Walking home from the soup kitchen this afternoon, it had started to rain lightly to moderately as I traversed the lonely streets of New Brunswick. The crowd was thin throughout, most preferring to slog through midday drizzle in the stressful carriage of metal motor vehicles, many of which skidded and swerved to dodge the few pedestrians venturing from the newly slick sidewalks. Patrons of the soup kitchen gradually gave way to students and young families who in turn yielded to business lunchers and merchants as the quality of the neighborhood improved around my steady tired feet.
Amidst fleeting unbespoken eye-contact with the variety of east-coasters I approached and then passed, I began to look at the rain itself as it was progressing to the ground. Rather than falling in the expected uniform pull straight toward the earth, I noticed it was often diagonal or at least akimbo from predictably perpendicular. More interestingly, there were particular drops that refused to fall at all, seeming to remain parallel to terra firma as they flew through the air. Were they bouncing off of other drops and arcing horizontal? Were they light enough to catch air and parachute away from freefall? Were they merely windblown in brief detour from their inevitable regression to the planet?
I couldn’t follow any one drop closely enough to truly see. All I could detect in the glint of the half-gray light was that there were many of these drops that refused to cooperate with terminal velocity. Not a majority, not even a sizable sum. But enough to not be coincidence, to almost be a trend.
Not long after, I was passing a church undergoing renovations, its spire scaffolded and the back of its roof under close examination for presumed repair. This particular house of worship houses a small graveyard in a three-sided enclosure facing the street I was walking, holding no more than a few dozen graves of apparent age and significance. One of the workers was late to join his companions, dashed past the dark wrought-iron bars and cut directly across the gravestones and the precious soil before them, tamping grass with long wet footsteps before the mossy etched monuments. At first I was shocked, my personal sensibility incensed at the wanton display of disrespect. But upon almost immediate reflection, I all but heard the soft whispers of the graves’ own occupants, their tingle at brief human contact as the land far above their heads was disturbed by life. As though they were calling, the aching empty bones of past souls, for some small solace in the possibility of movement, of connection, of something waking to penetrate their six feet of loam and half-inch of wood.
The man who did the dashing was laughing as he’d done it, literally ribbing his two co-workers as they razzed him for his tardiness. The trickles of mirth barely made it across the street to me, but I could hear them echoing down the rabbit burrows and earthworm tunnels toward a set of people far lonelier than me.
There are those among us already mostly in the ground. In a rush to get there perhaps. Whose craving for the steady predictable progress toward the inevitable destination overwhelms any observation or enjoyment of the process of falling. It is no fun to fall, mostly. It’s scary and cold and we’re separated from the other drops and the whole thing is over far too soon, before we know it. Bounce with me, fellow droplets. Collide, glide, fly. Let us strive to buck the trend once more before the end.
