The One About The Umbrella

(June 07, 2006)

I was in college when I stopped giving a fuck about getting rained on, and it was a liberating realization: it's just water, I figured out, and hey, I'm waterproof! It's okay to like rain! Rain is of no consequence, and umbrellas, I decided, are kinda stupid.

Now, there's stupid and there's STUPID. Umbrellas aren't STUPID stupid, like flip-flops. Umbrellas are only a little bit stupid, like tongue rings. And naturally, as is the way of the world, it's not the thing itself that's actively stupid, it's the owner. I'm just as sick of people flopping their gaping mouths open to perform little wet show-offy tongue somersaults as I am of people reeling sidelong into my eyeball with the prongs of their umbrella.
In both cases, I can see how it could be a cool thing to have, but come on -- the percentage of time you're using it for anything is nil compared to the whole vast span of time that it's just plain old in-the-way. Most of the day you're just an idiot with a cumbersome wet thing you're fiddling with, right? YOU, close your mouth and stop flicking that thing at me and YOU watch where the fuck you're going, you almost gave me an umbrella-prong-tracheotomy.

Well. That's all well and good, except it has been raining a LOT lately. It rained again today. I was getting ready to walk to work, looking out at the gray slurry of a day and I was just, like...UGH. Yeah, I'm still waterproof, I didn't get porous with age, but UGH. I swear to god it's like it's been raining every other day for months. It's not cool! I'm tired of being wet now! It's reached critical mass, IT'S JUST TOO MUCH RAIN.

Now, I know for a fact that there's no umbrella in this apartment, because I don't have one and Joe would as likely have an iron or a salad spinner (meaning, Joe would as likely have a hay baler). So imagine my surprise when I opened the linen closet to find an umbrella hanging there. It was a collapsible tote model, small, blue, and the handle was painted to look like a duck's head.

Yeah, a duck's head. I don't know who left this here or when, but of course the one umbrella I find has to be totally retarded.

(I didn't know the half of it.)

I hefted it. Tested how it feels. Decided "Okay. I'm going to carry this thing and hold it over me for protection from the weather."

I immediately went out into the elements.

I was immediately out of my element.

First of all, it's very weird to hold the upside down duck head. Do I grip its neck, or the beak area, or what? Secondly, this particular umbrella had seen better days. The prongs on one half were all bent inward, the skeletal flex mechanism was coming apart so bendy little metal bits were sort of dangling over my head. The prongs on the other half were nice and straight. Unfortunately the fabric on that half had ceased to be affiixed to the nice straight prongs.

Still, it was providing some protection against the rain, which had started to come down in what looked like buckets of the Charles River. That is, until I left the relative closeness of the big apartment buildings on Commonwealth Ave's back alleys. Everything changed when I turned onto Allston Street. This is one long street connecting Comm Ave to Brighton Ave, and can rightly be described as a thickly settled urban residential wind tunnel.

I now needed both hands to grasp the upside down duck head because, despite my chokehold, this umbrella was determined to take flight roughly northwest toward Cambridge. I fought to keep it over my head, but all the whole long way down Allston Street it jerked and bucked in the wind. Ah the wind, well. The wind, as it turned out, was blowing the rain directly into my face anyway so by the time I got to the corner of Allston and Brighton the battle for keeping the umbrella over my head was really, by then, just a matter of principle.

I could have signaled semaphore with it and had just as much rain protection.

One would think, given the total futility of this umbrella-carrying experiment of mine, that I'd simply close it up and just do what I always do: get wet.

Again, principle. I have an UMBRELLA. I'm not supposed to be WET.

By the time I got to work this umbrella had just about bucked and twisted itself into an approximation of a very large, very blue (duck-headed) bat that had been run over by several hefty payloaders. I folded it up and put it in a corner of the office all day.

At the end of the day, preparing to leave for home, I guess I'd forgotten about its condition. I popped it open and started on my way. I held the upside down duck head until the Brooks shopping center. It was still windy, still rainy, and I still had Allston Street to deal with, dead ahead. I thought I could make it all the way up the hill without the twisted-bat-duck-thing falling completely apart. But the image in my head, of myself, steadfastly holding aloft my sad, twisted dead duck-headed bat...I turned swiftly and in one movement, retracted the handle, collapsed the umbrella and sailed it into the trash barrel outside Brooks.

I went into Brooks and looked around until I found what I wanted.

For $7.99 I walked the rest of the way home sporting a new, spiffy 48-inch green-and-white striped umbrella. Which I will probably never use again.

I got home and Joe didn't notice I had a new umbrella. But at some point I'll have to say, "Who's blue duck-head handle umbrella is that in the closet?"

Depending on his answer, I'll tell him what happened to it. Hopefully it wasn't a family heirloom or anything like that.