Walking home from work a mile in the rain

I had to get home for dinner. My stomach felt empty and so did my head after a day of staring at spreadsheets. Plus it’s important to my daughters that I’m home for dinner (I once had a work dinner, I went home beforehand for about an hour, I told my kid I had to go back out, she said “you’re going to work at night?!” I said “I have a dinner I have go to for work.” She said “no you’re going out for a snack, you have to have dinner at home with us, it’s not dinner unless we’re all together.” So I ate dinner of a few bites of soup, then went out for a snack of a veggie burger, fries, a salad, and a beer). And what’s important to my daughters is important to me. Especially because they will scream and cry when they don’t get their needs met. This is even more likely when they’re tired at the end of the day and when they’re hungry. I pictured my wife trying to stir a pot of pasta sauce while the baby pulled at her pantlegs, “mama! up! up!” and the older kid shouted “I don’t WANT pasta! I don’t know WHAT I want! It’s not fair!”

I dumped my notebook, waterbottle, and the E.B. White essay collection into my backpack and zipped it shut. I pulled my office door shut and walked down the stairs. Out the window, clouds bulked low, dark and pent up. By the time I made it to the front door of my building the rain had come, crowds of fat drops rushing down. I walked back up to my office and found some empty plastic bags from old lunches. I wrapped my phone in two of them and stuck it in the middle of my backpack between book and notebook, which I then wrapped in two more bags. I walked downstairs again hoping the rain had tired itself out. No luck. I looked back at the stairs up to my floor then looked outside again. I wondered if the baby had taken a nap today. I sighed and stepped out the door.

The water soaked my clothes within the first block. The rain hit hard, like a shower on full blast. The water felt cool but not cold. My glasses spotted with rain and fogged up as my body heat evaporated some of the water soaking my entire body. I wiped them with my fingers and they spotted and fogged again. I walked quickly but didn’t run because I couldn’t see the sidewalk very well. I didn’t want to trip over a cracked or broken part of the concrete or a pothole in the road.

I stepped off a curb onto a street with two inches of water everywhere, not puddles so much as a temporary stream. A car drove through the intersection leaving a wake like a boat, the wave of the wake washed over my feet and my shoes filled up completely. I had about three quarters of a mile left to walk. I cursed at the damn car, at the shitty street, at the fucking water on the ground and in my god damn shoes and falling out of the motherfucking sky. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists.

I got tired of being angry, or I should say, I got tired from being angry, and relaxed. I remembered when I ran a shortish race in New Orleans and it had rained like this. It was in January and people there kept apologizing for the rain and the cold - it was in the high 40s - and I kept laughing and saying it was wonderful to be outside with no coat in January because back home it was about 50 degrees colder.

I started to laugh as I walked home. Other people would pass me hurrying to get somewhere, maybe they were drier than me, which is to say, maybe some part of them was still dry, and I would pass others walking very slowly. We would make eye contact and smile, to say “outside in the rain, what can you do?” There was something silly about it, like being in the rain was playing around, doing something just to do it. I kept walking. I got to the park I sometimes cut through. In the mornings when the grass is dewy or if it rained the night before I walk around it, so my feet don’t get wet, but now I was carrying more water in each shoe than was in many of the puddles I could almost-see through the fogged glasses so I walked straight on. I stomped in a couple puddles, enjoying the splash.

When I got home I opened the front door a crack and called out hello, asked for a towel. My wife handed me a large towel, I remember it as a large pink and orange beach towel, I don’t know if it really was that one or not but the memory feels festive like that towel’s colors so I see it there in my mind. On our canopied porch I slipped off my shoes and patted my clothes to catch the first round of drips falling from me. I set the towel on the floor and stepped inside. I stripped down to my boxers, picked up the towel, patted dry again, and walked to the bedroom to get dry clothes. By the time I was dressed I felt warm outside and in, like I’d just had a nice cup of tea and I had nowhere I needed to go. My older kid laughed that I walked in the rain and so did I. I hugged my wife and playing with the kids while she finished dinner. We had soup for dinner, adding to the warm, and then it was my turn to read bedtime stories snuggled with kid and book under a blanket.