Rainey Blogs on Some Days

With so much snow on the ground, my thoughts turn to summer sometimes. The fountain at the pond in the park where I do chin-ups in Mahwah , New Jersey constantly roars in the summer. It reminds me of the roar of the spillway dam overflow at Rend Lake in Southern Illinois where my grandfather used to take me to catch shad for bait and then fish a little farther down the river. We mostly fished in quiet waters where he could talk, but closer to the spillway the roar kept conversation at a minimum. My grandpa was a storyteller, but he could not tell stories above the roar of the spillway. Fishing by a waterfall is not able to support conversation. Fishing requires you to keep some distance from the next fisherman anyway and requires personal space to cast the line, to listen, to watch the movements of the line. This is at odds with storytelling, which requires intimacy. My grandpa loved to tell stories, so we mostly fished in the quiet of lakes or creeks. He could te...

Allison Park is in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River I saw a man sitting on a bench in Allison Park Rain was pouring down from the skies Tears were running down his face from his eyes The sky was misty, gray. Fog was everywhere, enveloping the man, his world, his town. Not far away were lovers in a car. Not sure if they meant to go for a walk, but not today. Rained in. They didn't care. A man is sitting in maroon Ford Taurus with the windows halfway down. He's reading the newspaper. He seems to be reading the weather forecast-- "Mostly sunny, high of 74." He chuckles and thinks to himself, "It's pouring down rain and 61--so what, didn't affect me!" The man got up from the bench to go for a walk. The trail was different--new trees in the place where he used to pray. "I should come here more often," he thought to himself. But he probably won't. He's not the pastor anymore. I saw a man...