“Soft” evenings, I believe, or “soft” days or nights are how the Irish refer to those many days or nights of rain in that country. I suppose the adjective evokes rain falling softly into the grass or on the pavement or the cobble stones. John Updike writes of a “soft” spring evening waiting for some lost luggage to be delivered to him on the streets of his Pennsylvania hometown to which he has flown back for a visit. He walks those old, familiar streets, remembering. Nice. Soft. Easy. Softness, soft moments in a hard world. Soft, solitary thoughts. Soft memories.
Of course, he called it soft because it was raining.
February is, by most accounts in most places in America, a “hard” month. Hard and mercifully short, because it is the dead of winter, and this February of ice hard as iron, snow hard and heavy all across the nation has been especially difficult.
Here today in Florida it’s just been raining. Nice and soft.
So it is a soft evening after a soft day in the generally soft state of Florida and I’m trying to have soft thoughts in hard times.
These are not harder than most time, of course. Life can be hard, even on the softest of days in the softest of seasons which is how we generally think of spring.
But, again, this is February. Winter. A hard season. (Of course, Florida, though it has been chilly lately, is where many people have come to get away from the hard, cold northern weather. And while it’s a harder-than-usual February here, it is, by comparison, softer than what those northern winter refugees have been enduring. So, let me extend a soft welcome.)
I am supposed to be praying with people right now. That’s what I was invited to do — with some men, businessmen, professors, engineers, in Tampa tonight. It’s a monthly thing, a little men’s prayer circle. I never miss that little time and that little gathering on the fourth (top) floor of a bayside office building in the offices of a devout and companionable lawyer, right across the long, busy bridge from St. Petersburg. Sometimes there are just three of us.
It’s just that the weather tonight– and the need to care for my friend Diane whom I took to the doctor’s office today for what turned out to be good post-operative news ( the growth taken surgically off her thyroid last week is not cancerous and there is no evidence of cancer), has also been suffering pain in her ear and neck region, possibly due to ways her head and neck were manipulated during surgery. So between the weather and not wanting to leave her alone, I’m here on this night after –or maybe still during — rain, writing this.
And they are wrapping up prayers in Tampa as I write. I wish I were there, though I’m content to be here. I can pray alone, though it is always good to pray together.
And, as it happens, Diane is not here. She felt well enough to go out and play cards. So, I could have gone to Tampa and prayed after all. But I’m content to have a soft evening here — alone.
I’m probably just using Diane as an excuse to avoid the tense, rainy ride across the long bridge to Tampa — just to pray for an hour. (Though, had I gone, I’d have been glad to be there. But then there would have been the drive back –in rain and darkness. That can be — hard.
Should we –all of us, together or alone — pray, not for a soft life, but for soft times in hard times in hard months like February?
The music is softly playing in the other room — piano. “Strangers in the Night.”
It’s good to be a stranger sometimes, in the night or any time, so we can have those soft, unhurried, solitary thoughts — and prayers.
Before everything turns hard again.
19 Cent Notebook 