The silver lining was rain. A sudden, mistaken rain that came all at once in the middle of the following Thursday, vanishing after five minutes upon noticing its blunder. No clouds, seventy-five degrees, no reason, but it rained. It rained on the hot oily asphalt and made it smell rainy. It rained the fray from the landscape, just like that, with a snap of its wrong turn.
The wild blue yonder came upon us like a drunken zoom lens thundering into focus. It seemed that God had made up His mind to change the background without telling anyone.
Los Angeles got huge shafts of pure yellow sunlight surging through office windows. Daffodils came to mind. Violets.
You could choose any direction and see as far as you wanted. Past Catalina and on west all the way to the East. In a quick clap of mistaken thunder the look of Southern California had been transformed miraculously and I have seen nothing like it anywhere else or heard of any such thing.
You could pick up mad gladness from bus drivers and studio chiefs and pool cleaners and check-out girls and guys doing their news on the radio. "Rain!" they cried, and immediately meteorologists were contacted to predict more rain. Rain from Mexico, rain from the San Joaquin Valley, rain from a storm out in the Pacific, rain coming down from Oregon. Converging rain -- we're bound to have more rain.
"Did you see it, it rained! everyone said to each other, in soft panting voices as though they were in love.
Excerpt pages 92 and 93 published in 1977
