City Girl

A few weeks ago, I was standing under the zillion watts of bulbs that make up the AFI marquee in Silver Spring, waiting for Ben or Melissa to arrive to take me to the members-only preview of Veronica Guerin. It had been threatening to rain all afternoon, but the weather held until the first full dark. The water hissed on the pavement and I stood back against the posters to keep dry. Lights were coming on in the apartment buildings and going off in offices. The Chinese place across the street had begun to bustle. I looked down the hill towards the Metro station, watching the pairs of headlights glide towards me, and the brake lights glide away, and suddenly thought... yeah.

I remembered sitting in my apartment in Chicago, looking down Rush Street at the cars moving slow in the rain, and the trompe l'oeil painting on the building two blocks over, and the hike down State Street and across the river to the Public Library, and the two-dollar theater, and arguing with my mother about the El. ('It's up there!' she would say. 'It's so ugly!' And, 'It's up there!' I'd say, 'you can see out the windows!')

I remembered Patty Larkin singing i remember magritte in the cold hard rain/ as i walk underneath the metal of the elevated train/ain't it good to be alive... good good good good...

Today it was raining again when I went to Eastern Market to have one last lunch with R before he flew back up north, and as I walked the long way around back to the metro after a stop at the used book store, I thought again how much I like a city in the rain. I like the hiss of water on concrete, and the way the rain polishes the street until the surface mirrors headlights and stoplights and streetlamps, and even the oil in the puddles in taffeta patterns that run down the drain as Joni Mitchell says.

ain't it good to be alive... goodgoodgoodgood...