Saturday, August 18, 2007

"The Office" (Workstation series) 20 (Tropical depression edition)

Saturday morning crowd at the Office (different group, on a very different biorhythm). Dharmonia is out of town but the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin have arrived. Though this is more the remnants of monsoon than the kind of storm I grew up with, it's the kind of day my mother (whose NY publisher family summered Down East) described as "State of Maine weather." I don't know the origin of the term but I can vouch for its descriptive accuracy. This kind of weather--misty, cool, not too much wind, light blowing rain--is the kind of weather you get on the coast of Maine in late spring (basically, June) and early fall (basically, late August). It's great fishing weather--I remember a lot of days out on the lobster beds with weather like this--and it's great curl up in a bookstore or a library in a big chair weather. Days like this in my home town when I was a child were days when my mom would drop me and my younger siblings off at the local library and leave us there, happy, for 2 or 3 hours (you could still do that in the '60s without either terror or lawsuits). That library was the only place in my home town I felt safe, and when, years later, I visited after its renovation only to find the interior utterly changed, even re-engineered and configured, it was one of the most shocking, disorienting experiences of my life. That's when I knew my home was gone (childhood house long since sold by then) and my childhood was too.

Rainy days are good days for learning to accept loss.



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Now playing: Gordon Bok - The Stable Lad

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with your statement that rainy days are good for learning to accept loss. It's almost as though the rain helps one to reflect on the past; though I am not entirely sure how. Perhaps it is connected to the idea that we typically spend rainy days indoors looking out, reflecting on what is going on around us? What are your thoughts?

CJS said...

Dunno. Introspective? Days often spent inside or alone? Or just a trope that goes all the way back to ?

Dunno. But it does seem to be true.

Thanks for reading!