Rainy Days in the City
Personal reflections on being alone.
In Walden, Just before his oft-quoted and much more famous quote, Henry David Thoreau writes of the morning;
“That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way… We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”
I was thinking of that, an infinite expectation of the dawn, this last Saturday, at about 6:00 am.
I’d woken up, before any of my alarms were supposed to go off. I looked out drearily from under the covers. From a side of my bed I can look out and see the spot where the sun rises in the east, above some trees in the back-lot. The sun was orange — the same color as my pillows and duvet. I felt well-rested, and peaceful. The room was calm, and my strangely aware brain had thoughts of all the things that I could get to: I could make a carafe of coffee, sit down at the desk, and force myself to write for a few good hours before hitting the city, and then I wouldn’t be plagued by guilt all day — guilt about not writing, and not making the most of my time.
I was there in bed, thinking all of these things. I could feel the minutes adding up, the number of hours that I could spend writing slipping away. I looked at my phone, which I try to keep on the bedside cart, yet it somehow slowly migrated under my covers at some point in the night, when I must have unconsciously reached for it. There were no new messages, no calls, no emails, no notifications. So, I slid the phone away, leaned back against the wall, and told myself that I would get up in a minute. And then in another minute. Until at some point I turned over, wrapped myself in the blanket, and drifted off again. The alarms began to ring an hour or two later. Bells. A beachy melody. I snoozed them once, twice, three times, eventually seven or eight snoozes, then I snoozed again, through maybe five or six alarms, beginning at about 8 and going until 10:00 am, until that last time, when I looked outside again and it was no longer bright and clear but grey and overcast, and it was long after dawn.
I slipped out into the kitchen, made the coffee, brought my thermos back to the desk, and stared at a journal. I was going to rescue the day from sleeping in. But the notebook stayed empty to my side. It turns out that things don’t write themselves. So then I opened the case of the laptop and began to scroll, scan, and sip the coffee, slowly at first but then greedily after the first cup. I opened three different news sites, and refreshed the live feed on the pages until I had the same news, but from three different sources. This felt important, to me: to know exactly what was going on, for some reason. I poured and sipped the bitter coffee until the long thermos was all empty, and all I had left was the grainy part of the French press grounds. I swirled the mug around in my hand so that the grounds would drift to the bottom. Everything was dark and grey. Through the open window, I could hear the wind, and then the plop-plop of rain on the leaves of the mulberry tree outside, and the splattering of water from the gutter onto the fire escape. I looked at my phone. There were a couple of new messages, all about the weather, things like;
so what do you like to do on a rainy day like this
disgusting weather isn’t it
For some reason, people often ask me how I feel about the rain. I must come across as someone with strong thoughts. Well, I do, but they aren’t purposeful. They’ve been absorbed, spongelike, unwillingly. I happen to usually like the rain. It reminds me of growing up in the Northwest, where every October to May is grey, and cloudy, with ‘partial showers’. This is one kind of rain that I like.
Another that I like is torrential downpours, storm-like events. I’m thinking of the storms that you get in Florida or the South for about five or ten minutes each afternoon: the clouds come in, people scatter for shelter, and then the rain goes berserk for about ten minutes until it’s all over and the clear skies return. I like that. There’s something chaotic, unhinged about it.
But then there’s that middle state of rain, what forecasters would probably call ‘heavy rain’, or just ‘rain’: rain that comes down fairly strong, and constantly, but not quite hard enough to be comical or charming, and not light enough to keep you dry. Whatever you wear, no matter how you prepare, you still end up getting soaked: the jeans stick to your legs, your socks and shoes are waterlogged, and your bones can feel it, and there’s no escaping it because you can’t dry off, and you never get the sweet release of getting absolutely drenched and ruined for the day. You still hold out hope for staying partially dry, even though you know it won’t work.
Saturday was that kind of rain, in the Northeast. But I wanted to get out, because I was languishing at home. I shut the laptop, rocked back and forth sleepily in the steamy shower, got back out and dressed: a pair of pants from under the bed, a blue sweater, my black raincoat, my travel bag with all of my goodies, like all of the journals I would ever need, and a pouch of twenty plus pencils and pens (because you never know when you will run out).I had an idea of what I wanted my day to look like: I’d go to the museum, drift from exhibit to exhibit, find a quiet bench in a room, and then catch up on all of the work I’d been procrastinating. And I’d start first with a walk through the park.
