The Rain Gauge

I am standing at the kitchen sink at 6:40 in the morning, rinsing a coffee cup in the dark, and there it is, whole and settled, as if it had been waiting behind the faucet for years. Every day, I cry a little bit more. I am sixty-one years old, and I have lived long enough to know that a sentence like this one does not visit at random. It comes because it is true. It stays because tomorrow it will be truer still.

A young man’s tears are rationed by ignorance. He has lost so little that he cannot guess the size of what can be lost. At twenty I had buried almost no one. At thirty my file of griefs was thin, neatly foldered, opened on occasion and put away before supper. The file is thick now.

Tears keep their own calendar now. Last week a headline did it. Two days later a song on the car radio. On Sunday, nothing I could name, standing in the produce section with a bag of onions in my hand. The eyes burn first and the reason arrives later. A younger man would be embarrassed by the inventory. I report it the way I would report rainfall. It happened. The amounts were small. The total keeps climbing.

A doctor would tell you the eyes of an older man water more freely. The tear film thins. The ducts slacken. Wind does the work that sorrow used to do. I grant the mechanism and refuse the discount. The water is real whatever the plumbing. The headline was worth weeping over and the ducts were willing. At sixty-one a man finally knows which headlines deserve it, and there are more of them every morning, and the increase belongs to the world.

The heart is a rain gauge. It does not soften with age; it collects. Every life you have lived leaves a little water in the glass, and a man who has lived a thousand lives carries a thousand small deposits. Of course the reading climbs.

My thousand lives are literal for me. I spent a winter in a New York theater in 1990, working for a playwright, and I seated Arthur Miller in the last row with my own two hands. Twelve novels carry my name, and every character suffered in my voice before suffering on the page. As a teenager I read aloud to children at the Bethany branch of the Lincoln City Libraries, and I can still hear the room go quiet at the sad pages. Add the borrowed lives, the hundreds of books read past midnight in four languages, each one a small tenancy in somebody else’s sorrow. Every one of those lives stayed.

Small towns run on hard weather and cruelty lived there in my childhood the same as anywhere. There was also a covenant, and I watched it kept for decades. The neighbor pulled your truck from the ditch before he asked who you voted for. The funeral dinner fed you whether your family had earned it or not. That covenant is broken now, and the breaking is advertised. The threats and the hatreds are everywhere, uncovered, blistering, mouldering.

That old cruelty never vanished. It lost its cover. What festered in private now performs in public, proud of itself, and the pride is the new part. For years I defended these towns against the sneers of people who had never driven through them. Some days now the towns make a liar of my defense, and that betrayal stings worse than the original sneer ever did. A man my age has seen the before and lives in the after. The double vision is its own grief. We remember what the cover was for.

Cruelty has a partner now. The partner’s name is uncertainty. The Midwest of my childhood was hard but legible. Banks stayed open. The school kept its grades. A man’s word about a horse or a loan meant something enforceable. A handshake meant more than a piece of paper. Little of it is legible now. The weather has turned strange, and the money likewise. Truth itself gets auctioned daily to the loudest bidder. An old man can defend himself against cruelty he can see. The fog is harder to fight, and the tears come easier in it.

At sixty-one the future holds more funerals than weddings. Friends call with diagnoses where they once called with news of children. I catch myself counting backward at weddings now, doing the subtraction nobody admits to. The actuarial tables, which I read the way other men read the weather, promise that the years ahead offer more tears than joys.

A man in 1985 grieved his county. He read the local paper, buried his neighbors, and carried what one county could hold. I grieve the species before breakfast. The feed delivers a world’s worth of cruelty to my hand each morning, every outrage fresh, every one rhyming with something I already memorized. No instrument was built for that volume.

On the braided prairie that raised me, crying was a sign of weakness in a man, and it probably still is. Nobody wrote the rule down. It lived in the faces of fathers, in the silence that fell when a boy’s voice cracked in public. Right or wrong, you wept, you bled. Our fathers had survived the Depression and the war, and their lesson was simple: tears were water the body could not spare. I believed that for fifty years. I have let the teaching go, and the release is part of the rising count.

