Rain

October 22, 2014

Is it ever going to rain?  We seem to have lots of threats and some very dark clouds but not much coming down.  I left the window of my car open last night by mistake and in the morning it was slightly wet on the inside of the doors but barely.  For a variety of reasons it is driving me crazy.  My inner calendar calls for this season to have some precipitation, and I keep thinking it will come. 

In 1977 I was living in San Francisco in the shadow of Buena Vista Park.  BV, as we called it, has the world’s best public tennis court.  The park is very big by city standards, the second largest park in San Francisco topped only by the very magnificent Golden Gate Park.  The tennis courts were on the East side of the park and were sheltered from the fog and mist that passed over from West to East, so you could be playing tennis while the rest of the park was shrouded in dense fog.  Also, the courts had an unparalleled view of the Bay and downtown SF.  It seemed perfect to me. 

While I had been living in San Francisco for years, there had been no drought since my arrival.  That year, it never rained.  The weather was perfect day after day.  While I was carrying a significant travel schedule, still I was around for many sunny days.  We had a regular game that we played at lunchtime and god forbid some other neighbors or players were on our public court at that time.  Using whatever technique necessary we always got a court.  Lunch was tennis.  We never missed a day and we all improved.  Still I kept waiting for the rain.

As a short aside, in 1982, many of my tennis pals started to get sick and of our group of about 100 players, over half of them died within the next couple of years. It was incredibly sad and devastating to us.  It was a desperate time and AIDS seemed unstoppable.  Many of our players simply disappeared.  It seemed to never end, and of course it finally did, but way too late for dozens of my pals. 

So here we are in Sonoma, 2014 and another Fall season begins with very little promise of rain.  It really worries me that someday we will run out of water.  That we will have used it all up, that the aquifers will run dry, that winter won’t come.  I suppose I have enough to worry about, but it bugs me that we don’t seem to do anything constructive about saving our resources.  Have we reached the level of non-concern that seems to abound in Southern California?  Maybe I am too naive.  What does it take to make our society pay attention to these primal matters?  As much as I dislike the early dark and the falling leaves, it seems the best I can do is reduce my usage and hope it starts raining soon.