I emerged from the subway stop at 59th, zipped the collar of my raincoat up as far as it could go. There were a thousand ripples on the ponds, ducks coasting across the surface, and essentially no one in the park (which I liked), nobody on the benches, or the boats. The only people there were trying to get somewhere else quickly, like me. Especially the runners: those extremists in the sports coats and the athletic wear, who still fanatically keep to their schedule of self-betterment no matter what the weather does.
I veered out of the park and to the museum. There was a line of about a thousand people, stemming from the entrance, stretching around the corner and the plaza several times. I did the math. I stood there for a little, watching the hundreds of other people who had the same plans as me. I didn’t like it. And I wanted a quiet museum. Not one filled with people like me. I ventured off, with a new plan for the day: I’d find a warm spot, grab a coffee, write, and then get dried off before my plans in the evening. I wandered around, pretending to know where I was going. After some circling of the blocks, I got to another museum, one that I knew had a cafe in the basement.
I’d been to this museum before, just a few weeks ago, and it had been raining that day as well, but the only difference was that I hadn’t been alone then. I’d been with someone, and we’d checked our coats at the counter and got a small red medallion in return.
But this time I walked through, caught the eye of the security guard, pointed down to the floor as if I was a regular and knew what I was doing, and he only nodded at that, and the customer-service smile left his face in an instant. I went down the concrete steps, scanned the room, and saw there wasn’t a table empty but ordered, anyways. A black coffee, because I am boring. $5.50 later I was standing at the bar counter hunched over, rocking back on my heel like I was waiting for someone. I took off the coat, and instantly a mug’s worth of rainwater poured out of my hood onto the ground. I looked around quickly. No one was looking. A table opened on the far end, by the windows, so I quickly grabbed my things and kicked at the water and saddled my bag over one of the open chairs.
There was a couple behind me that was moving quickly, going for the same spot, so I moved quicker and pretended not to see them, and got there just in time. I had to pretend that I hadn’t seen them, and they, too, had to pretend that they hadn’t been trying. I saw them hover by the counter, watching. At a table near me, there was a woman leaning over the table, her jaw resting against her fist. Her eyes were red and puffy, and a man with her was holding her coat, awkwardly. He offered to sling it on the back of her chair but she just shook her head, said something under her breath, and tilted the cup back slowly and wiped her mouth. He tried to talk with her, smiling, but she kept staring out ahead. Towards me. I turned away, pretending not to see them. Eventually, he stopped trying altogether, and he sipped at his drink alone until they were clearly both done, and she stood up, grabbed her bag, and slid the coat on.
The couple from earlier, the one that I had beaten in the race, eased forward from the counter and tried to grab her attention. The girl leaned in and tried to say something, smiling apprehensively, but the other woman waved her hands toward the chairs, dismissively. And then they got up, and left, and walked back up the stairs, and the pair that I had beaten to the table drifted in and settled in the chairs. And so I no longer had to feel too bad about it.
A thing that I’ve found in life is that it’s very compelling to have tiny, hard-to-dispute theories about life. It’s best to keep it about something banal; pineapple on pizza, snoring, books that are red flags on a shelf. They’re best when they are vague, sound well-reasoned, and pretend to say something anthropologically interesting about a huge swath of the world. But they’re usually bogus. One of my favorites of this genre is this old nugget, which made the rounds on social media earlier this year:
‘People on the East Coast are kind but not nice, while people on the West Coast are nice but not kind.’
But I’ll tell you what I do believe, earnestly: that New Yorkers are as nice as they are kind, and the same goes for just about everywhere I’ve been in the U.S.; Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Florida, and everywhere in between. And this isn’t meant to be as ooey-gooey of a sentiment as it sounds. It just means that people, wherever you go, are people, and no amount of bustle or scenery disrupts that. People are people.
There was a specific moment that reminded me of that, on the train out of Manhattan after the cafe at the museum. I’d trundled onto the train car and put my earphones in, prepping a playlist that I’d listened to dozens of times to block out the rails and the voices and the noise.
