Biking in the Rain. Such a reoccurring theme in my dramatic moments.
Sometimes I feel so dreadfully ill at ease that I start walking backwards out of somewhere and grope behind me until I find my bicycle and I get on it and ride away. I ride and ride to some place of solace where I can forget my troubles. I maybe ride to a payphone and nervously shove in some quarters, or I ride past somewhere that holds fond memories for me-people's old streets, my old stompin' grounds, the old somosa joint…
It's a luxury of the summer, of course. Senseless trips outside are no longer chic in this frigid weather.
Still, that night was no better--it was thundering and pounding rain upon me! I got on my bike and I rode and rode. I wasn't terribly upset about anything in particular, just feeling a bit dramatic. It's always at these times that I've forgotten to put my rain fender back on and water is on my pant legs and on my back and making little curly locks of wet hair from out under my helmet. I always have that grim expression on my face in these times, and I get a little mad if people look at me cross-eyed or smugly from their cars, for obvious reasons.
I also have a certain humour about me in these times, one which I feel is my favorite secret part of my personality. I'm not the laughing-aloud type, but if you looked very closely you might see a little tiny smile on my face, if you could see past the running mascara and tears streaming down my cheeks (how I imagine the rain).
If I had to be fleeing somewhere in the rain, I'm pleased that it was the boy's cabin by the woods. Yes, I'm sure many of you are very doubtful that a boy was sitting in a little cabin by himself, a cabin by the water and at the edge of some trees, waiting for me to come visit him; I'm sure if strikes some as implausible that such a cabin existed outside the realm of fantasy and indeed in downtown Ottawa, and yet I assure you all that it is so.
This boy is a craftsman of words also, and he has a moustache when he looks in the mirror, as I do. I rolled down the path through the trees that seemed like a very shallow riverbed at this point, and up to his little shack. The heavens opened up and were furious on this night! I do believe that if I had arrived there a second later, I surely would have died.
It may seem like just too much of a stretch for me to say that there were light-and-speaker towers outside of this boy's cabin, but you simply must believe me that there were some, and in this terrible gale the storm god Jesus seems to have set his eyes upon them, for one of them was toppled by a mighty gust.
Sadly, the boy was tormented by this disaster all on his own, and he held the burden, if perhaps with a bit of sadness and faltering. Surely it must have seemed that all the world was crashing down upon him, and it must have devastated him to see that one of the only two sound-and-light towers he had in the whole world was now painfully spread on the wet grass.
He retold me this over two mugs of vegan hot chocolate, as the storm clouds thundered away just outside. He had a haunted expression on his face as his forearm, bent into an L and vertically at 90 degrees from the rest, rather dramatically and in slow-motion started to teeter and then crashed onto the "ground." In that last second a single tear emerged from his saddened eye and made a slow procession down his face.
At that moment I thought we were both going to die right there and then, but instead a cool silence ensued and we both regained our emotions and proper senses. The storm calmed, and a cheerful song blew in on the breeze, a faint waltz with accordion and a muted happiness to it. Things didn't seem so bad, and I think that we both realized then that the storm would rage itself into impotence eventually, and that the tower could be rebuilt. It would take more than some feeble weather troubles to crush human invention!
Nary a word had been exchanged, and yet we both emerged sobered and with a new perspective on things. Surely we could have sat down together and written a novel that would have changed the course of human history, but instead we sat in pleasurable silence, or at least we sat and listened to this angry crashing about outside, and nothing was written, and yet so much was said.
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