See If It's Raining
Enduring advice from Mama Berenstain
In Southern California, we’ve been having weather for a change. I will assume you’ve heard about it. Not long after our first bout of rain storms in January, I called my family as they were gathered in St. Louis for my uncle’s birthday. The phone got passed around, and each person asked me the same opener: “Did you get hit badly by the flooding?”
I had not been hit badly by the flooding. I hadn’t been hit at all by the flooding. Some friends had water logged yards and basements, but were spared anything catastrophic. Still, I told each aunt and uncle the same true thing: throughout that stormy week, I kept on seeing an alert on the taskbar of my work computer. “FLOODING,” it warned. Suitably alarmed, I’d suddenly remember that my desk sits before a third floor window. So I’d stand up and look out, checking to see if the street had become a river, cars at risk of floating away, like you see on flood report news stories.
Each time I stood, I saw the same welcome sight: wet street. Water rushing downhill only along the gutterways. No flood. Just rain.
We got a period of respite from the wetness – a chance to revel in the sudden clearness of the air, the lush greenness that rushes out of hiding here at the slightest provocation of precipitation. Then, last weekend, the rains came again, and even snow up in the higher hills (the bad, scary snows have been further east, in the San Bernardino Mountains). I’m sure you’ve heard about it. That Friday, a friend of mine stopped by my apartment to wish me a happy birthday. It was, in fact, HER birthday, the day before mine. In seven years of friendship we’d never managed to celebrate together, but this year that changed. She was visiting me at noon, and later that night I would go to a big birthday dinner out near her place. At my apartment, I made us tea and we ate some savory scones I’d baked that day – so genteel! Then we said our goodbyes for the intervening hours before dinner. She’d entrusted me with the responsibility of picking her up at home and giving her a ride to the nearby restaurant. “I know I can rely on you to get me there on time,” she’d complimented after I’d agreed. And here’s a thing about me: No actual magical spell could have rendered me any more willing – duty-bound, even – to pick her up on time than those words of punctual praise.
But no sooner had my friend left to go about her afternoon (and had I clocked back into work) then a deluge of Slack comments alerted me to a new weather development. Most of my coworkers had received phone alerts warning them about flash flooding. I hadn’t gotten an alert, but one coworker shared a screenshot; the alert seemed as calculated to provoke compliance as my friend’s compliment had. “This is a dangerous and life threatening situation,” it read.
My friend was a sensible person, I knew. She would be making the drive from my place to hers right now. She’d text me if she found it unsafe and tell me to stay home.
Night fell, the time to leave arrived, and no such notification came to my phone, nor did that automated flash flood warning. So, vowing to be sensible and turn back if things seemed even slightly dicey, I got in my car and left.
You know, that thing where you’re driving, and also it’s raining? Yeah, this was that. Nothing more, nothing less, at least not in the swath of town I was driving through. I’d driven in heavier rain in driver’s ed, on maybe my third go behind the wheel. And yes, that had been terrifying – me in my 15-year-old teacher-pleaser voice, repeatedly asking Mr. Craycraft if I should pull over and wait for the storm to let up a little. Him telling me no each time. “Keep driving, I’ll tell you when it’s time to stop.” But I am an infinitely better now than I was then.
I stopped at my friend’s house, she got in, and we both wondered aloud if we were being reckless, if we were missing something. We were moments away from the restaurant when a warning alarm blasted through my speakers (connected to my phone via Bluetooth). The alarm startled me more than any weather I’d encountered that night. This, at last, was my automated warning. My friend read it aloud. “A flash flood warning is in effect for this area until 10 PM PST. Do not attempt to travel, unless you are fleeing an area, subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.“ It was as if we had crossed an invisible border and were now in (invisible) danger.
Shaken, I parked the car outside the restaurant, safely away from any trees that might fall or drop heavy branches as a result of strong winds. We went in to dinner. “I guess,” my friend commented sagely, “no one’s allowed to leave the party until after 10.” Safer inside, they’d told us.
Between the January rainstorms and the February rainstorms, I went to Jacksonville, Florida with my friend, Will, the director of The Mirror Game. It was a poetic ending to our festival run, which had effectively started in Florida — the first in-person screening we’d been able to attend had been in Will’s hometown of St. Pete. Now we were the opening night feature at the Jacksonville Film Festival.