There was a couple across from me, about my age. The guy was looking at his phone, watching a video, while the girl next to him had opened her e-reader, and was trying to start with a book. But he kept trying to show her something on the phone. She would look at the screen, nod, smile, vindicate him, and then return to her book. It would go on like this for five, ten minutes at a time, back and forth like a tennis volley. In one of the exchanges, while he was switching to something on the screen, she looked up, caught my eye, and smiled at me. An exasperated smile. One that everyone knows.
One of us, I thought.
A third person about my age came into the car and sat a few seats across from me. She was holding a rolled-up yoga mat, and she held it a bit awkwardly across her lap and shoulder. Like a rifle, I thought. She had one of the last open seats in the car, and there were still a few people standing, milling around, holding onto the metal rails as we lurched to a stop. When the doors opened, an older couple came on, a man and woman in maybe their sixties or seventies. The wife grabbed a seat that had emptied, and the man was planting his feet nearby when the woman with the yoga mat caught his eyes, smiling, and offered her seat. When he protested, she stood up and offered it anyway, and he reluctantly bowed a little sheepishly and took the seat, and smiled, and the train went on. One stop, then two.
We reached the edge of the next borough. A seat next to the husband opened up, and the woman with the mat slid in and he said, “Well I guess you ended up here anyways.” She laughed awkwardly, they smiled, and their attention drifted apart from each other.
The husband looked up at the ceiling, watching the little dots light up on the green line, and the wife said to him, “Well we’re almost there”, and he rolled his eyes. An eye roll that says a hundred little things. But exaggerated, meant to be seen, and clearly practiced over years.
I caught the gaze of the young woman right across from me, the one with the e-reader. The guy with her was on his phone, and he was still trying to show her something. But she was looking over there to the right, where the girl with the mat and the older couple were, and she was smiling too, but a little sadly, like she was on the outside of something. The train lurched into my stop. I stood up, walked out the door, and followed behind the older couple that had stood up and left with me. They were walking a little slower than I wanted, holding each other’s hands. I swerved around them, walked quickly up the steps, through the station, and then out the staircase into the fresh air. It was raining harder, and a few people were standing there under an awning, checking their phones, and watching the rain, maybe checking for when the forecast said that it would end.
I thought of something to say to the couple. The husband, specifically. He’d said something earlier on the ride about the weather, and how he’d been unprepared. It was going to be nothing spectacular: just something to say, something to prove to myself that I could talk, still, and communicate with people, like friendly people do, like anyone does, because up until that point I had only spoken with the people that I ordered coffee from. I turned around and began to open my mouth but they weren’t there. I looked down the steps and they weren’t there, either. And I looked to my left, down the street, where I knew the other exit was. Nothing there, no one that seemed like them. I stood there and couldn’t remember what I was going to say. I still don’t. I have no clue what I could have possibly said. I zipped my coat, flipped the hood, and began to walk again.
I walked away, further into Brooklyn and away from Atlantic Avenue and the drabness of downtown, into the beginning of the neighborhoods with the brownstones, walk-ups, brick apartment faces, and bougie home-goods stores. It had been four months and some change since I’d been here. And it had been raining then, too. So it goes. I walked into a coffee shop in Cobble Hill. I’d been there before, three or four times, enough to have my idea of ‘my spot’: a table in the corner, near the hallway where nowhere went. But it was crowded over there with a gaggle of kids running around, and parents watching, so I sat instead on a makeshift wooden bench in a small room off to the side. The bench went along the ledge of the window. I brought over a ceramic kettle, and a mug for my tea, and I poured it in, and nestled the mug against my palm, and felt the steam lift and curl in the air. There was a pair of young women next to me. The one was American, the second Australian, and they were clearly buying time. The Australian woman was drinking an iced chai, and she left an inch of chai in the cup. It looked like she was reserving it, so that she’d had something to drink when she needed to. The American was talking.
“And what does he do, then,” she asked the other.
“Well he has a good job. A really good job, actually. But it’s like he’s stuck. You know. Like, it’s a great job, but he could do so much more.”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s just his dad’s mentality. His Dad was always telling him that it wasn’t the job that mattered. What mattered was what it allowed you to do.”
“Oh right, right,” The American was poking holes.
“And he seems fine, and happy, but also… stuck, you know?”
“Of course!”
“Like he could be so much more, but he’s just…”
“Oh. That’s scary,” the American said. And they sat with that thought for a while. As if it had meant something profound.
