  The looser might just be the fire roasted wings ordered by the fat man two levels down from me.  It's a different world.  But, it might just be the opening line to a budding friendship.

It might just rain today, I would say.  He might smile back.  This is England after all.  English reserve is renowned as rain on the sunny plains of Spain.  Anyway, Summer is already leaning into Fall.  Rain, though unpredictable by Florida standards, is almost certain.  The quiet man will take it for what it is.  A lead, maybe a leash.  A line fishing for a connection.  But, he is neither dog nor fish.  "Yep", he might say  -- or, the British equivalent of it.  Politely though, not looking away from the plant he's tending.  Trimming the dead blooms to ensure a longer flowering season.  Prolonging summer like childhood memory into adulthood.  The observation, the prediction - really - of rain is a kind of trap that will hook him into conversation.

The other night, as I was walking my dogs, I passed him on the street.  Recognition was a fleeting - now there's a word apt for the English historical experience.  That almost furtive moment of boy first sees girl, or, if you like, of boy first sees boy.  If I say nothing in passing, she'll notice that I've noticed but think me too shy to have asked her to dance.  On the rather desolate streets of urban England near dark, there are no plants to tend.  No comfort zone to retreat into.  As I head toward home, in any case, I notice that he's dressed in man's best bar-man's black.  His clothing, perfect for his unofficial role as observer, as purveyor of potential connections.  If appropriate at his destination, I can imagine him leaning into the light, delivering the line or some such other, as smoothly as bill into a G-string.  It appears he's headed off in the direction of the Lap Dance Club - the name says it all with a frankness more American than British.  With my own vicarious life to seed with visions of alien worlds, I'll want to hear all about it later.  Of course, more than the Lap Dance Club can be found in the direction that he is headed.

The next evening, opportunity has come.  I shorten the line to, Looks like rain!  My dog, Max, is taking an endless pee into the storm drain outside the front of the house.  Max is standing over the drain, letting loose with perfect aim.  His performance draws the attention of passers-by, who generally find it as adorably cute as a cat trained to use the indoor loo.  This toilet has something more exhibitionistic on offer.  Perhaps, it is a good thing no one can read my mind.  Looks like rain! has the nostalgic twitter of my maternal grandmother's rough English.  Looks like a cow come a peein' on the flat rock uv the ruff! she would say of an approaching thunderstorm.  Like the walloping a good thunderstorm could give the green-fields, Max's pee kills all greenery.

Most people, thank God, are just amazed to see my boy using the storm drain.  When I lived in New York City, my roommate would borrow the old neighbour lady's dog, Gretchen, for a walk in the park.  Unabashedly straight, he called the dog his "Babe Magnet".  Max is a kind of magnet.  For example, of the men who stop, I can read from their expressions flashbacks to their own potty training, when their mothers floated targets in the toilet to encourage them to aim.  Most dogs here pee in their private gardens.  Max prefers the storm drain.  No doubt, the percussion of it are as deeply gratifying to him as the sound of water on water.

On this evening, the man who stops is the adjacent neighbour rather than the fellow who shares the communal garden.  This young man is from one of the Steppe countries that most Americans collectively call "The Stans".  His name is Mohammed Omar.  The name makes him sound prematurely old.  He's actually rather much younger, a student at the nearby polytechnic university.  It's Ramadan.  He's on his way to break the day's fast.  Looks like rain! breaks the silence that would normally pass between us.  They say in England that you notice but ignore your neighbour twenty times before you might finally say "Hello".  I don't know that that's so much different from my old neighbourhood back in Florida.  There heat and humidity, or, the distance between homes rather than a national reserve abetted the dysfunction of neighbourliness.

Later, when I am asked, "Who was he?" or "Where's he from?" or "What does he do?" and so on, I find that I've gathered up more information than I thought I could have done.  It seems as though conversation was a spider's web, spun for the purpose of catching the dew.

I used to complain that my parents were capable of only talking about the weather.  I was their alien child.  Destined to live in a far off land.  Back home, in Ohio, this evening as my mother lay dying, I try to call her.  It's her birthday.  A monumental day, marked by the Perseid Meteor Shower, by the Catholic feast of the Assumption.  No one answers.  And, all that's on my mind is the chance of one more rain.