It’s raining. It’s pouring. The old man is snoring. You’re trying to get home, get whacked in the face with an umbrella. Oh right, that’s not how the rhyme goes.
Rain is one of those things that seems romantic until it becomes a reality. It’s easy to love something that is in the detached backdrop of your Sunday night under the covers with some tea and a good book.
Rain will remind you of your silly idealism by bothering you at the exact wrong time because every time it pops up, you are always somehow very unprepared. The possibilities are endless: you wore suede flats, you forgot an umbrella, you didn’t wear a jacket, you didn’t remember cab money, or you just got your hair done and now it’s going to frizz like a puffer fish at the first sign of danger.
When one of those aforementioned things occurs, and you find yourself trudging through the torrential downpour, you aren’t in the best of moods, to say the least. Last time you checked the Oracle of Delphi was at Greece, yet everyone else seems to have performed augury and had a prior warning about the monsoon that has now made it a point of personal vengeance to drown you.
To top that all off, while they were at Delphi in ancient Greece, the entire city of Manhattan made a trip to ancient Sparta to get military training lessons. Now they have formed into a phalanx system with umbrellas acting as helmets, shields and swords alike determined to poke and push you into the river now running on the side of the street; theirs are the ultimate weapons.
In the rare occasions where I wield one, I always find myself doing the “umbrella shuffle.” I am walking down a narrow street with my modestly sized umbrella when I see someone approaching holding one with a diameter of at least 6 feet. We have all seen these monsters. They exist. If I were to describe it to an alien I would say, “it’s a huge rotund thing with at least 12 spokes sticking out and a horn on the top that eats the face of humans and doesn’t let them see where they are going!” Now does it sound like more of a monster?
Anyway back to the scenario. Both of you are holding to your path, determined not to move. Suddenly you are side by side, and as the owner of this behemoth attempts to barrel through, your arm holding the umbrella instinctively shoots up to allow a path for the Godzilla. Some may say this is proof of an increasingly selfish society, the rise of the individual, or the deterioration of the last fiber of etiquette towards strangers and the next step from here is getting out of your car to punch the person that stole your parking spot.
However, Rihanna begs to differ. In her song “Umbrella,” she sees them as a protective object, one to share with your loved ones in their time of need. She says, “When the sun shines, we’ll shine together/ Told you I’ll be here forever,” and this shows the exact idealism about weather I was talking about before. It is so easy to love someone when things are great and the sun is shining; then she sings, “Now that it’s raining more than ever/ Know that we’ll still have each other/ You can stand under my umbrella.” That must be one giant umbrella.
Rihanna uses the metaphor of an umbrella as her friendship and protection from harm (or the rain). But I wonder if, when she and her lover walk together under this said umbrella, they pay any attention to the other pedestrians that must share the sidewalk they are so selfishly hogging.