Reflections on a Rainy Day

Everything glistens when it rains.

The wet streets of the city shine in the gray sunlight, the leaves of the mountain oaks turn a bright emerald and the last of the shiny red pomegranates glow like Christmas ornaments on their branches.

The whole world seems to light up even as the sky darkens.

L.A. went for 219 days without rain, got some sprinkles and then went another 44 until today when it came with the dawn, tapping on the rooftops, dripping off the eaves.

I awoke at the first scratching of the storm and thought it was a squirrel scurrying across the roof, so unfamiliar was the sound. But as I listened, it became clear that there was a cleansing going on.

There is a quality to morning that is refreshing, an assurance that one has survived the darkness. With rain, the relief is laced with beauty as a field of grass is strewn with diamonds and mottled patterns of light and shadow turn the ocean into a work of art.

But still, the voices on radio and the faces on television tell us that the weather has turned bad and will likely stay bad and isn’t that too bad?

And the traffic on the Santa Monica isn’t moving because there’s something wet and strange falling from the sky and there’s a backup on the Ventura because a truck has spun out and there’s mud seeping across the Pacific Coast Highway, raising fears.

And I hear the phrase El Nino repeated in tones of a litany, and maybe this is a forerunner, but I don’t think so. I think it’s just an anomaly in L.A. called weather.

*

Rain puts me in a reflective mood, and all the memories of rainy days come flooding back as I arise early and cruise the city, searching for pieces of the storm that will illuminate a column.

I see a boy walking to school, for instance, and remember walking a street in Oakland as a child of 10 and seeing birds, dozens of them, encaged in a backyard aviary . . . and I remember climbing a fence and setting them free.

They fluttered up through a misty rain, flapping madly, aiming at the sky, and I ended up in the back seat of a police car with my flustered sister Emily, listening to her pray that this wasn’t an indicator of what I would someday become.

It was raining a few years later on the morning in 1942 when I accompanied her to a train station before dawn to see her young husband off to World War II, and I stood with her as she waved and cried and the rain fell like tears.

And it was raining the day our unit trudged up a slippery hill in Korea and I looked across a vast expanse of enemy territory and suddenly realized that war wasn’t just a movie.

I met a young Marine that day named Joe Citera. I thought about him for the first time in years the other night at a gathering of Marines that celebrated the Corps’ birthday.

He was a kid of 19 from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and we shared the dream of wanting to write. I remember the glow of our imagination in the gray of monsoons as we rose to accept Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes and waved, like Walter Mitty, to the cheering crowd.

I went on to write, as I write today with rain falling gently on my world, but machine gun bullets found Joe and death embraced him like a mother as he lay in the new mud of a rainy day a long time ago. . . .

*

I remember walking in the rain with my good friends Travis and Nicole when they were younger and watching them throw back their heads, mouths open, to taste the distance.

I remember them running ahead of me and spinning, arms outstretched, as the wind blew through their hair. I remember them asking where rain came from and where it went when it was gone and what the world would be like if it didn’t rain at all.

I remember answering, “Like L.A.”

But that was when I was new to Southern California, coming from a place where it rained in the winter and sometimes in the autumn of the year. I came here when it didn’t rain at all and then poured (El Nino!) so hard homes were flooded, cars were washed off the highways and everything filled with mud.

I remember our roof leaking in a dozen places, each series of drips caught with a different colored plastic pan, and water from the backyard seeping into the living room and our creek running wild.

I prayed for a drought then and when the drought came I prayed for rain, but today. . . .

A patch of blue opens in the clouds, allowing a stab of brightness to touch the crest of a towering oak and holding it for a moment the way a spotlight caresses a diva on opening night.

This is the world in its purity, light, dark, rainy, rustled by a gentle wind, free of fire, glowing, gleaming, new again, like a child rising from a bath, reaching for warmth.

There’s magic afoot and the Earth gleams, so do yourself a favor, L.A. Walk in the rain today and stand for a moment in the newness, remembering . . .

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com