There was later a family across from me, too: a young girl, maybe seven or eight, and her mother, whose legs swung a bit off the ground when she was sitting up fully on the bench. The daughter was wearing some sort of dancing outfit, I couldn’t tell what, but it was all black, with some sort of frilly skirt. And then I realized that there were maybe ten, or a dozen other girls in the cafe at all the same age, and when I looked outside, I saw families pushing strollers with more kids of the same age trudging along. I didn’t know what was going on. But then another mother in the room got up and left, and the mother across from me looked up to her and said,
“Oh, are you here from the ballet, too?”
The whole cafe was a gaggle of girls before their four o’clock ballet practice, with mothers talking over coffee and tea and the dads catching up and parking the strollers inside, and lifting the toys out of the back of the strollers and holding them above the heads of the babies laying inside.
I hadn’t seen it before, but her words had opened the whole room.
“Yes, yes! You’re with the 4:45 group,” the second mother said.
“Exactly!” The mother across from me was beaming. She was trying to get her daughter to look up from the floor, where she was playing, ostensibly to introduce her to the mother, and then her fellow ballet mate. But it wasn’t going to work. The other mother and her daughter were already in movement. She had the tote bag saddled, the toys picked up, the snacks put away, and the empty drink cup tossed.
“Well, we’ve got to get going, but it was so nice to meet you,” the second mother said quickly, not looking at the other woman but down at her daughter, who had darted ahead, as if on cue. They turned the corner, pushed the door, and then walked out onto the street, where I saw them cross and then move behind brownstones and bushes.
I looked over at the first mother, who was still across from me. She had sent her daughter to get a cup of water from the free carafe on a table nearby. The mother was watching her, silently, and then she turned away and looked down into her lap. She was holding a paper cup and fidgeting with the corner of a cardboard heat sleeve, tearing at it with her fingertips. And then she stopped, suddenly, and looked up at me. I tried to look away — I always feel ashamed, and awful, and voyeuristic when caught people-watching. But instead, she smiled at me and nodded. I was the first to look away, but I could tell she held the smile for an extra second before her daughter returned. She tried to catch my gaze again, over the next several minutes, a few times. I got the sense that she was trying to say something. She had looked over and seen me writing. Maybe she’d ask about that. Or the tea that I was drinking. Or the rain that was trickling through a leak in one of the windows. Or anything, really. But all of the options scared me and made me bury my head in the journal and look away.
The café was beginning to clear. Most of the parents scattered for early evening ballet, and the laptop-goers shut their screens and went elsewhere, and the quiet people turning book pages shut the paperbacks, stuffed them in their tote bags, and then walked out the door. The only people left were the workers, quietly hovering, wiping counters, repositioning boxes on the shelves, and a loud group of friends all huddled together in the back corner, in the seats that I had wanted, talking loudly, and laughing and smiling.
I was nauseous, suddenly. I blamed the rain, and the wind, and the fact that my socks were soggy, and my pants were damp, but I should have blamed five cups of coffee plus a whole thing of black tea, with little to eat on top of it. I was on the verge of getting into a bad mood again. It’s like that, for me, and probably everyone else: a few quiet moments of revelation, and peace, when things seem to feel right, with a whole lot of surrounding dullness and sludge that feels impossible to climb out of.
But I was very thankful for the lady across from me. She had smiled and it had made me smile. The nausea waned a little in my throat, just thinking about it. I was in a clean and well-lighted place on a cold day where the rain pattered against the roof and the windows, and I was inside and warm and safe, alone with my thoughts. She had built a little bridge, between her and me, and the point of bridges is that you are supposed to cross them, and smile back, and start a conversation, and temporarily climb out of being alone before reaching the other side and then settling into the natural state of aloneness again. But I hadn’t. I’d been working instead, my head buried in my lap, and even by the time I had gathered the courage to say something, to say anything to her, I’d looked up and seen that the bench across from me was entirely empty, and it had been empty for some time, and all that was left was a puddle of water from the leak next to me. I had plans soon. I wouldn’t be alone, soon. And when I looked outside the rain was slowing, and the glass wasn’t so foggy anymore, and somewhere in Cobble Hill the kids were dancing to Tchaikovsky and the mother was probably trying to start another conversation, with another unwilling mother who did not want to try.
I leaned back my head against the wall, and things felt good, and when things feel good you have to embrace them, and cherish them, whether you’re alone while it happens or not.