When I think of rainy days, and the melancholy effect they can have on us, I think of an episode of the classic TV sitcom, Barney Miller, a wry, understated  comedy series that ran from 1975-82.  The episode was called simply, “Rain,” and you can watch it at that link.

For the uninitiated, who missed one of the era’s best comedy series as well as the most ethnically and racially diverse, Barney Miller is set in New York City’s 12th Precinct police station on East 6th Street in Greenwich Village.  Each episode takes place almost entirely within the tight confines of the detectives’ squad room and Capt. Miller’s adjoining office, which subs as a patient treatment room. And the patients are Miller’s detectives.

Miller the multitasker

Miller is not only the police captain, but also the camp counselor and psychologist for his laid-back crew of detectives. It’s as if all the lovable misfits of the NYPD have been assigned to this 12th Precinct and Miller’s care. And that’s great news for the viewers of this show.

A typical episode features the detectives of the 12th bringing in several zany  complainants and/or suspects to the squad room. Usually, there are two or three separate subplots in a given episode, with different officers dealing with different crimes.

Under a leaky roof

In the “Rain” episode, the action around the squad room is particularly slow, apparently because the crooks on the street are staying home out of the rain.

Barney and his dim light bulb Detective Wojciehowicz (mercifully nicknamed “Wojo”) are leaning on their respective windowsills as they stare blandly at the raindrops splashing against the windows.

They begin contemplating the meaning of life, wondering if this is all there is to it, and wondering when it will stop raining.

“Can you give me some idea of when this will stop?” Miller asks a meteorologist on the phone. “Forty days, maybe?”

The Rockefeller Effect

Meanwhile Sgt. Nick Yemana, the designated coffee maker, has opened his window to catch some rainwater to make the day’s brew. The idea is it may produce something more ingestible than his normally questionable java.

“Some guy claims that the rain is controlled by the Rockefeller family,” he says, reading from the newspaper. “To bring about a one-world government. Ever seen Rocky with an umbrella? He don’t need one. It don’t rain on him.”

Meanwhile, Sgt. Amenguale is slowly going nuts at his desk, which is filled with tin pans catching raindrops leaking through the old, cracked ceiling above him. The rain is not only dampening his desk, but also his spirits.

Why bother?

Lamenting the unrelenting crime in the city, he tells Barney, “It seems like no matter how hard we work, everything stays the same as it was.”

“That’s called progress,” Miller replies.

The only thing approaching a crime of the day occurs when a nightclub comedian starts insulting an unresponsive audience, causing a brawl. Amenguale is sent out to arrest him. Miller tells his Detective Harris to go with him, but the would-be novelist who considers police work only his day job, balks at going back out in the rain before relenting.

Catch and release

The two bring the club comedian to the station, only to have the suspect’s lawyer threaten Miller with a lawsuit because of the inhumane, wet conditions in the room’s holding cell.

Later, the owner of the night club drops the charges, electing to keep the comic on until he can pay for the damages he caused to the club.

“Great,” Miller responds. “The only catch of the day, and we have to throw him back.”

The downpour and outburst

Photo by Joey Velasquez/Pixabay

Finally, a piece of the ceiling caves in, causing Miller to explode and call the police commissioner’s office to complain about the deplorable working conditions for his men. But he can’t get through because the rain has washed out the phone lines.

The episode closes with the normally calm Miller apologizing to his men for his angry outburst.

“That’s okay,”  Detective Fish responds. “We all get depressed. You were just the first one to put it into scream.”

To which Amenguale adds, “Yes, depression is like a bad cold. One guy gets it, and it just starts spreading around.”

Yeah, rainy days can be like that. But if you have to have one, it’s great to have a funny show like Barney Miller to watch.

The Parents Group

When our son was born in New York Hospital I was asked if we’d like to attend The First Year of Life,  a series of quarterly lectures by Lee Salk,  the renown child psychologist.  Of course we signed up and over the following year we attended four wonderful lectures held in a hospital meeting room.

Most of the others in the room were first-time parents like us,  all eager to learn how to navigate in our new roles.   Dr Salk was kind and informative, took time to answer our questions, and imbued us with some needed confidence.  At the end of the final session – now all parents of one-year-olds  –  we thanked  our lecturer and were filing out of the room when someone held up a sheet of paper.    “If you’d like to stay in touch”,  he called out,  “give me your name and we can continue to meet.”

