Love and Rain

We were married on a rainy day,
The sky was yellow and the grass was gray,
We signed the papers and were on our way,
I do it for your love.

- Paul Simon

On a Saturday in 1994, I'd smoked three Marlboro reds on the drive from Meadowlands to Greensburg and left the windows up to keep the rain off of my tux. Hours later, after my new brother-in-law drove my car from the church to the fire hall, my bride blamed the smell of cigarettes on him and I, the newest entrant into the family, didn't say a thing.

It rained that day the way that makes you forget when the rain started. An unbroken slate of relentlessly gray sky hammered rain on a sinless flock of congregants who crowded together and evaporated rainwater and all of nature's judgment in great plumes of invisible humidity into the vaulted ceiling of a Methodist church. They looked on with the detached bemusement of casual NASCAR fans with no skin in this game at all.

More scared and stupid than I'd ever been in my short lifetime of being scared and stupid, I stood there like it would all be okay. (The) bride smiled at me and showed her lower teeth for good measure like a private joke. "This is crazy." "This is really happening." "What are we going to talk about when this is over because this is the only thing we've talked about for almost a year." Her eyes, bright and wide, said everything.

I was swimming my own cold pool of doubt. I was going to pay the rent a week late with money from the bridal dance. I'd just been busted down to cashier for not selling extended warranties at a job I hated. I was about to begin two courses of antibiotics and eleven days of walking around with a fever. In sixteen weeks, there'd be a phone call in which someone would offhandedly predict we'd break up within a year and I'd wonder what they knew that I didn't know because what the hell did I know to begin with?

Now, decades hence, I've seen the pictures in retirement homes and assisted living facilities, of young, mid-century dudes with pompadours and crooked grins standing next to their young wives in floral prints and pearls. People dressed this way, in post-war refinery, had always seemed older than I could ever get -- until some point two years ago, when they suddenly started looking like teenagers. And with that paradigm shift came the sudden and skull-struck realization that the thing I'd thought was specific to me was, in fact, universal. That we're all making this up as we go along. That they might have stood as we stood, rain hammering the stained glass like it wanted to settle some old score.

An artist can only paint so many placid and sunny seascapes before he sickens of it and renders a set of storm gray skies and cobalt waves with wisping spray and broken foam, where some tattered schooner with rain-slick sails lurches and breaks through the swells. Even on this side of the frame, we hear the thunder and wind and the creaking of the hull which is sure to break and yet, somehow, hasn't.

Twenty three years has turned recollection of that Saturday, of my timidity and apprehension, into wild-eyed, derelict and reckless crazylove in which I am dumbstruck and aimlessly blind.

Here, now, in this then unimaginable stretch of road, where where we skid and pitch and fade from our fixed, fast course, where the water can creep and buckle ancient plaster ceilings or bow a basement wall with the malignant indifference of the fiercest pathogen, where torrents swarm and twist as if they were specifically bent on tearing apart any two people who'd pledged, above anything else in this world, not to hurt each other. Does it rain?

You're goddamn right it rains.


And we don't care.














Happy anniversary, Tracey.