Yes, the rains moved in around 8 pm last night and haven't let up yet. For whatever reason, I woke up by 4 am and haven't let up since. A lot is roiling around in that synaptic mass of mine -- too many ideas, too many memories, too many points of confusion.
Often in the rain, I am summoned back to my childhood; sometimes further along to my youth, specifically my college years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If you've never been to Ann Arbor, well, that's rather a pity.
It epitomizes the college town, the Midwest, intellectual freedom, and seasonal changes, among many other things.
I'm remembering a day, or rather the feel of a day, whether it ever existed I'm not entirely sure. It was rainy and I was going existential on myself, wandering around, skinny, long-haired, and more lost in thought than any absent-minded professor.
But I wasn't a professor, I was an absent-minded student, not something to be desired, particularly.
As I entered a building in campus, out of the rain, a nun looked at me and smiled, sympathetically.
That's all. That is the entire sum of the memory. I don't know why a nun was on campus, but there were various chapels here and there around the campus, so I suppose she was attached to one of those houses of worship.
If there is a shred of meaning to be attached to this fragment of a memory, it eludes me. And therein lies the problem. I'm compelled to remember this but I don't know why, and it has little applicability to my present dilemmas, other than once again I find myself feeling very lost on a rainy morning just as on that other day 40 years ago.
This time, however, there is no nun and no sympathetic smile. This time there is only the soft silence of the rain, reminding me how alone some of us remain in this lovely, poignant, awful, pointless, cruel, fantastic world of ours.
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