Rainey Blogs on Some Days

When I sit by a stream, I start to remember who I am. The sunlight shines a spotlight on the water in certain places and you can see the rocks clearly on the bottom of the brook. The liquid facade hides what is below in most places, except where the brightness brings clarity. And the same brightness seems to shine in my soul when I am at Flat Rock and I somehow remember who I am. My life feels like it is a mess today. If I think this thought through rationally, I would conclude this is not true. But I emphasize that it  feels  this way because the feelings are so powerful and desperate that I cannot shake them off at home or church or work. But they are only feelings . No events or circumstances in my life demand such desperation, but inside me is turbulence and chaos. I am on the verge of tears but they never come. I long for the gentleness of the brook's waters that glide by to somehow jump the bank and enter my tempest-tossed soul. A woman who was walking across...

He wears a hoodie, and this is why wearing a hoodie is wrong. Point of clarification: I'm talking about wearing hoodies and actually putting the hood up on your head. This is the point where it crosses the line. You don't have to agree with me, but this is how I see it. So if you're driving a car with a hoodie on, hood over your noggin', I'll think you're planning to do something illegal and the hood will conceal your identity. Wearing a hood while you walk down the street? Got my eye on you, even though I've noticed people wearing hoodies will not make eye contact with me. Is it 90 degrees outside? You're wearing a hoodie with the hood up in that weather? You are obviously up to no good because a hood holds heat in and in that kind of weather, it's cooking your brain and making your skin oily, which causes pimples. Yuck. But I digress from my main point: wearing a hoodie with the hood up is oh-so-wrong! Know how I know? Like I said: The Devil do...

A spring day in May has the power to make a person feel young again, even when that is no longer true. Why? Spring brings hope. Things return to life, pointing toward the radiance of summer. Age feels powerless against imminent waves of heat.  Spring means I can't help rolling down the car windows to let the wind blow through my hair and let the stereo blare Jackson Browne's “Before the Deluge.” I don't think I'll be dying in spring because the prospects of lying in the sand by the ocean shore lifts my soul above the declines of the rest of the year. People move to Florida to escape chill of fall and winter, but if the reality of those seasons does not catch you then their shadowy metaphors soon enough will. So I plan to stay up North and ride out the seasons until they get the best of me. Today's luminous leaves are suspended on firm branches so green and secure, and will remain so for several months. But you can be sure that fall's chill will begin to fell ...

I was back in my hometown last summer visiting with my old high school friend Elton Skelton at the annual 4-H barbecue. We were both eating a thick barbecue sandwich, corn on the cob, and homemade potato salad when I started telling him about New Jersey. He thought it was the strangest place in the world. He kept saying, "Well, Chrissy boy ( He always calls me "Chrissy boy" ), I don't know how you live out there in a place like that!" I then asked him if he were to try to explain to someone from New Jersey what Mount Vernon is like, what would he say? Well, he had plenty to say and I've tried to summarize his rather lengthy response below. “What’s it like in Mt. Vernon, Chrissy boy?  Well, first, I'd tell 'em: Let’s get this straight—it is nowhere close to Chicago! Okay! Try 280 miles SOUTH of Chicago! Chicago gets most of our tax money and wastes it on bribes and other such corruption. You think it is an accident that Blagojevich and Obama a...

I can tell I am getting older by the way I check to see if the iron is on. Now that I am nearing fifty, I have noticed it is too much trouble to bend down and see if the iron is plugged in. I mean, it is a long way down there and lots of things can go wrong bending down that far. Dizziness can set in. You can pull a muscle. Wrench your back. (I am finally learning not to reach into the back seat while I'm driving the car for that very reason.) It is also way too much trouble to bend down and unplug the iron to be sure the iron is turned off. Besides, bending down that far for one thing is really not a good use of my time. If I'm bending down that far, I better have more to do than just check the iron. At my age, you just can't go around wasting your energy on frivolous activities like checking to see if the iron is plugged in. Wait until there's a few things to do down there before you commit—picking up paper clips, dryer lint, stray used softener sheets, etc. Getting d...

The media has never really influenced me much. I could always watch what I wanted on television and suffer no ill effects, like a man who can eat a large piece of apple pie a la mode every night after dinner says it doesn't bother him because he sleeps like a baby. But let a guy do that over a period of years and it will eventually catch up with him. But mine was not the cumulative effects of media consumption over time; I had a one-time episode resulting from a movie that I know got the best of me: American Gigolo . Richard Gere played a . . . well, okay, a gigolo in the movie who hung upside down shirtless in inversion boots and drank Fresca out of the can. (This is all I really remember about the movie except that Lauren Hutton was also in it, and I figure if she came of age now they would have put braces on her to fix the gap between her front teeth.) I believe it was around 1982 when I saw the movie, so you can guess what happened next: I bought a pair of inversion ...

In honor of 2012 being the final year Car Talk would record new shows, I have decided to launch a car advice column in 2013 to take advantage of the strategic opportunity due to diminished competition in the auto repair advice space. Who knows? Maybe I will finally get my big break. So here goes with some of my best advice. Get your child an old car when he or she gets a driver's license . Too many parents nowadays buy or lease the golden child a new car. Why? Learning what to do when your car breaks down is a valuable life skill. Plus, with cell phones it's just not that hard. The engine dies. You pull out the cell phone and make a call. The tow truck comes within 45 minutes or so. It's not that big of a deal. Back in the old days, breaking down was tough. You stood by the road and hoped someone would pull over to help you. Usually they did, but it was usually some rough-looking guy with a beard because those are the people who know about cars. He would get...