Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

Here in Florida it feels as though it has been raining for a solid month. While grumbling about this constant deluge, I remembered the six year old version of me first learning two key lessons about rain. Lesson number one: people pay a lot of attention to you, especially in a crowded place, if you put your curly hair in pigtails, smile, and sing the song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"- just like your grandparents asked you to do. Lesson number two: old people seem to know a lot about the weather.

Since I am now just a few years beyond the age of six, it is probably a fine time to revisit what I know about rain (putting all the meteorological details aside). My current depth of understanding of lesson number one (pigtails, smile and crowd-pleasing singing) is still useful, but in a less literal sense. A child of six is unencumbered by the baggage of adulthood. Six year olds smile so easily and they can be talked into doing almost anything to please others, especially their grandparents. When I think back on those impromptu performances, part of me wants to express a nostalgic yearning for the simpler times of a bygone era, but quite frankly, I know it isn't the cheesy seventies that I miss. I miss my six year old world view.

The song "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" had a simple melody and lighthearted lyrics. The moral of the tune was somewhere close to this: 'you can't stop the rain by complaining, so choose to be happy now because the sun will soon return'. Regardless of the weather outside, we are are free to make ourselves feel sunny or rainy on any given day.

At six, you can make others feel sunny by singing a silly song out loud in an ordinary crowded place on an otherwise ordinary, perhaps gray day. As a grownup, you could still try that trick but someone might be tempted to call a doctor. Instead, my adult take-away from childhood lesson number one: Change the weather in your mind and turn yourself into a sun lamp for others. Do this not only because your singing voice might be one only your grandparents could love, do it because humanity's emotional climate matters more than any high or low pressure system blowing in from the west.

The modern relevance of childhood lesson number two: (old people know a lot about the weather) is simple. My mom and my grandparents used to sing a song called "You are My Sunshine" to me every time I saw them -until I was old enough to be embarrassed by this fact. As a little person of six, I truly believed I was that important to them. What I had partially forgotten in the many years in between six and now, was that the people you love really are worth singing about. It shouldn't be embarrassing and we should never be too busy to let each other know that we are, really, each other's sunshine. It is our job to weather storms, imagined or real, by keeping the inside lights on.

Wise old people know the difference between real sunshine, real rain, and the weather that comes and goes. While I am chronologically at a place where I should know this in both my heart and my head, I am still learning how to be consistent with the heart part, specifically how to truly enjoy singing in the rain. I know where to find the sunshine if I am not too busy looking outside. Where is Burt Bacharach when you need him? Or Gene Kelly for that matter? Or maybe I could use Rihanna's umbrella, ella, ella....