Commentary: Rain inspires a deluge of pithy thoughts

By BEN OLSON/For The Herald — Today’s rain, the first in quite a while, reminded me of a quote from Dorothy Parker.

Although I, myself, am not a journalist, my musings appear in a publication that is run by journalists, so I thought I would, at least, get the correct wording. In consulting the oracle, which contains the sum total of all of mankind’s knowledge, I found that Dorothy Parker, though she said a lot of things in her time, did not say the words I was going to attribute to her. Could my computer be wrong?

It was author Susan Ertz who said, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

Although Dorothy Parker and Susan Ertz were both writers and contemporaries, I could find nothing on the internet to link the two. Susan never joined Dorothy for cocktails at the Algonquin Round Table in Manhattan with the rest of the smart set. While Susan said a few memorable things, she kept her nose to the grindstone and churned out novels and short stories throughout her long life. Dorothy hobnobbed with celebrities and the elite in the publishing and newspaper businesses and was quoted on a regular basis in the gossip columns. Her career as scriptwriter was upended when she was blacklisted in the ’50s because of her politics.

Because I have, at my fingertips, all this assembled knowledge, I will share with you what Dorothy did say about rain. In a poem that was in her 1936 collection, Not So Deep as a Well, there comes this line: “Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain, and bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.”

Speaking of an acquaintance that she found particularly boring, she said, “I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof or alanol tablets . . . you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking.”

Now that I’ve dragged you through where my research has taken me, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts on rain.

Vivian Greene said, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

Nabokov said, “Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”

John Updike opined that “Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

Bill Watterson, who amused us with Calvin and Hobbes, advised us that “Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.”

I will leave you with some wisdom from that venerable philosopher Dolly Parton, who said, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

Oakridge musician Ben Olson, entertainment editor and columnist for The Herald, can be reached by email at [email protected]