Tag: emotion

Eddie Rabbitt

I Love a Rainy Night

etikser

The ying/yang of a rainy night. The sights and sounds a sensory feast, and yet a scene that scares me a bit. Living with tall trees overhead means living with that feeling. In the middle of a windy storm, I don’t know whether to sit by the window and enjoy the light show, or to hide out in the basement.

I look outside and think about birds sheltering down in the elements, and wonder what in the world they think. When they’re at the beginning of their night and wake in the dark to the clamor of thunder and the gushy sounds of rain pouring down through trees and shrubs to the spot where they’re trying to rest. I understand birds are light sleepers, but they don’t seem to wake up and start tweeting in the middle of a midnight rain. Some definitely tweet at the beginning of a daytime rain. As if to say, “Hey, in case you didn’t notice, folks, it’s raining. Better find cover under some branch.” And I imagine the rest of the birds roll their eyes and think, “Yeah, smarty pants, like the rest of us didn’t notice.”

So do the dads come flying to the aid of the nest when it starts to rain hard? As far as I know, they don’t. I’m not sure we have studies, but I don’t think so. The mother, though, the mother spreads her wings over the little ones and must think something like, “Give me a break, I’ve been at this all day trying to keep these guys fed and content, and now in the middle of the night, when I’m not likely to go out and hunt juicy worms… now… now we get this rain. Like, can’t I at least get a decent night’s rest?” I haven’t found this information at the Audubon site, but what else can those birds be thinking?

“Well, I love a rainy night
It’s such a beautiful sight
I love to feel the rain on my face
Taste the rain on my lips
In the moonlight shadows
Showers wash all my cares away
I wake up to a sunny day
’cause I love a rainy night
yeah, I love a rainy night

Lyrics from Eddie Rabbitt’s I Love a Rainy Night.

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rhythm

da da dum

etikser

The air’s breathless, the space…motionless. Sun, pavement, and distant drums. Full-voiced percussion, like a jacked up truck, radio blasting. It’s a summer parade and the pressing crowd around me surrounds me. Would it look silly if I turn and run?

The drums. Yes…the drums. That joke about clowns? Okay, we get it. But who’s freaked out by drums?

They advance now…the drums…and the resonance closes in. Uneasiness ricochets about the hollow of my chest. Anomalous somatic energy, and a spastic, weirdly thready, response. Distressing spectrotemporal interdiction, riveting normal precious regulated cardiac rhythms.

Dissonance. Internal physical dissonance.

The sun’s beating down, and the drums…they’ve only arrived. It’s not déjà vu. But it’s happened before.

No one else feels that? Apparently not.

A discernable commanding hum echoes discomfort within me. A tug of war. A battle of nerves. A competition as old as humans…fight and flight or rest and digest. Or just some acoustic oddity, in which the encompassing rhythms of those pounding drums drown out the life-sustaining silent pulse of my seemingly absent heartbeat. I’m standing. The system must be working, right? It’s a minute, scarcely a minute. Can’t I stand and breathe, hold fast and breathe, one short minute, or can’t I hold my breath, and wait, patient, wait for them to pass?

The sun’s beating down, the clamor of flashy color surrounds me, and columns of noise and noise and noise approach, now, right in front of me.

The distressing crescendo. The tipping point. And then.

Then, the dazzling procession moves along, and a restorative transition falls into place, as it should, in a quiet, effortless, intuitive pattern.

Like the waning end of a thundering storm, the metrics of summer, a day in the sun, and the vanishing hum of distant drums.

Da da dum da dum da dum. Da da dum.

_____________________________

This is an odd piece I drafted a few years ago. I pull it out from time to time and play at it. It sounds fictional, but it describes a physical reaction I’ve experienced, yes, to drums.

2022

patterns

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The pasty smell of drywall and paint…tell-tale leftovers from the morning’s work.

Sheer curtains scarcely move at the open window, not enough to call it a flutter. And the afternoon sun floats columns of dark and light about the architecture of the panes and the surface of a half-drawn shade. Plaids, squares, rectangles.

The air works a gentle song from the chimes outside. A soft musical chant. I hear children down the street, and a distant car engine. Repetitious drumming, the tap, tap, tap, of a small animal.

There’s covid and war and the contradiction of what should feel normal in spring. Reactions feel confused and hollow. Optimistic/pessimistic/oppressive. Unworthy of a sunny beginning-of-spring afternoon.

winter

winds

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High pressure meets low pressure, and we get loud howling winds. Fast-moving currents…not the ones that move miles aloft in the jet stream…I don’t think we’d hear those…but the noisy whistling winds that whip through our old favorite branches in the backyard.

Winter’s best sounds. One is just a whisper…the soft hiss of icy crystals falling on us from a dark, starless, snowy sky.

The other is a roar.

This is about the roar. A cold, noisy, winter night, and the roar. The howling winds that bend branches to the point of breaking. Those winds.

Me?

I’m inside.

I’m enclosed and surrounded by architecture, and busy with life. With heat, with electricity. There’s this and there’s that, and I’m hunkered down, as if I can ignore what’s going on out there, a hundred feet, two hundred feet above the rooftops. Still, there’s the hum that finds its way past the insulation of walls and windows, past the white noise of every appliance, inside, that cycles off and on.

It’s hardly exceptional. Barely a simple blink or nod, on an evening in the middle of winter.

But it’s not simple. It’s unexpectedly comforting.

Compelling?

It’s as if there’s something I’m missing this winter. The noise of the wind comes like a note to self, a reminder, of the icy cold that comes at the darkest, coldest, emptiest part of an eye-watering cold winter night…when my hands, my gloves, clutch a scarf and the top of my coat up close to my neck, and up over my mouth. It’s almost instinctual. We move to hold onto that little bit of warmth released every time we exhale. But the chill of the howling wind is shrill, strong, and indifferent. Try as I might, it takes my breath away.

That’s comforting? Yes, it is.