Chapter Two--Racing the Rain

Between the ages of seven and twelve, life as I remember it was an idyllic fantasyland. It was a simple life, an organic existence, peppered with characters who didn't know just how little, or how much they had. They were just accepting. Of whatever life brought. As a result, people, except for Susan Furlong's mother, were very, very happy.

Ms. Furlong (she never married though she had a truck load of kids, I can never forget this woman) once stopped by my mother's gap and engaged my mother in conversation for quite a number of hours. I remember it because she had never stopped by before or after that. The Furlongs lived at the far reaches of the village, almost half way to town, so her being in our parts, in Glory Alley, as they called it, was weird. She fascinated me. Not just because she and all her children were the darkest shade of Black I had ever seen, but she seemed very convicted about whatever it was she was talking about. My mother who had very little tolerance for anybody, stood for hours and dutifully listened to this woman. And I lurked around, pretending to be playing with the flowers in my mother's garden, listening. I think Ms. Furlong was considerably older than my mother. (Everybody was considerably older than my teen-aged mother, actually.) And she seemed so much more informed. I don't remember anything else she said to my mother that afternoon, but I do remember her saying, "Poverty is a crime. Is a crime." This phrase reverberated in my head since that day, even now, when I reflect on life, and on the world. I think I've come to understand what Mrs. Furlong meant when she said, "Poverty is a crime...."


I would say that as young as seven, I was aware that we were poor. I knew we were not dirt poor like some of the other children who ran around the village without shoes. But we were not well off like the Birds, the Benjamins, and the other people who lived on the periphery of the village, in massive concrete mansions, never mixing with the ordinary folks like us who invariably lived in wooden houses, and some of whom did not have indoor plumbing, or a pipe of their own. We were lucky in that my father had had pipes run in our home. So the experience of going to Top Tank, (the central place where the villagers obtained water) or using a "latrine" was a pleasure I have not personally experienced. But this was life for many of my neighbors and many of my friends. And they lived, as if everything was a celebration.

If it took money to be happy, none of us knew it. I remember a lot of laughter, cackling really in those days, by children and adults alike. For one thing the weather always cooperated. It was always warm and when it wasn't, it rained. That was a welcomed distraction. First of all, it meant there would be no school. Second of all, it meant playing in the puddles, making paper boats which we could sail off to Puerto Rico and other exotic locales (laden with fruits) and otherwise, indulging in our version of a snow day. I especially loved to race the rain. Because, often, the rain didn't begin as a downpour, it commenced instead as this strange cross-pour. By that I mean, it would start out near the water, in Pickotts, say, and spread across the fields, across the villages, till it reached us in Glory Alley. So, if I was say, at the shop when the rain started, I would hear it coming up the hill from all the way out at Pickotts. And I would hurry up and buy whatever it was my mother sent me to buy and tear home in a mad dash, trying to out run the rain. I called it "racing the rain."

It didn't rain all that often. We had many spurts of drought, though the whole concept was lost on me till many years had passed and many lessons had been learned. Back in the days of my ignorance, it was all about play, chores, church, school, lots of cook outs, entire weekends on the beach with everybody and their mother (except for Susan Furlong's mother), dreaming of being a lawyer, dreaming of far away places, and racing the rain.