When commuting to work from my girlfriend’s apartment, my morning ritual involves a small cup of extremely expensive coffee from a small coffee place three blocks north of her building. It takes two or three minutes to make, because it’s brewed a cup at a time and because it wouldn’t be a luxury item if it was expedient. Once I have my coffee, I sit on the step of a store a couple of doors down. This store has been under construction or deconstruction for a year or more, so I don’t think anybody minds. This whole process takes about ten minutes, after which I do the ten minute walk from the shop step to my office.
Today, the first ten minutes happened to be the ten minutes the sky took to turn from sunny and clear to gray and beginning to rain.
Actual rain changes the walking dynamic into a scurrying maze of death and hate, but pre-rain drizzle has the less dramatic effect of magnifying preexisting commuter habits. Fast walkers lengthen their strides, opportunists break into dashes more frequently, the lost sheep look a little more lost as they eye the sky. A few people already have umbrellas up. The curb creepers edge closer to death, looking for openings. The people who have to work outside and don’t care about anything continue not to care, but except for them, the pace of the street ratchets up a couple of cranks as everyone tries to shave thirty seconds of the minutes between them and their target door.
Overall, it worked out well for me. The drizzle dispersed the mini-clusters of people looking over stolen or knockoff goods along Hester street, and brought the amblers up to speed walker status. For some reason the lost sheep seemed to have wandered their way into another time frame: one woman took a full thirty seconds to traverse the S-curve she was following in front of a delivery truck trying to make a right turn, and a man who couldn’t have been over five feet tall managed to block an otherwise unobstructed sidewalk with a cane and a single plastic bag. I wondered if this was some kind of obscure martial art.
The only things that become more dangerous in pre-rain conditions are the bicycles. Cyclists already eschew law and order in favor of speed, and when the rain is coming, the space reserved for their sense of superiority is annexed by their already amply housed sense of entitlement. Fortunately, they remain a bigger danger to themselves than anyone else, but it’s important to stay out of the bike lanes.
I got to work with only a light moistening, which I dried off with the my edition of the company shirt somebody ordered without asking anybody what size they wore. The rain stopped two minutes later.
