Long-Awaited Rain

8/28/08

The rain took its time, but it got here. It was a hard and sustained thunderstorm, beautiful with sweet tasting rain that soaked my hair and beard as I ran around with Meredith in the soccer field. In just ten minutes, the field was two or three inches deep in some places. The rain brought a fresh and reviving coolness back to my skin that it hadn’t felt since early June.
As I stood there licking rain from my moustache, I watched Meredith dance around in the rain like a ballerina. It made me think back to a time when I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, on one of the last days of school, when a small group of friends came over to my house, and an early summer thunderstorm came too.
We were standing outside plucking sweet honeysuckle blossoms from the large bush growing next to our burning barrel in the back yard when the winds blew in over the ridge behind my house. Ten minutes later, puddles and rivulets of rain water ran down my driveway, picking up heat from the asphalt as it went. We kicked and splashed the hot water at each other, which felt oddly disgusting. We followed the water into my yard, running and sliding through the grass in our bare feet as we went down the hill behind my house, across the path leading to other houses, through an unused field, and into the 5 foot wide and 3 foot deep ditch running between some houses and the woods.
What would start out with shy wading and playful splashing would slowly bring out the true countryside boys we were. In five minutes time we would all be thigh deep in the muddy torrent, wrestling and dunking each other. Every boy knew from many learned experiences that any fine wrestling match in the water was never complete without savage and repeated dunking matches, ranging from hair pulling to full-fledged over the head, back suplexes. Once we got one another down into the frothy slurry, it was always important to dunk them two or three times, making sure that each successive dunk was more impressive than the last. In between bouts of all-out dunking wars, we would try to swim in the mini rivers, or we would just sit down in them and see who could get rolled the farthest in the current.
Games like this growing up were always competitions, but it wasn’t really about the competition. I find it surprising how even from a very young age, most of the games we learn as kids are simply precursors to the life we lead as adults. Of course we don’t realize anything of the sort at the time, but who is it from that we learn how to play? Who is it from that we learn to be a boy, who later becomes a man? Games are simply intimations of the hierarchical trappings of society. The best memories of mine are often based on games like this. For us boys, it was one of the only times it was considered normal to be running, giggling, wrestling, and having all out loving fun.
Sooner or later, one of the house owners close to the gutter would peak out the back door and yell at us, “Get outta that gutter!” They probably would have complained about how we were on their property and it was dangerous for kids to play in such gutters. However, deep down I think adults who have forgotten how to be a kid themselves at heart jealous and bitter towards those who still know how to have pure fun themselves.
Meredith continued to dance in the rain, as she was accustomed to doing, and I continued to walk around sucking the sweet rain from my facial hair, looking up into the sky as rain fell heavily upon us, feeling a bit of a heavy heart at not really having a way to show how joyful I was of the rain. Sure, people can say, “If you want to dance, dance. If you want to giggle and run around in the rain, do it,” but that’s not the point. The point is how amazing formative experiences can be in the rest of our lives.
I stood there in the rain, missing my childhood friends, and while I smiled at the wonderful memories I had of playing in the rain, I longed for a close friend to play and wrestle around with in the vibrant rain.