April Showers Bring May Impatience

The forecast for the next nine days in the Portland, Oregon area is rain. Sure, they vary what they call it: “Showers,” “Rain,” “Few Showers,” even “Cloudy” (meaning that water probably won’t be falling from the sky, but it’ll still be dark and overcast). It all adds up to the same thing, though: an absence of sun.

And an absence of sun bums me out. Call it Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), call it the wintertime blues, call it whatever you like—living in perpetual darkness just plain sucks.

Leo doesn’t seem to mind, though. If it’s raining steadily, he wears his raincoat. It has a collar that stands up on the back of his neck and pockets that say “Outward Hound.” When I first put it on him, I thought he looked like a vampire in a red cape. But then I realized it was something else, an image tucked way, way back in my memory banks: he looks like the Big Bad Wolf after he gobbled up Little Red Riding Hood, donned her cape, and went masquerading around the forest as a cross-dresser.

So while Leo and I trudge around in the rain, I pine for summer. I pine for long, hot, sundrenched days that seem to stretch on and on. I think fondly of the sundresses and skirts I’ll wear (forgetting, momentarily, that I’ll have to shave my legs). I mentally transport myself out of the here and now of rainy April to the here and decidedly not now of cheerfully sunny June.

See, I’ve never been good at being “present” and “staying in the moment.” In fact, I came to the conclusion during a therapy session in college that the present tense, like perpetual darkness, just plain sucks. You’re stuck in the present, forced to live it as it is unfolding. It is what it is and there’s no changing it.

In contrast, the past is so malleable, so dependent on fickle memory, so open to interpretation. The past begs to be messed with. In the retelling of our pasts (whether to ourselves or to others), we exercise supreme power. We choose to highlight this event or completely omit that one. We express how we felt at the time without acknowledging that the memory may have been colored by how we feel today, stuck in this present, retelling the event. And then there’s the “truth” of the memory: do we really even remember the event at all? Or is it a memory we’ve fabricated within ourselves, bolstered by family photos and the stories of other family members?

But let’s leave the past tense alone and move on to the bright, shining future tense. In the future, the possibilities are endless. My dreams and fantasies take place in the future tense, a realm where all kinds of wonderful marvels and ridiculous escapades very well could happen. (Like my fantasy of one day getting married and living in a house and having a garden; it’s happening! Or the dream I had where I was a rock star and Lyle Lovett came on stage when I was playing in front of millions of people and asked me to give him a haircut; it’ll never happen but I never wanted to be a rock star or cut Lyle Lovett’s hair, so who cares!)

The future is slippery and shiny, like an exotic fish—difficult to glimpse, impossible to grab a hold of. And, at least in my mind, it’s always sunny.