Down-Pour

There is a cliché that is particularly worn out in my family. It says, "When it rains, it pours." It means heartache doesn't generally fall with a single drop of rain, but rather with sheet after sheet of heavy down-pour.


It's pouring in Japan.


It started with an earthquake. But that's not when the rain ends.


The earthquake caused a tsunami that destroyed thousands of homes and washed entire families out to sea. Yet the rain still doesn't cease.


The tsunami caused a massive nuclear meltdown.
       The Rain continues...


Japan is still in turmoil. These disasters have caused hundreds of smaller tremors throughout the nation, some of which the repercussions we have yet to see.




--On the PLNU campus, we are undergoing major construction. The work has affected everyone on campus, and the school is buzzing with irritation at the increased struggle to find parking and the lack of hot water for showers and laundry.


Japan would be so lucky,
if their greatest turmoil was cold showers or
having no place to park.


In Japan, the skies
pour down
Heartache
like Rain.


 

The Way Ice Melts: The Things We Never Knew About Our Fathers...

There is a memory I will never forget. I have carried it with me all these years as a reminder of the price we pay for the decisions we make.

My neighborhood friend and I devised a way to break into a house without leaving any evidence behind and executed the plan just to prove it could be done. We shattered a neighbor’s window with a few cubes of ice, climbed in, climbed out, and left the ice behind melting our fingerprints. We weren’t criminals. We were scientists testing a hypothesis.

The police didn’t feel that way. Being a small community, they were pointed in our direction by surrounding neighbors and wasted no time in manipulating our confessions out of us. They took us to court and charged us both with felonies.  We were in the seventh grade.

As I said, our town was tiny. Everyone knew us and knew what we had done. They called us idiots, saying “they didn’t even steal anything, what were they thinking.” Our brilliant plan became our greatest shame.

I had been a popular kid in school, but after that we were lepers—festering sores in the town’s complexion. The humiliation consumed my friend and he killed himself. His father was retired military and so a gun wasn’t hard to come by. He shot himself in the head, and his family never forgave me for it. It had, after all, been my idea. 

At his funeral my friend’s father and brother approached me as the black clad audience somberly dispersed. His father spoke in clipped words to me, “Next time you..” but I never heard about the next time. I couldn’t bear to hear what he had to say and I ran away crying.

I find myself wondering, from time to time, what he had been about to say. But questions like that will never be answered. It wasn’t a moment exactly, this experience, but it was the most embarrassed and ashamed I have ever felt. I have never committed a crime since, and I will never forget that my friend paid for ours with his life.  

Dragonball Z Kai!

Noah, nine, and Charlie, six, lounge on the couch in their father’s music studio watching Nickelodeon. Noah sits cross-legged and yammers excitedly, “Dragonball Z Kai is my favorite Cartoon!” His younger brother Charlie sits bolt upright and yells in his high pitched voice with eyes closed tightly and gap toothed smile, “It is awesome!” He bounces back and forth against the back of the couch with his excitement. Noah, more calmly explains, “Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT are ok but Dragonball Z Kai is the best! I love Goku! It is so awesome when they are training for the invasion…”

“YEAH!” Charlie jumps in. “It’s like swoosh” he gestures his hand one way, “boosh,” he slams his hand together, “and, then, BOOM!” His voice grows shrill and he jumps into the air off the couch with his eyes rolled back and arms spread wide. Noah rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to the screen which happens to be playing the latest episode of Dragonball Z Kai as Charlie crumbles onto the couch in a fit of uncontrollable giggles.