Six or seven couples did,  including us, and in fact Danny and I offered  to host those parents and their one-year-olds in our apartment for the first meeting of what we came to call our “parents group”.

After that we continued to meet with our kids in each others’ homes,  in parks and playgrounds,  at restaurants and theaters,  and during one memorable summer at a rented beach house.  Over the years some families moved or dropped out,  but four couples remained and we became a close-knit group  – Janet & Les (the guy who held up that piece of paper almost 50 years ago),  Janet & Harold,  Lorraine & Eric,  and me & Danny.

Then all too quickly the years passed and our kids got older and went their separate ways,  but we adults continued to meet for dinners.  And then more time passed,  and a heart attack took one of us way too soon,  and memory loss has sidelined another,  and our parents group was sadly diminished,

But we’ll always have our memories of the joyous times we shared and the golden friendships we made in that wonderful community of eager young parents and their kids.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

They say man plans and God laughs. On the big day, it rained steadily from sun up to midnight.
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Inks and Derek: Art and the Cricket Scores

In the early 1970s my husband Danny accepted a stint in his company’s London office.   (See Laundry Day in London,   Kinky Boots,  Valentine’s Day in Foggytown,  Intro to Cookery,  and Munro)

He’d be working for a guy named Derek whom I hadn’t met,  but Danny assured me I’d soon come to adore Derek and his wife Inks – and I did!

In fact soon after we’d settled into our Chelsea flat,  Inks took me under her wing,  and we realized that we shared a passion for art.  And so Inks took me to museum and gallery exhibits all over London,  and we enjoyed lovely lunches together in elegant members’ dining rooms.  Inks,  I learned,  also collected art and sculpture  – both British and African – much of it displayed in their house in St. John’s Wood and their wonderful country retreat in the Cotswolds.

And she and Derek took us to concerts and theater,  memorably to Athol Fugard’s stirring Master Harold and the Boys, and Trooping the Colour in honor of the Queen’s birthday.

And years later when we were back in the States we drove down to Richmond, Virginia to join Inks and Derek in celebrating their eldest son’s wedding.

And we joined them on a wonderful trip to South Africa – Derek’s homeland – and met them at a business conference in Barcelona where we explored Gaudi’s amazing Sagrada Familia together.

Over the years we’d see each other whenever we were in London or they in New York,  and I always found Derek to be larger than life – warm, bright, generous of spirit,  and an outstanding athlete who played cricket well into his 70s with teammates half his age.  And I was always touched by the way he ended emails and phone calls  “With fondest love.”

Then four years ago we got the devastating news that Derek had been diagnosed with cancer.  We kept in touch with Inks and their sons about his condition, and when Derek died we asked about his last days.

He was quite weak at the end,  we were told,  but he always asked for the latest cricket scores.

Thinking of Inks and remembering Derek – both with fondest love.

–  Dana Susan Lehrman 

Monsoons are more than just rainy days.  They are the wet season, the dry season’s counterpoint.  The rains are intense downpours, not drizzly affairs, and they sweep in ferociously. They are the annual water renewal that makes life possible.  Of course, that is changing along with the rest of the climate, but still.

The small commercial plane carrying me, my two sisters and my parents pitched and rolled through the monsoon clouds on its way to a bumpy touch down in Dacca (now Dhaka) in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1962.  Below us were glimpses of the saturated great green delta, so prone to flood and cyclone.  After a disorienting drive through humid gray streets, we arrived at our temporary house and wondered what the future held.

There was air conditioning.  The house had some servants assigned to it, dressed in loose white cotton.  Michael the cook served us rice pudding for dessert and he had a pet Alsatian dog with small puppies we couldn’t play with. My sisters sneaked sips of purloined crème de menthe from a preceding plane flight while my parents had their grownup discussion in another room.  I would later hear my mother summarize this as, “what god-forsaken place have you brought us to?”

That first impression was hardly improved when we awoke the following morning to find our house essentially an island in a dull watery lake.   The tanks (manmade water catchment ponds) had overflowed, the road runoff had overwhelmed the ditches on the side which served as open sewers, and we were going nowhere until the waters receded.  Michael and the rest of the crew were nonetheless unfazed, and we were soon visited by the cheerful and chaotic family across the street, the one we were replacing with our two-year posting. Welcome!

