Rain and Reflection

We in Nashville are under a Tornado Watch until this evening. A cool front is going through. When I left work this morning the sky was getting dark, and the 37,000 people down on Broadway did not care. There they were - streaming up to Centennial Park for the start of the Music City Marathon. Then they came back, running down the middle of the road . This was hard on everyone trying to get to work in the Downtown Hospital Hive, and our day people were late. My co-workers were contemptuous of the marathon mob. The people I work with never run anywhere, and they smoke more than they walk.

I had to take Charlotte Pike home, past the Goodwill and the $12.00 tire stores and the street corners where homeless guys sell the Homeless Newspaper. Past old defeated men , bearded, with backpacks and worn guitar cases- all holding cardboard signs begging people to give them a ride somewhere. I saw the wild and weedy pink primrose growing along the chain link fences guarding abandoned lots.

At White Bridge Road I turned east, headed back to the Money Side of Town. Had I turned west on Briley Parkway, driven under Interstate 40 out to Centennial Boulevard I would have run out of road and into the Cumberland River, but not before passing some of this City's most dismal destinations- the Motor Vehicle inspection Station, the Drivers' License Testing endless line, a mini-mart that is the last civilization before The Charles Bass Correctional Complex for Men , and lastly, the Big House. The Riverbend Maximum Security Prison. The ladies live just across the Cumberland at the Tennessee Prison For Women.

All day rains in this city are rare, except when a front stalls. Then we have 4 day rains and flood watches and flood warnings. Last year my suburb put in tornado sirens. Bellevue is hilly though, and tornadoes prefer to run around downtown where it is flat. Out here they just bounce off the tops of hills.

So here I sit, trapped inside with the hounds. "Tosca" is playing on my tinny little radio, courtesy of NPR, which for this afternoon has preempted its usual All Jabber All the Time programming for opera.

I am trying to decide, while waiting for Tosca to throw herself off a building in the last act, what book to read next. I finished Nan Fairbrother's "Men and Gardens" last night. I started a New York Times bestselling novel I bought at Kroger, but after 50 pages I was tired of "wistfully" and "hopefully", and all the other dead adverbs and adjectives. I decided the book was "banaliful", a word I made up.

What to read next? "Imperial Life in The Emerald City"? Do I want to read about all those Bush Brownies doing a heck of a job in Iraq? Or perhaps Moss Hart's autobiography "Act One", the story of his life in theater.

I will decide later. Tosca is singing. The music sounds ominous. And now the audience is applauding.