Here Comes the Rain Again
It's been raining cats and dogs around here since last week, which is a welcome change from the gloomy but ultimately dry weather we had been having. The rain has been so heavy that for the first time in a long time, I've been on a road with very low visibility and a good chance of hydroplaning. Everywhere you go there's lots of standing water and I'm surprised at how poor the drainage is all up and down the Peninsula. It seems like the only drainage is going through the freeway signs which can't stand up to the water coming from the sky, and are garbled and useless. Traffic of course is insane in these conditions with people undecided over whether to slow down to a crawl or take advantage of all the space left by cautious people to speed to their destinations. More often than not I find myself practically parked on the 101 watching rain drops bounce off the hood of the car, or get slapped around by the windshield wipers.
Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) this brought up all kinds of memories, starting first with childhood memories from NY. Riding home from school in the Mission station wagon, watching the rain on the asphalt and fogging up the glass with my breath. It was always so stuffy in there, in a the back of a car filled with fidgety kids who just wanted to be home. We were always the last on the route, and had ample time to zone out to the mixed white noise of rain and traffic. This is a pretty weird memory for me since I haven't thought about it in a good long time. Mainly, it's the amalgamation of thoughts and memories from a thousand rainy days in the seven years we lived in NYC when I was little.
That was idyllic compared to the strongest memory of rain that I had. In August 1988 we were living in Khartoum, and the rainy season (the khareef) was almost on us. School had just started a week prior and was ramping up as quickly as it usually did. That evening we'd had something to eat and the moved the mattresses out to the courtyard where we would all sleep to escape the stifling heat in the house. Sleep came quickly but it seemed like no time before I was awoken by my father shaking my shoulder. "It's raining, get the mattresses inside," but we were woken up again afterward. The roof was leaking throughout the house, and water was rushing in from under the doors. We rushed to plug the gaps up with towels or rags or whatever was at hand, and to put pots under the leaks in the roof which seemed to be everywhere. Before long we were bailing the house out like the Titanic, and continued till 4 or 5am, as the sounds of white noise on the roof faded to silence.
We woke up the next morning to a muddy and partly serene world, with not a cloud in the sky. Wish the same would happen here soon.