Rain, Like Childhood, Ends Somewhere. We Don’t Know When, Where

It was sunny that day, and then it wasn’t.

In the middle of a business call, I had to excuse myself. I ran out to the car and put up the windows and closed the sunroof. The rain was coming down.

By the time I finished my multiple apologies for having run out, the rain was fierce.

A little while later, after I hung up the phone, I grabbed my youngest son, SJ, and we stared out the windows. It had started hailing outside. I’ve heard the term, “it looks like golf balls are coming out of the sky,” but had never actually seen it. We watched in fascination as Leila, our dog, hid under the bed, scared of the noise the hail made as it hit the house.

My wife texted our oldest son’s camp. Should we come get BR? He had been attending a day camp where they play baseball all day. Outdoors.

The response came back quickly. Things were fine where they were. They had yet to see any rain.

What? My wife and I were in shock. The rain had been coming down where we were – just five or so miles away – for a while.

When we picked BR from camp later that day, he said, “No, we didn’t have any rain. Except for the rain that just stared falling now.”

Somewhere near, the rain line existed. The rain ended somewhere. There was rain and there was no rain.

“My teacher told us a story,” my son, BR, recalled as we pulled up to the house. “It was raining in her front yard but not in her back yard.”

“Cool,” I said from the front seat. “Well, the rain has to end somewhere, right? It’s just we don’t get to see the rain line very often. When we’re in the middle of it, we rarely see the end. But somewhere is an end.”

He agreed.

+  +  +

I dropped little SJ off at his camp some days later. As we turned the corner, he said, “You can go now. Love you. Bye.”

It’s not the first time he’s blown me off. I get it. “See you. Love you too,” I called out as he ran off.

Then the next day, when I picked him  up, we got into an animated conversation about his camp. He was excited about what he was building.

And he reached for my hand to hold it.

So I grabbed on.

Don’t know when the end will come: just that it will sometime.

A version of this first appeared on Me, Myself and Kids. Photo by Loren Gu on Unsplash.