Rain Stream of Conscious

Ever since it started raining, approximately a year ago, no one has touched the watermelon in the fruit drawer or the lavender blueberry agua fresca I made. We all want to eat warm and warming things like beef stew and apple crisp. I took a slice of watermelon today just so it wouldn't feel neglected. When I lifted the cover of the Tupperware container the smell of summer wafted out and seemed out of place against the background of dark and damp rather than sun and heat.

But one thing I like about all this rain is fungus. Fungus hearts moisture. Of course, not all fungus is good. I've lost a few books to mold. Professional book restorer Richard Homer informed me that there's no way to get mold off of book pages. "It's pretty much a total loss", he said. Well, I made that quote up but that was the essence of what he said.

Anyhow, what I like about all this rain is mushrooms, but I used the word "fungus" because I like it better than "mushroom". Fungus has a round, fat little rolling sound. And any word that starts with "fun" has to be good. Sometimes I shorten the word to "shroom" but always self consciously, because I'm afraid I sound like a hippie, a druggie, or Nicole from high school who was the first person I knew who ate shrooms.

All she said about the experience, as I recall, was something about eating them with oil and that they tasted nasty. Actually, maybe Nicole wasn't the first person I knew who did shrooms. It might have been Laurie who went to Alvern High School. She said they had some agricultural program there, something about cow fields, and early in the morning you could find shrooms growing under cow plops--or cow pies, but I hate that expression--but they shriveled up in the heat of the sun so you had to go early.

Or am I mixing that conversation up with those two guys from driver's ed. who went to High Mowing School? High Mowing is the weirdest name for a school that I've ever heard and belies the fact that it was a leftist, commie experiment. I don't have any evidence to back that statement up, really, except what the kids told me about growing pot out in fields--or was that Laurie?--and that one of the teachers who I saw at the Palace Theatre, when JRHS went there for a performance and students from High Mowing were there too, one of the teachers was dressed like a hippie.

Also, the kid who told me about the shrooms (or pot) was named Axel or something German and he had one brother with a Japanese name and one with a Jewish name, which made me think that his parents were "different" and would be the type to send him to a leftist school.

Anyway, what I like about mushrooms is their huge variety of color, shape and size. Some look like dainty little parasols and some are monstrous growths, like the earth's organs are protruding above ground. And some grow in circles called "fairy rings". How can anyone not love that?

Whenever it rains and rains and rains like this I am reminded of the one episode of Ren & Stimpy that I saw (not even a whole episode, just a portion) where it rained beans for 40 days and 40 nights and God told Ren and/or Stimpy to build an ark made of weenies. I suppose that is sacrilegious, but I find that beans and weenies thing very, very funny.

Whenever I think of Ren & Stimpy, I am reminded of two boys in middle school, David and Dave who were completely obsessed with the Gumby and Pokey cartoon. One or both of them were talented artists and they drew cartoons all over their homework, book covers and notebooks.

David and Dave's pictures were really disturbing. They drew the characters doing violent things like burying hatchets in the heads of other cartoons. Always lots and lots of blood. The boys dressed in black, too, and talked enthusiastically about morbid things. But they were the only boys I was even remotely friends with in middle school. And they were faithful customers of my candy business (buying it at Osco, toting it around MVMS in a tackle box, reselling to students at a profit) before it was shut down by teachers.

Like me, David and Dave mucked around at the bottom of the social strata, watching the bright beings who flashed through the surface, trying to stay out of their way. Artistic, morbid cartoonists, dressed in black, they were way too different for middle school.

Which was strange, since little Dave (one was hulking, one wee) was the twin of Sara, who was voted most popular in 8th grade. Why in Heaven's name do middle schoolers vote on most popular, most good looking, etc? To etch the social hierarchy into stone? To save it for posterity?

At our camp in Maine, people write on the doors of the cupboards before they leave, telling about their stay. Someone wrote, "God hates Maine, all it does is rain" which, as a kid, I got a kick out of and repeated and sang until my dad told me that God doesn't hate any state. So that was that.

Oy vey, it's still raining.