I know the other kind of man by sight. He is my age, and he has gone dry. Nothing reaches him now. The headline slides off, the phone call slides off, and he calls this peace. It is a sealed gauge. Whatever weather hits him, the reading says zero, and a zero reading in a storm means a broken instrument standing in bad weather. He looks rested, and that is what frightens me. I will carry my rising number over his flat one.

One question has ridden in my coat pocket for weeks. Is weeping for the strong of heart, or for the old man who can never go back again?

The old man is owed his due first. He can never go back; that part is true, and pretending otherwise is a lie we tell children. The house in North Loup where I spent boyhood summers belongs to someone else. We put family in the ground there in 2024, and the ground keeps what we give it. I have stood at that stone with my bare hand flat on the granite. The granite was warm from the sun. I cried there, and the rule of my raising said to stop, and I did not stop. The road behind is closed by time, which asks no permission and gives no refund. If a man cannot weep at a closed road, he never traveled far enough to have one.

Weeping is the discipline of remaining open. Numbness is available everywhere now, free of charge, and most of the world takes the deal. To keep crying is to refuse it. The tears prove the instrument still reads, that the man still registers what a day costs. Numbness always bills its customers later, with interest. Lincoln, the man my hometown is named for, buried his son Willie in February of 1862. That December, with the war grinding through its second year, he found time to write Fanny McCullough, a young woman whose father had been killed in Mississippi. The memory of her father, he told her, would return as “a sad sweet feeling” in her heart. He carried a whole Union’s grief in his face and still believed the sweetness was coming.

The Greeks knew better, and they knew it earlier. Their strongest men weep all through the literature. Achilles weeps by the gray sea in the first book of the Iliad, crying out for his mother, and this is the killer of men. Odysseus weeps on Calypso’s shore day after day, staring at the water toward home. Later, in a hall full of strangers, a bard sings of Troy, and Odysseus weeps inside his cloak, and Homer compares him to a woman crying over the body of a husband who fell defending the city. The tears give him away. They are the spasm of revelation that names him. In the last book of the Iliad, Priam kneels to the man who killed his son, and the two enemies weep together, one for Hector, one for a father he will never see again. Then they share a meal. Nobody in Homer calls any of it weakness. Weeping, in that punishing time, was how a man showed he still understood what the punishment meant. It took me sixty years to side with Homer against my own raising.

This fork is false. It asks me to choose between strength and exile, when the exile is the strength’s proof. Only a man who built something worth losing has anything to weep over. Only a man still strong enough to feel the loss keeps his gauge in the yard. The tears measure the closed road and the open heart in the same water.

The forecast is accurate, and it changes nothing about the assignment. More tears than joys, promised and scheduled. Joy outnumbered is still joy. One evening with old friends outweighs, in the hand, a month of headlines, even when the headlines win the count. The heart refuses to settle its accounts by majority. One true hour outweighs a hundred true cruelties.

Weeping is testimony. When I cry at the headline, a verdict gets entered somewhere, even if the only courtroom is my own chest. The cruelty is recorded. Records matter because records are what cruelty works hardest to erase; cruelty wants to pass as normal, unremarkable, weather. A man who weeps refuses to file it under weather. He writes it in the book. On some days that is the whole of the resistance available to a man at a kitchen sink, and it carries weight. A people who still keep the record have not yet given up.

The thousand lives make the tears heavier and the standing easier. A man with one life cries one man’s ration. I carry twelve novels of characters, a theater full of ghosts, a library corner of children now grown, a grandfather’s house, a fresh grave. Each life left a room in me, and rooms collect weather. When I cry a little more today, some portion belongs to people who never existed, and the grief for them is real, because the love that built them was real. Imagination is taxed like property.

Tomorrow I will cry a little bit more than today, and the day after a little more than that, and I will go on working and laughing in the same hours, often in the same minutes. Grief and joy draw from one water table at different depths. I intend to keep drinking from both.

My grandfather kept a rain gauge by the fence post. After every storm he walked out to it in his boots. He read the number, wrote it in a small book he kept in his shirt pocket, emptied the glass, and set it back out in the weather. He never once resented the gauge for filling. That was its purpose. The purpose of the man was to keep the record. I understand him now in a way I could not at nine years old. Tomorrow it will rain again, somewhere in me, and the reading will run a little higher than yesterday’s. I will write the number down and empty the glass and set it back out in the weather.