Rainy Reminiscences:

Things look pretty when it rains.  The grass is a true-blue green.  The flowers are gorgeous; the trees sublime.  Let’s face it, everything looks better through waterlogged eyes the way Cybil Sheppard looks better through gauze.

Once about a trillion years ago, give or take a week, it rained oceans.  Really.  I remember it well.  I was an amoeba at the time.  Me and my amoeba buddies were just hanging around trying to figure out how to evolve when it started to rain.  You should have seen it.  It was like Seattle!

A couple oceans later, the sun finally came out. First thing we did was put on sunglasses.  (But amoebas don’t wear sunglasses, you’re thinking.  Oh yeah? . . . by then we had evolved into dinosaurs –so there!)

Next thing you know, it started snowing – the biggest snowflakes we ever saw.  Somebody said each one was unique and we tried to verify that, but by the time we got two flakes positioned on the slide and the microscope in focus, they were a drink of water.

Then it was cold for a really long time.  The world was quiet.  Nobody went out except for this one guy who kept insisting on hiking over the Alps in his shorts.  One day he got lost, and they found him thousands of years later perfectly preserved in a perfectly round puddle of perfectly melted snow.

From studying the clothes he wore, and the items he was carrying in a crudely fashioned satchel, scientists were able to conclude the following:

a) He was a hunter/gatherer.

b) He was born sometime before the Bronze Age

c) He wasn’t very good at crudely fashioning satchels.

As exciting as the Ice Age wasn’t, I still preferred it to the rain.  Part of the reason is because nobody had the wherewithal to invent an umbrella until the seventeenth century when it was simultaneously invented by an English Aristocrat named William Shakespeare and, clear across the great Atlantic Ocean in America, by a man named Thomas Edison — both of whom have since drowned. (I know your thinking this sounds a little fishy and you’re wondering if I have my facts straight and, just between you and me, so am I.)

I’m not exactly sure what the gang and I had evolved into by this time.  My memory is hazy.  We were either peasants in France or pheasants in pants.

I do remember that by the time we had evolved opposable thumbs, France was heavily into a revolution.  You see, the French Revolution was established as just a fun way to teach French nobility how to divide.  What would be the size of the fraction, they wondered, if they were to divide, say, Henry the VIII by Louie the XIV’s guillotine? They might have found out too if that dimwitted Marie Antoinette wouldn’t have wandered into the way of the experiment.

Until next time . . . I love you