No V8.

Diagonal rain beats a tattoo on the windows. The living room breathes in soft shadow. I'm reclined on the sofa listening to the burbles and splatters of a wet afternoon. In a world made up entirely of places and things, there is no place to go and no-thing to do. I am roaming mentally. Decades ago there was a hallway that seemed always defined by the morning sunlight streaming through a transom. Where did the hallway go when it rained? It is nowhere in memory's lost labyrinths. There were sullen afternoons where the clouds welled up like bruises over the poplar trees, and in the dark still before the storm I was afraid and wanted to go home. There was a night when the heavens opened up their canons and shot forth fire and sound that shook the streets. I remember a train station and me huddled under a scalloped canopy, shivering and peering at the slashing rain, trying to choose a time to dash between the lightning bolts. I remember running through the streets of Boston in a blinding downpour, finally succumbing to nature, no longer trying to dodge the drops, but taking a langorous natural bath in all my clothes, feeling the rivers of heaven streaming down my face, my neck, my shirt, my legs, filling my shoes, trying to wash me into the streets along with the dust and debris of the day. I remember a glass frame in a garden, used to grow -- I think -- cucumbers, smashed by the sheer weight of water after its three thousand foot trajectory from the skies above. I remember a mathematics class where the rain outside was so spectacular that all eyes turned to the window to gape, and the teacher was reduced to sarcasm "Haven't you seen rain before?" I remember three soggy days of windless rain on a small sailboat, and we four small boys reduced to sitting in the tiny cabin quoting Coleridge: "water water everywhere" while the tarpaulins flapped and dripped. I remember coming out of the Paris Metro one spring day and being met by a tidal wave of runoff from a sudden storm, crashing down the steps sending commuters screeching back into the tunnels to wring themselves dry and regroup. There was a car my father had which always stalled when driven through any kind of standing water; nevertheless he would venture forth fearlessly in the worst of weather, somehow never dreaming history would repeat itself. There were afternoons in Florida when the palette of the sky turned to black ink and the rain was so intense it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the ocean began. I had an employee who always hid under the desk till the thunder passed, convinced the day of judgment was nigh. Now he is a priest, presumably telling everyone it really is nigh. I should have been a priest, or "a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across ocean floors." I could have been a priest. I could'a been a contender. I could'a had a V8. I could'a, I would'a, I should'a. Hell - one day I will! But right now I'm too comfortable on my sofa listening to the rain.