It’s 2:17 a.m.; I’m sitting on my front porch with my laptop, watching the rain cascade over the eaves troughs and rain spill into the barrel we bought for harvesting rainfall. This rain, only one of dozens in the monsoons of July and August, could have filled millions of barrels.
What I first thought was a roaring jet engine was really another of a series of rainfalls that awoke me and probably most of San Miguel County this week.
So much moisture have we had to date that only recently did a state religious group almost take credit for having prayed too hard for moisture.
They’re considering sending a thanks-but-we’re-fine-for-now-type prayer this time.
Even though the loud storm interrupted my sleep, I’m thankful and hopeful that the Lord will smite us again with even more rain, then lots of snow, and then a sensible means for storing water.
All my life, I’ve welcomed rain, even more than sunshine. As a child, long before we heard the Internet comment about “Home on the Range,” I used to wonder about the words to this popular song. What did Dr. Brewster M. Higley have in mind in Kansas in 1872 when he came up with the ditty? The Internet joke, by the way, simply states, “Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and I’ll show you a messy home.”
That aside, as a 6-year-old, I wondered about the syntax of the song and questioned, six decades ago, whether the “deer and the antelope play,” with each other or stick to their own kind.
But worse is the confusing, ambiguous choices of words in regard to the ratio of rain and sun, and the obvious dig at the rain.
The song ends with “and the skies are not cloudy all day.” Now that means that for the entire day, there are no clouds. Not one. But it could also mean that the skies are cloudy for parts of the day, but not the entire day.
Or else it means that perhaps somewhere else there’s constant cloudiness, but in this “home,” that’s not the case.
To investigate this libeling of rain, I consulted my own rain man, my son Stan, who lived in Seattle in January, at the time when the city recorded 27 consecutive days of measurable rainfall, five days short of the record set in 1953.
I reached Stan at his home in Denmark through a computer program called Skype, which enables us to talk — really talk, not text message — to each other through our computers, for free.
I asked, “What kind of weather are you having in Copenhagen, Son?”
“Well, Dad, it pains me to say it’s been raining for several days. And you? And you never call me ‘sun.’”
“Strange that you should ask, but at least for now the City Council has relaxed watering restrictions. I’m thinking of renting Noah’s Ark, but your mom still carts out the dishwater, and we’ve hooked up our washer to drain the graywater.”
“Sonny” then introduced me to a Web site which contains thousands of references to rain in songs, and before I brought it up, he said, “Ya know, rain sure gets a bad rap. When the Bible says, ‘It rains on the just and the unjust alike,’ I guess they mean that, as the Bible also says, ‘into everyone’s life some rain must fall.’”
He’s right. But the second source was Longfellow, not the Good Book.
Look how frequently rain gets maligned:
Riding with my three grandchildren, Arthur, Carly and Celina, we came across 17 whole drops of rain, which prompted a round of singing, “Rain, rain go away . . . ” Mili Vanilli sings “Blame it on the Rain,” in which, like many other singers, he realizes that “rain” rhymes with “pain,” and “sun” rhymes with “fun.” Already, the deck is stacked against rain.
Peter Criss “Can’t Stop the Rain,” and, as expected, throws in “but the pain’s gonna stay.”
Anita Cochran, in “Every Time It Rains,” claims she still feels “the shame” and deals “with the pain every time it rains.”
In “I See the Rain,” by Marmalade, he/she croons “I must complain again, why does the rain let me down? Will you try to make it sunny in the morning?”
Many older songs and literary allusions portray rain as the villain:
“Every cloud has a silver lining. And it’s “Stormy Weather” since “me and my gal ain’t together.” “You Are My Sunshine” continues to promulgate the anti-rain, reigning-sunshine sentiment, as does “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”
The main song in “The Wizard of Oz,” reassures us that “Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue.” Guardian, in “The Rain,” utters a discouraging word: “I feel pain and it looks like I’m gonna lose again” and asks, “Who’s gonna stop the rain?”
If it weren’t for Gene Kelly, who’s in love and “Singing in the Rain,” there apparently wouldn’t be anyone on my side.
Would anybody in the usually parched Southwest ever dare compose a song depicting rain as the villain? Sure, rain sometimes reigns and spoils a few picnics and parades and it dampens People’s Faires. But let’s rein in this temporary inconvenience and not denounce rain.
Without disturbing the rhyme or scansion, I propose a slight alteration that more fits the needs of this area, such as “You Are My Rainfall, My Only Rainfall” or “And the skies are not sunny all day.”
In addition to its being vilified, rain can also be unpredictable. On a trip to Madrid, Spain, with a class from Highlands, in 2002, some of us took a jet to other parts of the country, on Iberian Airlines.
The jets are like those in the states, except that the one we boarded had little windshield wipers on the inside of the cabin, at every window.
Are the little wipers there because of clumsy flight attendants who spill drinks? Is there a severe humidity problem inside the passenger area?
Finally a fellow passenger explained something strange about “the Rain in Spain.”