Florida enjoys a rare position as the butt of many national jokes, but the joke hasn’t seemed very funny lately. The 10 months that separated that St. Pete screening and this Jacksonville one was a grim one for civil rights in this country, and especially so in Florida. At the time of our trip, the dystopian indignity du jour was a law requiring female student athletes to report on their menstruation. In LA, when I told people we were going to Florida, the response was often a look of horrified concern.
Nevertheless, the festival (which was co-sponsored by the LGBTQ+ Community Fund of Northeast Florida, fwiw) was probably the best film fest experience we had in our whole run. This was in part because we had that opening night status, meaning our film was accompanied by a cocktail hour and catered party that festivalgoers could attend. It was probably the biggest audience we’ve had anywhere, and it all happened inside the shared studio of the local public radio and television stations.
There was a Q&A after the screening, and we were asked thoughtful questions by both the emcee and the audience. And I got a chance, in the most definitive way I’d yet been afforded, to publicly name something that has been annoying me a bit about my script ever since the Dobbs decision came through and overturned Roe v. Wade. What I said was simple: I was born and raised in a world where certain rights were assumed, and the character of Rose was written into that same world. Rose has a lot to say about the choices that women are allowed to make about their reproductive rights, and how her own decision to try and have a baby relates to those rights. But as soon as those rights were put into question in the real world, I could never watch the movie without wishing I could go back and empower my character to say more and assume less.
When we were finished answering questions on stage (and talking to some audience members off stage, who had questions and comments for us) Will and I joined the party in the lobby. Among the many folks we talked to was a middle-aged couple who opened our conversation by saying bluntly, “Thank you for coming to Florida.” It was clear that they weren’t thanking us for the travel commitment. It was a thank you for being willing to come see it for ourselves, for not writing off an entire segment of the population.
It was easy to smile and say “Of course! Thanks for supporting independent film!” But even as I replied, I felt a shift in my perspective. We can (and should) worry about injustice spreading like a virus. But that worry then causes us (when possible) to distance ourselves from the source of the problem, mentally and physically. Meanwhile, anywhere unjust laws are being made, the citizens there are the ones being most directly hurt by those laws, and the culture that foments them. How could I claim to care about such people, and yet refuse to witness them?
When I returned to LA, it was easy to tell the truth about my trip: Jacksonville had been a surprise. The people were so kind. There were so many bookstores. It had been a delight.
With every passing year, I feel more and more strongly that one of the hardest things about being a caring human in the modern world is finding the balance between staying vigilant and staying connected to the here and now. That’s true in weather and science, and it’s true in politics and social justice. Surely, dissertations are being written – have been written – about the intersection of the Internet, news media, capitalism, and fear. My own advanced degree, meanwhile, is a Masters of Fine Arts in screenwriting. So, in an attempt to tie these stories together in a metaphorical bow, I will share with you a moment from a book that I read as a child. It’s something that I find myself thinking about a lot, and strangely it is the only scene from any of my many Berenstain Bears books that I remember at all.
The book is called The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV. The bears get a TV antenna installed in their treehouse, and quickly Mama notices that everyone is watching TV all the time instead of doing anything else. So she tells the family that they will not be watching any TV for a week. Draconian, sure, but stick with me. Papa agrees that this is a great plan for the kids, and then excuses himself to go watch a sports program. Not so fast, says Mama. Papa is indignant to learn that the TV embargo applies to him too. (Click here for a video sample.)
“What about the news?” protested Papa. “I won’t know what’s going on in the world if I don’t watch the TV news!”
“Try this,” said Mama. “It’s called ‘the newspaper.’”
“And the weather!” continued Papa. “How will we know what the weather will be?”
“Try this,” said Mama. “It’s called ‘putting your hand out the window to see if it’s raining.’”
The book was written nearly 40 years ago. It’s still good advice.
Hilarious! (I wouldn't say "hysterical", as I've been reading up on the etymology of the word HYSTERIA) The women's cycle thing has gone away here where I live in Florida (we gained over 28 thousand Californians last year according to geekmoving com).