A thick gray carpet of rain-bearing clouds moved in over this city today, yet so far no rain has fallen. I keep waiting, anticipating, hoping. Since as far back as I can remember, rain for me is intimately connected with reading.
One vivid memory is when I was a teenager, on a camping trip in Canada (where I saw my first moose), and one day a heavy rainstorm drove me into the car, where I consumed Joseph Heller's brilliant Catch 22, a bible for my generation if there ever was one.
As recently as last Thursday, up at Farm School, a brief rain shower sent me scurrying into my one-man tent with Haruki Murakami's magnificent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as my companion.
Together, Murakami and I huddled safe and dry, listening as the raindrops bounced off our rain flap. The sounds was different but similar to that of the Canadian rain bouncing off that car so long ago, as Heller and I stayed safely out of an unwanted wetness.
It is eerie when one finds a writer who feels like your brother. This is how Murakami feels to me, much as Heller did long ago.
They are the brothers I never had, spirits so similar in sensitivity and humor, so visually acute and so aware of the insanity of it all that I feel related to them.
After all, the writer walks alone. She meets her spiritual partner through the words they exchange. Bodily fluids mixed in love-making are sweet like honey; words exchanged in love are like honeybees. They gather, they sting, they create life, and you are left with an ineffable buzzing forever in your most delicate inner ear.
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