Reaching out to the dead.
This is a perfect night for listening to the rain.
There is nothing worth watching on television, which is sometimes my refuge from reality, so I lie on the bed, not in bed, but on the bed with my cat keeping me company on the end of the bed, and we listen to the rain. It’s been raining for two days. Rain conducts electricity. I’m hoping it works with electrical energy — the electrical energy of the mind, and, dare I say it? the soul.
I try to direct my mind into communion with my son and my wife who were good friends in life, doing things together that I couldn’t or didn’t want to do like attending a Prince concert in Toronto and now they are both gone and I don’t know where they are, probably nowhere in a nonexistence of nothingness, but maybe, just maybe, by some cosmic miracle, they are somewhere in the unknown sphere of infinite possibility, and I’m lying on my bed on a rainy night in Upstate New York trying to contact them in some way, any way will do, the slightest sensation, feeling, indication that they are somewhere out there.
A Christian friend tells me they are in heaven, up there looking down and waiting for me to join them. If I believed that for even a moment I would join them in a heartbeat, in a New York minute as the saying goes, posthaste, full speed ahead and don’t spare the horses. But since I believe that to be Sunday School fantasy, I reach out to the rain.
After trying every night for thirty years to contact my son, and four years to reach my wife, I hope beyond hope that this night I may receive some kind of signal, a sign that they are, if not UP THERE, then somewhere OUT THERE.
The rain is going into its third day.