The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Rain, rain, don't go away

There's something truly comforting about waking up on a Saturday morning to hear the first rain of winter.

The rain plunks down the spouts, it patters on the roof, it whispers a reassuring message. It means the season that passes itself off as winter has come to California.

It's no longer so necessary to get out in the yard. The yard can take care of itself for a while. Those other tasks on your agenda can wait, too. You can roll over, lie there and think about nothing much..

I emphasize that it's only the first real rain of the season that does this. Later, of course, rain will become boring and then irritating, and maybe even threatening if, as promised, terrible old El Niño delivers.

But the first rain of the season, especially in California, is a blessing and a marker.

It means the dry season, if not necessarily over, is at least abated. It means the danger of wildfires has been removed for a time, and the hills will soon become green once more, shedding their death gray or autumnal golden brown.

The first rain of the season is also satisfying because it's some kind of a guarantee that the world is still turning, that the seasons are still following one another as we move around the sun, that all's right in Heaven somehow, even if not on Earth. "It falls as the gentle rain from heaven," Shakespeare has Portia say in The Merchant of Venice.

Portia, of course, was referring to mercy and using the rain as a metaphor, but that's all right. It's pleasant to think of the rain as a shower of mercy on the Earth and its inhabitants.

Not all rains are like that, alas. Rain is not always gentle, and it isn't always pleasant.

Rain is a blessing when you're safe in a warm bed and a dry house without leaks. When you're out in the rain when you don't want to be, its blessing may be hard to find.

I know that not all rains in my life have been that comforting. Indeed, I can think of a few rains, all of them long in the past now, which were terrible.

Perhaps that's because they took place in times of trouble, in times when I knew I had to be out in the cold and the wet, even if I didn't want to be. The first, for instance, was when I was in college, and I was working over Christmas break as a substitute mail carrier. ("Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor dark of night...")

In a day when people sent one another more greetings by mail than they do today, I had to deliver all those damned Christmas cards--dry, at that--in a rain which never seemed to stop. It rained for the entire two weeks of my Christmas vacation, every day, invariably about the time I left the post office for my route.

I delivered the mail, all right, but by the end of the two weeks the rain and I had become enemies. The rain kept trying to get into every Christmas card I carried, and I kept trying to devise new ways to keep me and my cargo dry.

The rain won most of the time.

The second rain I remember with distaste was in those days on the Belgian-German border during World War II when not much was going on, when, before the snows and the Battle of the Bulge began, it rained. And it rained. The rain dripped off the pines and puddled in our foxholes; it made our overcoats great soggy messes. It filled the pockets of our miserable raincoats. It even fell in our mess kits as we tried to eat, standing up, huddled under the trees. As for sleeping, well ... And after that it snowed.

There was nowhere to go to escape from the rain, as, indeed, would be the case outside this snug, dry and leakless house.

So that's why I'm lying in bed this morning, reluctant to get up, snuggled under the warm blanket, listening to the rain.

Maybe I'll get up after a while and watch football games or cooking shows or even old movies and listen to the drops as they fall on the roof. Who could ask for more than that?

Maybe I will, but not right away.

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