Mille
"Bleecker Street"
It was a rainy day in Manhattan when I suddenly found myself without an umbrella. I knew I could expect days like it when I moved to a coastal city; they always got rain. Didn’t matter whether I was in Cape Town or Oslo, rain came from the ocean. If you wanted the coastal climate, you also had to have the coastal weather.
So, I was stuck under the awning of a pizza shop on Bleecker Street. Given this was Manhattan, it was easy to find a number of stone-faced individuals, marching through the puddles, taking a clothes-on shower, walking as if they didn’t even need an umbrella. I’d certainly braved worse weather with much less. Though, I suppose it was just a day for an umbrella; I didn’t want to endure it without one this time around. But as I stood there a minute longer, I got to further thinking. I supposed I didn’t want to walk in the rain like those stone-faced passersby because, for some reason, I wanted to watch it instead.
As my eyes fell to meet the pavement at my feet, I saw the little echoing dots against the greyish brown and imagined how each was an individual drop of water. Not just an individual drop but drops from other drops. Drops breaking into many pieces, scattering around, making more dots, on top of the dots from the whole raindrops. It was a monochrome kaleidoscope.
I got a rare insight of nostalgia. I suddenly remembered my earliest memory of rain on pavement. It was in a coastal city, too. A mediterranean city. I would say it was Rome, but it wasn’t Rome like the world knew it. It was Rome as I first knew it, thousands of years prior. I entered that city after a small storm threatened to steer our caravel into a worse one. I’d never seen such architecture, such commitment to design. I had seen the pyramids—I knew what masterwork architecture was. I did not, however, know it to cover every inch of a city. It was all so dense.
It was the same day I arrived, my mentor at that time had us walking the markets. That was when the small storm was replaced with the greater one. He remarked to me, “We got here just in time,” and we ducked under the proscenium of an arcade. The sky dumped over the city like a bucket, it was the first time I’d seen rainfall emerge from seeming nothingness. And when it wetted the streets, the little haloes of dead raindrops dotting the ground, I saw for the first time this monochrome kaleidoscope. You see, when it rains, you don’t see it in the grass. You can see snaking through ditches, splashing against the jags of rocks, but never in the grass. And if it ever met a road in those times, it would have drops here and there, certainly, but never so complete a kaleidoscope as on pavement. I was enamored by this thing I’d never thought twice about. The volume of dots, the sheer clarity—the articulation—that a flat, hard surface gave these raindrops was amazing. The Romans had made a canvas where they thought was a road.
Back on Bleecker Street, I was realizing that the art of raindrop-canvases had joined the ranks of paper-mâché or interior design. Unassuming, practical things given artistic natures. Here, though, the artist was nature itself. How lovely. I pivoted on my heel and went back into the pizza shop for a twelve-ounce and another slice. I wanted to watch when the sun came out after the rain.
Comments
Post a Comment