No Rain

It has rained everyday this week. It’s not that rain we’ve become accustomed to either: The kind that begins without any warning and falls from a cloudless sky at about 4:30 in the afternoon from June to August. On Tuesday it literally rained the entire day. Everyone is trying to be positive. You’ll hear the comment, “Well, we needed it,” at least once a day.

I called my trainer at about 3:00 yesterday to ask if I should even bother coming out to the barn, because it was starting to sprinkle, and the black clouds in the sky looked like they were about to break open. She told me, “Well, it just stopped pouring out here, so we should be fine.”

So an hour later, after it had begun to pour at my office in St Petersburg, I grabbed an apple and headed west to Seminole. And it rained the entire way. I tried to distract myself by calling my friend up in Pensacola. He had spent the day golfing and had shot a 92.

“You suck,” I said, as a big truck drove past me in the next lane sheeting water from a giant puddle over the windshield of the Volvo.

“Yeah, I know. I did better on the back nine.”

“No, no. Not you,” I told him.

“I got a new car,” he said.

“Cool. What did you get?”

“Another Miata,” he said.

“Do your clubs fit in that trunk?”

“No, they ride in the front seat,” he said, and this made me laugh.

My other line beeped in when I was about five minutes from the barn. It was my trainer.

“It just started pouring here,” she said.

I bit my tongue to keep myself from telling her that it had been pouring for the last half hour while I was driving out there. That wasn’t her fault. In Florida, it can be pouring on one block and sunny on the next. Makes it a real pain to plan a picnic in July.

“That’s okay,” I said, as I pulled in the lane to turn around and head home. “Call me to let me know when you want to make up the lesson.”


Someone suggested a book to me. It’s called The Untethered Soul. There’s a blurb from Deepak Chopra on the cover, so I really should have known better. I’ve been trying to get through the first section for two weeks. From what I’ve read so far, the author writes that everyone has an inner roommate – that voice inside your head. The book cautions you not to listen to that voice, because it often gives bad advice. Yet we all listen to that voice don’t we? The book says that voice is just a bunch of meaningless chatter. We listen to the voice because it allows us to recreate our world inside ourselves to give us a semblance of control. Basically, it’s a coping mechanism.

My friend had suggested the book when I made the comment that my first instinct is usually the best one but that I find myself talking myself into or out of things that go against that “gut feeling,” which almost always turns into a disaster. Since, I couldn’t get anyone else on the phone and was stuck with my own thoughts for what with the wet roads would turn into a forty-five minute drive home, I was finally able to do what the book suggested, to focus and really listen to what that inner voice had to say. Yeah, she’s a nut case. So once I was able to hush the voice, it was actually pretty nice. I was able to observe without judgment, and I was no longer frustrated by the traffic or the weather or my day.

As I sat in traffic on the bridge with only the sound of the rain hitting the car and the rhythmic whoosh of the windshield wipers to keep me company, I watched a seagull suspended in the air, flapping its wings against the storm and going nowhere. The bird finally changed direction and was able to gain forward momentum. But I wondered where it was going to end up now that it couldn't fly in the direction that instinct had directed it. That's when that inner voice piped up again. It said, “That’s you.”

Sometimes she makes sense.