From the Editor

"Spring is here, so why doesn't my heart go dancing?" is the way the 1938 Rodgers and Hart song goes, though by all considerations of the rainy weather, this spring is destined to be more like "Singing In the Rain," rather than dancing.  Come to think of it, "Singing In the Rain," written on the eve of the Depression in 1929 by Clifford Edwards, a.k.a. Ukelele Ike, was a pretty good dance number, too.  Certainly, the rain is an over-used trope (used for all sorts of feelings) as in: "It's a hard rain that's gonna' fall" or "Have you ever seen the rain?" or the even more melodramatic, "Baby, the rain must fall."

During spring break, I was on the train (not in the rain) to New York City to do book research where I met a man from Brooklyn who moved to Jersey in the months before 9/11 because he had feared (in a psychic way) the plumes that would overtake our imaginations and the way we see the world.  In the dining car, he lamented, "I mean I go into my mother's house, and there it is on the wall -- Jesus Christ, Kennedy, and the Twin Towers.  It's like a crucifix around our necks."  I excused the mixed metaphor: Millstone? Noose? A framed picture?  "Yeah, (a mouthful of sandwich) enlarged, like it's a two feet by three feet photograph, what do you make of that? (another mouthful)  It's creepy.  I try not to look at it when I go there."

He is a black-haired, unshaven small-time entrepreneur on his way back from visiting his sister in Florida where he was thinking about buying some investment property.  "My mother told me that."  What?  "Buy the vacant lots and hold onto them.  If I'd a listened to her I'd be rich right now, just in Brooklyn, in the 70s, I could have done that."  But he didn't listen.  The same old story.

"You know what this war is all about?"  Oil? Freedom? Democracy? I was stabbing in his dark.  "None of those. It's all about revenge.  That's what my mother thinks.  For setting up his father.  It's about taking him out for that."  A blood feud like the mafia?  "Yeah, this is family business all the way."  I chewed on micro-waved chicken pot pie and, of course, what he said, which had about the same texture.  I wasn't privy to the inside dope on any assassination attempts, but then I have been reading a lot of fiction over the past ten years and haven't had time to keep on current events, you might say, although Ezra Pound's "Literature is news that stays news" kept resounding without effect.

Our conversation started to take on a surreal quality -- like some movie or cartoon where everything was simplified so the plot could be advanced early in the game without too many complications.  The complications could come later, or at any time.  The pre-spring landscape of Virginia turned to winter in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, the home of the Liberty Bell, authentically cracked.  "It's all about sex and money."  I didn't ask for this -- he was a fountain without a flow control.  "Everything is.  Clinton was about sex, and Bush is about money."  Out the window. Philadelphia in all of its gray glory.  Nothing as simple as eating on a train, minding my own business, trying to be.  All the beauty and cruelty of the world summed up in that twin maxim -- sex and money --  the twin towers.  "It's stupid.  I know.  But, hey, the rich are stupid.  Money makes them dumb.  Look at Donald Trump, Ted Turner.  They used to be smart.  Can't help it.  Dumb now.  Sex makes you dumb, too, you know.  But the poor.  The poor are  brilliant -- that's where all the creativity comes from, all the energy -- the poor.  That's what makes this country the greatest nation on the earth."

The train pulled us onward -- to home for him, to time alone for me -- waiting for the city to show up like it does when you come in from the south.  The skyline will be without the twin towers, I thought, but I will note the space where they should be and still are in our imaginations.  Sex and money, rich and poor  -- God help us if that's all we can imagine about the world.  Maybe it's time to write a new song about the rain.