Glory Ho

Today (okay not today, because I wrote this blog three months ago, so pretend it’s still winter) as Michael parted our red and yellow trying-to-be-regal curtains, which keep out the light about as well as a pair of trendy sunglasses, I breath a sigh of relief. Another cloudy, dreary day. While the sun hangs like a bare, crack-apartment lightbulb in the Midwest during the winter months, it doesn’t even show up in this country. And I don’t mind. But my Colorado native husband hates it.

In his head, he mumbles: A tiny glow of sun is leaking through the clouds, struggling to make an impression on the day before disheartedly slipping behind the horizon, in a couple short hours…maybe tomorrow. . .maybe tomorrow….

Here’s the weird thing. I love this weather. No kidding. I always have.

About four years ago, I was in my Jeep Cherokee stoplighting through downtown Denver with my friend Ayn Fox, a professional muse who works above the Tattered Cover and wears cowboy boots with skirts.

I had expressed my love for the currently rainy day and she said,

Oh, so you’re one of those. You like the drama.

And I realized she was right.

There’s something literarily lovely about rain, cliché’d but nevertheless, correct. About the melancholy music it makes. . . . about the weight of every last drop. . .about the depressed, alcoholic poets of the last century who seem to write lasting lines only during a drizzle. . . about the glistening streets it leaves behind. . .about what’s going on behind the protectively ambiguous blur of water. It is the drama. The gloom, with all its substance and stories, unlike buoyant happiness, gives everyone something to hold on to.

But it’s more than that. Rain is an element of heavenly proportions. Like death, like a hurricane, like change, it’s something beyond our control; it’s a relatively harmless force we succumb to, a force beyond ourselves.

Five or six years ago, I saw The End of the Affair. The relationship between Maurice Bendrix and Sara Miles happened during WWII, a time when blurry lines, shifting loyalties, and uncertainty about the future deteriorated moral judgment. During any war, many people, be it the soldiers, the attacked or the innocent bystanders, feel an utter loss of control. And during this war, in this movie, amid the persistent rain, that helplessness led to a sultry surrender to fate .

When the war was over, so was the affair. The atmosphere shifted back to reality. Back to logic and back to life. The difference, to those trapped in war-time mindsets, was ironically devastating.

I love this movie.

But these philosophies. . .they are not part of me, are they? I’m not a fatalist, right? I believe my actions have a direct impact on future events. . . deep down, there is Republican in me. . .and to believe otherwise is the easy way out! This can’t be me! I am not Bulgarian!

I am far too level-headed, I tell myself, to regularly crave crisis for drama’s own sake. Too happy to carry on like Oliver, Millay or Plath. Too weightless to regularly participate in that evocative, but maudlin martyrdom.

Right?

But. I guess it’s why I like rainy days. Sometimes, when the baggage of control begins to weigh me down, I am thirsty for a force which lets me abort all previous plans and stay safely inside myself.

Stay tuned on this topic. . .after reading Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, I feel I could journal into oblivion about it. . .and that bring me to the book club, which I need to write about. Okay, okay, I’ll get back to blogging.