The monsoon season passed and the land dried up. Our new life developed its routine. We moved to a new house, the kids started school, met new people, got to know the city better. We ate dry season vegetables of pumpkin and okra. It was still hot.  Always humid and hot.

One sweltering day, I walked a few blocks over to visit my friend Pam..  She was blond and freckled, energetic, a year behind me in school and cursed with an obnoxious younger brother named Larry.  Her parents weren’t home.  She showed me how to make burnt-sugar candy in a frying pan, maybe a little too burnt, maybe sticking to the pan too much.  Uh oh.  To get out of the heat of the kitchen, she led us up the stairs to the flat roof for a bit of breeze.

Red-faced and overheated, I stepped outside and turned towards a quickening wind with an unexpected freshness.   The clouds had become very dark and we felt the weather turn.  And then it came, the astonishing wall of water, heavy drops sweeping across the roof, starting at one edge and swiftly advancing in a distinct line, a knife-edge front.  It raced forward and then washed over us, quenching our heat, giving relief, making us giddy.

Hooray, the rains are back!

Jews were told to remove their shoes and then shot by the Hungarian Arrow Cross and pushed into the river. As one of our guides said, “They disappeared.” Only their shoes remained behind.
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Good films can imitate life so well that we can discern and assess the values they convey.
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Namekagon river, Wisconsin

What could be more glorious than a weekend on the Namakagon River in Wisconsin? A group of female nurses, myself, my 12-year-old daughter and her friend, Emily,  drove under a bright sky across rich agricultural land through the St. Croix river’s national forest finally stopping at a roadside rest over the river. Our group planned a weekend canoe trip. We portaged the canoes down the banks of the river to a camping spot. The weather promised us a wonderful weekend where we could cook, play, swim, and paddle. We did not anticipate the storm that split our weekend holiday,

An idyllic spell filled our first two days with laughter, luscious recipes, and camaraderie. The canoe trips through scenic passageways and smooth rapids lived up to their amicable reputation. The small tents with their sleeping bags spread over drop cloths warmed us in the cool Wisconsin night.

We prepared for the last glorious night with an array of homemade specialties eaten at a campfire with plenty of hot chocolate. Except for me it was an all-female evening with no booze or awkward relationships. Just as we were closing, a sudden unexpected legion of dark clouds, wind and lightning threatened our evening. Before we could repack the dishes, the storm broke. The deluge of rain threatened to flood and knock over our tents. The ground cloths that were to provide a soft surface for the sleeping bags became drowned in running water, thus providing the campers with wet chambers.

I hurried the children into our tent. Then fled out to get the last cups of hot chocolate to warm them up as well as calm them down. They cried out that they were too cold to sleep.

I told them to shut their eyes while I told them a story. “Concentrate on my voice, fall into the story, fall asleep.”

I had much practice in this technique with my daughter. I often told her Morpheus inducing bedtime stories which I read, plagiarized, or came from my own inspiration.

So, I began. Once a storm struck a boat filled with children. Fortunately, it was near a small island and was able to crash on the shore. The children were wet and frightened. However, they spied a light house on the cliffs above. Struggling up to the door, they found it was open. And warm. They climbed to the top where they could observe the lightning and listen to the wind in safety. Old blankets for the lightkeeper were found in a closet. They curled up to sleep.

But, before dawn, they heard animal noises on the stairs. Rats who had also been on the boat were also seeking refuge in the lighthouse. They were scared.

By now my children had fallen asleep. In the morning, my daughter complained that she did not hear the end of the story. She asked me what happened to the children and the rats. Since I had been watching my daughter and her friend gradually fall asleep, I had not planned an ending.

I could have assuaged their fears by saying that along with rats were the cats also kept on the boat. These cats came up the stairs to eat the rats.

Or less grim, as the dawn arrived, the rats ran back to their burrows to get a good day’s sleep.

Or I arrived to save them.

In the morning we pulled our canoes through the muddy slope to the river to the cars above. We drove back the way we came into the sunlight, across the prairie, and to homes with warm beds. The storm, like the trip, became an adventure in itself.

I wanted to join that company.
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