Rainey Blogs on Some Days

The day I realized the chin up bars had been removed from the Mount Vernon City Park was one that broke my heart. You might not think removing a couple of old, weathered chin-up bars was a big deal, but those bars and I had a long-term relationship. Each year we went home to Mount Vernon for a visit over the last twenty-five years, I would trudge off into the park to do my chin ups. The bars were directly across from my grandparents house on 24th Street, so I often managed to do chin ups and visit them at the same time. Sometimes I visited the chin-up bars more than I visited them. The bars were on two rectangular wooden structures. One was about 6 ½ feet high. I could reach up and grab it from a standing position, but when I was doing chin ups I would have to fold my legs under me on the downward motion. The other bar was about 8 feet high, but it required me to jump up, grab on, and then maneuver my hands into the right position. When I was in my twenties, I could do sets ...

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...

What can you write when the first thing you see out of your window on a Monday morning is an expanse of seas surrounded by an orange hue breaking through the dawn darkness? When your hear the water’s rhythmic waves wash up on the shore and slide back down into the ocean, drowning out all but the sound of birds flying nearby? My last memory before going to bed last night was seeing the Caribbean moon light up the night sky and ocean in the distance, and now I see the Caribbean sun peeking trough the clouds to announce the day. This is where we are for our 25th anniversary, an inclusio to this first quarter century that began on another little island halfway around the world called Okinawa and ends on another little island called Jamaica. I cannot help but think about our first year of marriage when I hear the sound of the ocean. After arriving in Jamaica and picking up our luggage, my first impression of Jamaica is that they are not a purpose-driven people. They have not read the Seve...