Climate Changes

Cold. Inside, outside.  Not just here in the sunny lands of milk and honey and 800 new laws effective January 1, but everywhere across the Continent. The coldest winter in 40 years, report the media, believable for once when spouting about climate.   Don't start a novel with weather, warned one popular and now dead writer of crime potboilers.  The postman just delivered one that does that. Its cover mimics the covers of potboilers, penny dreadfuls.  Critics loved it, I ordered it on a calm day of the rainy season. The rain started with no warning, reads the first sentence.  I bet the author was aware of the advice, and consciously disobeyed it. Good for him.  In another, 771 page novel I've just finished slogging through, the author has her hero walking through pouring rain of New York, somewhere around page 500 (I'm not going to search it for the exact page number, are you nuts?) There is no reason for the rain there then, no symbol, no metaphor, no consequence.  It's that kind of book. The marquise went out at five, kind of book.  It was a dark and stormy night. Speaking of rain, Phil Everly just died, two weeks short of his 75th birthday. I remember when he and his older brother Don,  who like their mother Margaret is still alive, sang  their gorgeous song Crying in the Rain after I timidly requested it sitting at a table right in front of the stage of a  small club, next to a date who worked for the CIA.  Raining in My Heart, sang Buddy Holly, not just for me though, for everybody. Martin England, another favorite, has written at least two songs about weather, and the covers of his albums are weather related.  There is a lot of weather in popular songs. Not climate, though. The wind has stopped blowing, said a friend to me (I just made it up.) That wind is gone, dead, there will be another one, I replied.  Why do people worry about things that are long gone, ceased existing?  The thought that started it, waking me up late on a sunny cold Sunday of the dry rainy season.