Tom Waits and A Hat Full of Rain

In the turning gyre of Midwestern rain and storms, life fired a curiosity that drove me to take the path of wonder in simple things, like delicate rain. Walking in the rain, I hear a child, and like the grass, she is in the moment. She gives me a gift, requiring that I pause. Did Walt Whitman have a child with him when he wrote Leaves of Grass?

“A child said What is the grass?”

The grass is wet. I notice its smell and the amber-orange sun augmenting its green. It’s said humans can distinguish more shades of green than any other color. Today, it’s tinted by the sun, and rain has turned it grainy, like burnished dragonfly wings, droplets cleaning its tender shell.

“What is the grass?”

Without planning, the warp and weft of travel delivered me to sidewalks from my youth. Growing up in this town, I was about pounding drums and baseballs, my teenage life in patterns . . . steady . . . like rain.  We were getting wet, so we ducked into a coffee shop where the bulletin board drew my attention. “Four out of three people admit they are poor with fractions.” Seven-tenths of the time, I adore and crave adventure; eight-tenths of the time, I love the churning wind; three-tenths of the time, I love the rain, but today a child teaches me to be 100 percent in with the rain.

“What is a fraction, Grandpa?”                                                                                                 I keep hearing the same question but in different shades.                                                       “What is the grass?”

Coffee shops are places to listen and data mine, and the timing is perfect when we walk in. On the sound system, I hear the deep guitar and tortured voice of Tom Waits singing words closer to home than I am to myself, in a line that tingles my spine and juices my anti-Capitalist sentiments.

“Money’s just something you throw off the back of a train. Got a head full of lightning. A hat full of rain.”

We get our treats and sit down.

Next to us, someone was hammering their point and pounding the wooden tabletop. Their beat was steady, the table legs . . . uneven, unsteady . . . the coffee cup jiggling and rocking. “Every knock is a vibration through the oldest pine,” Christen Noel Kauffman wrote in “Thanatopia.”

My granddaughter and I sip our drinks and listen to vibrations from the wooden tabletop.  We see the color of fractions and hear the sound of grass. Spilling my coffee, my granddaughter laughs. It’s my favorite sound in the entire world.

In the background, Tom Waits’ glottal vibrations kept grumbling like thunder clouds dropping rain and Gospel. “Got a head full of lightning. A hat full of rain. And I know that I said I’d never do it again. I love ya pretty baby but I always take the long way home.”

A soft voice lands in my ear.

“What is the grass?”

We finish our treats, but before leaving the coffee shop and people pounding wooden tables, I scan lines from a book of poems I’m reading. It’s a hockey poem, and it catches the inside of an old pine.

“These boys of recovery gather sticks                                                                                      to bend in a wild slapshot                                                                                                    across the bare-knuckled ice.                                                                                                   They love the sound of a ricocheting puck.”

Ricocheting pucks and wild slapshots remind me of playing hockey with my brothers not far from here, where the echo of wooding a puck on ice is long gone. Back then, winter’s cold vibrations set our teeth on edge as we raised bruises with sticks in hand, slapping at shins, taking delight in skates full of lightning. My delight is in the saunter now, especially when rain is soft and the light is orange.                                                                                                                            Long after Tom Waits stops singing, his words echo in my ear. “I love ya pretty baby but I always take the long way home.” Time to leave the coffee shop, her dainty five-year-old hand is cradled in mine. The grass is shimmering from fresh rain and the sunbeams augment fractions of green.

Caroline, can we take the long way home?

“Ok, Grandpa,” she says.

A voice lands in my ear one more time.

“What is the grass?”

My hat is wet, but I turn, turn again in the rain and the wind of this Midwestern town to read the words tacked on the bulletin board next to the one about fractions. It’s a small index card with a simple title and three lines written anonymously.

Ojibwe Saying

Sometimes I go about in pity

for myself, and all the while

a great wind carries me across the sky.