The rain abated long enough for me to walk back to the dealership for my car. The air was fresh and full of memories, some recent, others remote. I recalled the morning and the names of the service reps, and how the other customers had looked. Mixed with that were memories all along Santa Monica Boulevard as I passed familiar stores and buildings.
The furniture stores were empty, out of business or relocated. I wondered. I glanced at the auto club building, which had been a boxing gym for a short time, before reverting back to the auto club office, next door to the infamous O.J. McDonald’s, which was also the McDonald’s near the Quaker Meeting House still on Harvard.
On and on, Yale, the street I used to take to get to that sushi place on Wilshire, which had been another sushi place before, decades ago with the family of a friend, and now more recently with more recent friends, and then past the hospital I remembered more recently, opposite my subsequent oncologist’s office where I would be going again in a couple of weeks, I walked.
In my car again I drove back the other way past the same places, old and new. I took my time, noticing that the clouds were returning. I decided to stop at the gas station while the weather held.
Just as I got out of my car and was walking to pay cash inside, an old woody station wagon with a surfboard on the roof pulled in. After I paid and was walking back out, the owner of the car, an older guy, who looked a bit tired with his fat leather wallet in his hand, walked up.
“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up. “Does that thing run on gas or nostalgia?”
He smiled slowly. His teeth were very white in contrast to his very dark skin, and he also wore a black hat and black jacket, black slacks, black shoes. “Gas,” he said. His eyes brightened a bit.
I looked back at the car and the surfboard on the roof and thought to myself, I hope he’s not planning to surf today. The run-off from the rain increases the chance of getting sick.
Just as I finished filling my tank and got back in my car, the rain began again, hitting my windshield at the very moment I started the car.
The drops splashed gently against the glass flung sideways by the breeze like grains of rice tossed by guests at a wedding. The sky was still bright blue above, but to the left and behind me, the combination of sunlight and dark gray clouds was spectacular.
At least it seemed so to me, with great expectations for lyrics and dreams and rainbows.
I Dwell In Possibility 