The Heavy Rain

They said it would rain today and it is raining. They said it would rain hard and that there would be dangerous puddles. The mayor called me last night to warn me not to drive through those puddles. He said my car could get stuck and someone would have to come and pull me out.

So I am not driving through puddles today. I am not driving anywhere. I have not stepped outside my apartment all day. I did not walk my two miles this morning nor feed the birds.

The birds are no fools. They do not come out in heavy rain, even when there are peanuts and sunflower seeds laid out for them. I would not insult them by scattering food in such weather.

But I do pity dogs that must pee and poop in such weather. But at least their food is dry when they get home.

Since the rain falls perpendicularly and birds fly horizontally, for them to fly in rain or snow is to fly in a forest of pain. They are too smart for that.

The weather people said we could get two inches of rain. Some places up north and out west could get many more inches of snow.

It is spring. Rain is a natural event in spring. Some day we may pray for rain, the way they do in other parts of the world, as the Earth chokes on its own dry soil. The way the people of Gaza pray for food. The way they pray not to be bombed to death.

If only prayer had its feet on the ground and could actually protect people. If only prayer could summon help and change three-dimensional anguish into survival. But prayer has more abstract aims than anguish, more goals than survival. It is especially good as a tranquillizer.

We are promised sun for tomorrow. The reservoirs will be filled. The trees and plants will be well–watered. People will emerge from their houses and apartments and walk through a refreshed world, except for those shoveling themselves out of snow up north and to the west. .

We will be glad that the rain came and went. We will still avoid driving through puddles and will be careful of downed power lines. We may drive to the lighthouse and watch the waves slap their extra water against the ancient boulders lining the harbor.

And when night comes, we will crawl into soft, dry beds, turn out the lights, and be grateful that we are where we are and not somewhere else. And the planet, unaware of all of us, will continue to rotate through space, as if that was the only thing it had to do.

The Sadness of Changing Clocks

Like most Americans and Canadians, I turned my clock one hour ahead this past Sunday. We do this every year for silly reasons. We think we are controlling time. We think that Nature pays attention to our convenience. We think that time is ours to play with.

We think we are such big shots.

Meanwhile, Nature pays us no attention. The morning light shows itself when the earth moves along its arc around the sun, the way it always does. The coming and going of the light and the darkness is determined by where and when the earth is moving along its gravitational arc.

Humans don’t determine when the sun rises or the night falls. .

The most we can do is manipulate what Nature provides — even if we have to render it Artificial.

One day we move our clocks ahead. Another day we move our clocks back. The rooster and the sundial are unimpressed. The birds I feed each morning wonder why I arrive earlier sometimes and later at other times. They measure my coming and going by the light in the sky, not by a minute hand on a clock.

In my absurd case, I have many clocks to adjust. I have nine stand-alone clocks to change, plus another eight that are built into my numerous radios. And then, of course, there are my two wrist watches, plus the clock on my car’s dashboard.

That’s 20 clocks I must change twice each year.

And virtually none of it makes sense. If we just left our clocks alone, nothing important would change. School buses would just have to turn on their headlights in the morning, the way they used to once upon a time. Nothing else would matter.

And in the end — despite all this self-deluding time change — we all die, no matter how many clocks we change. A mere hundred years from today, virtually everyone alive right now will be dead — whether a baby in a hospital or an old person in a nursing home.

A few thousand people — maybe a million — will live past a hundred. But not many more. Despite all the medical miracles being performed, we are relentlessly rendering the planet unfriendly to life.

The sun will still be shining for a few more million years. And the earth will still be spinning and oceans will still be surging and clouds will still be forming.

But we and our private clocks will be gone. With all the hours we thought we were controlling, all the daybreaks and sunsets we thought we were arranging, all the time zones and atomic clocks and intergalactic satellites we launched — none of it will add a single second to the sundial’s immovable face.

Time’s Arrow will simply continue to streak across the cosmos with all the molecular indifference of eternity.

The Power of Bouquets

In Russia, it is considered bad luck to give a living person a bouquet that has an even number of flowers. That according to the New York Times. The custom in Russia is to give a living person a bouquet of odd-numbered flowers. You reserve the even-numbered flowers for the dead.

That custom came up last week during the funeral of the Russian dissident, Aleksei Navalny.

Thousands of people attended the funeral in Moscow. It was dangerous to do so. The Russian government punishes people who show public affection and respect for individuals who criticize the Putin regime. But the people came out anyway, despite the threats and intimidation from the government. There were thousands.

Many of them brought bouquets as a sign of respect and affection. But instead of the customary 12-flower bouquet for the dead, many brought the odd-numbered bouquet for the living.

One person, a 19-year-old woman who had flown in from her home 1,800 miles away, said, “I came here because this is an historic event. I think he is a freer man than all of us. He lived as a free man and died as a free man.”

The young woman said that the reason people brought the seven-blossom bouquets instead of the usual 12 for funerals is because “for them Navalny lives on.”

The power of symbols. The power of flowers. Even in the midst of impossible conditions.

Of course, nothing will change. Putin will still murder critics. Dissidents will still be in hiding or will ride an underground railroad out of Russia. Navalny’s name will be relegated to a footnote — if mentioned at all — in the official proceedings of the Russian government. Free expression will still be forbidden — and punished with prison time.

And life will go on. The bouquets will wither. Independent Russians will meld back into suffocating silence. Navalny’s widow will try to carry on her husband’s quest for a free Russia. The war in Ukraine will end and Russia will posses a chunk of that country’s territory.

The far-right in the United States will continue to praise the strength and resolve of Putin. Newly re-elected President Donald Trump will travel to Russia to shake Putin’s hand. The U.S. Supreme Court will declare that freedom has its limits and that a woman’s body is a temple of the Holy Ghost and must not be medically tampered with. And gays and trans people will be required to shut up.

Everything good will be over, except for guns and mobile phones. The Palestinians, meanwhile, will continue to bury their dead well into the next century.