David Cohen illustration.
It was a spring day in 1971; my friend, Led, and I were 15 and in the ninth grade. She and I had spent the night at each other’s houses and hung out together on school trips. She worked after school as a waitress at a local steak house and was a vivacious girl with auburn hair and freckles. I loved her deep Western North Carolina accent (more pronounced than mine), and we had a mutual interest in dieting. In a telephone conversation one evening she confessed she had just eaten fifteen soda crackers (ten more than was recommended for our diet). I laughed because I had just consumed a disastrous portion of butter pecan ice cream. Led was fun—never backbiting or competitive.
That spring day, the clouds started invading a sunny sky. Led and I had a few minutes during our lunch break to walk back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the elementary school, located a few steps away from our high school building.
That’s when we felt it.
“It’s starting to rain,” I said. But the drizzle felt refreshing. We continued our stroll, talking about boyfriends and our teachers at Pleasant Gardens High School.
As we walked, a steadier rain began to fall. Led and I looked at each other, and in her eyes I saw a glint of mischief.
“I don’t want to go in,” I said.
“Naw,” she agreed.
The rain fell more heavily, and our peasant tops and miniskirts soon clung to our skin. We sloshed through puddles, our feet squishing in our leather sandals.
My waist-length hair was saturated and dripped from the ends. I looked up into the gray sky and closed my eyes. The rain splashing on my face felt exhilarating and filled me with a sense of freedom.
Maybe I was thinking about the Cowsills song “The Rain, the Park & Other Things,” about the girl sitting in the rain, flowers in her hair. After all, I was a dreamy teenager who imagined myself a budding flower child, though in fact I was just a naïve Southern Baptist girl. Yet, at that moment in the rain, I felt daring and happy.
However, when time came for our classes to resume, I realized I was soaked from head to toe. I suddenly felt chilled. Perhaps I thought of my mother’s lifelong warning about wet hair and sore throats, which I had experienced my share of.
I decided I better go to the principal’s office and ask him if I could use his phone to call my father at work. He would come get me and take me home.
“I need to call my father to come get me,” I explained to Mr. R—, when I stepped into his office. I thought he would find me pitiful, a drowned rat. He was an imposing man, whom the high school boys nicknamed “Big Bad John” after the Jimmy Dean song. He had a deep Lorne Greene voice that boomed in response to my request: “I saw you out walking in the rain. You knew better than that. You’re going to have to stay and go to your classes.”
That was the end of that. I headed to my art class that was held in an old house on the school grounds.
When I walked into the front room of the house, my teacher, Mr. McE—, a refined, soft-spoken man, rushed to me, alarmed by my appearance.
“You’re soaking wet!” he exclaimed.
“I got rained on,” I said.
He found me a blanket to wrap myself in and remained solicitous during the class, not requiring me to do any work.
I eventually dried out.
In the years afterward, I became friends with my former principal, John, and remember him with affection and respect. In his firmness, he had taught me a lesson about common sense and responsibility—a fatherly gesture at the time that I can appreciate now.
But I also remember the joyous feeling that I had that spring day with my friend, Led, as we walked carefree in the rain, savoring our youth and accepting the pleasures of nature.