I was on a schedule I had no part in making, desperate for food at an odd corner of my town. I had less time than I'd have given myself, had I been involved in the giving. So much was unfamiliar that day, that when I spun the map through my head, it fixed on a familiar place to eat that was closer by than I'd realized. I embraced the idea happily, before I'd really thought it through.

When I was trying to feed the parking meter, I realized I had no one to turn to for change. And that I was going to my usual lunch spot on the usual day of the week, only with everything different. And that I was an idiot for leaving my umbrella behind in my haste to go seek food.

Having the skies open up on you, raining in mid-drought, at the very moment you realize it was better when you weren't alone... now that's really livin'. I almost got back in the car to find a less-memoried place, but that would have been craven even for me, plus there was the schedule thing.

Instead I hurried down the sidewalk, to get to the block that was under trees, where rain had not yet fallen. Quickly past the spot where I got that one question, with my clothes fittingly both soaking wet and dry. (So stunned was I at how intensely it was asked, I don't even recall whether I answered right or true.) I decide that I'll simply remember, and then feel however I feel.

I took the seat I had taken on the night I advised an ex-coworker as to how she might return, back before I left that job myself. I recognized all the staff in the bar - the one who always tries to decide whether I'm young enough for her maternal act was the one who drew my table.

Perhaps better her than the one we'd enriched, precisely one week before, because we thought her boss was a dick. She seems the type to ask me how I wound up there alone, and I'd be tempted to answer both right and true, and that would completely blow the schedule I was trying to keep.

I place my usual order, as I've a surfeit of things that are new today. Curls of smoke fly as I'm waiting, looking out the window at the sidewalk getting drenched. People are moving in a hurry to get in the door. It seems unlikely that anyone will linger out there long enough to put on a show, so I shouldn't have to duck out of the way. It amuses me somewhat to just sit in the whirl in my head, all the new facts from which I should extrapolate today, all the old ones shuffling in like snapshots to be cherished.

I decide before the food arrives that it's just the haircut that makes that one girl trippable, so at least that's one thing that won't come up again. I eat with gusto and efficiency, as it's not a day to linger, and sip iced tea for the same reason. I ache with the awareness that I'd savored it all better before - better beverage, better company. The rain falls harder every second, and I can't even look forward to the trip back to the car, to the new game afoot I should be learning.

I lean back as I finish, watch a highlight double play. Since I'm alone, I might as well take in some sports - it's not as if I'm mindful of much of anything else, having whirled all I could for the moment. The TV I'm watching hangs above a spot where I once counted backwards from five, and I'm left wondering if I said anything right or true while I did so. Whether anything was heard, or just felt, and whether that matters.

I'm jarred then as the music then stops abruptly - the enriched one fills silence with "uh-oh", from where she stands behind the bar. The rain, it appears, is thicker than the satellite radio can stand. Someone behind me speaks to someone else, saying "hey, I need you to go up on the roof," and the staff is dutifully amused.

The silence hangs then, and brings forward the voice of a man at the bar, who clearly did not wait for noon before drinking. He seems to be midway through revealing some personal philosophy. "How does one go about reinventing oneself?" he intones to the crowd assembled. "Is it with one big step, or a bunch of smaller ones?"

No answer comes to my ear, as my check arrives at that moment, and the pleasantries drown it all out. The music cuts back in just like it cut out, and the question is what hangs as I go.

I know how I'd answer, if I just had the time - myself, I just wait one damned week.

That strikes me as sad, and then right, and then true, and then settles down to be fine, in the span of a half-dozen paces.

A stop in the eight-sided room after that, to get the best air-drying in town as well as for other, more necessary, reasons. By the time I stepped back onto the sidewalk, the rain had gone, as if it had never happened. The landscape around me, however, was greener and sharper for it having come my way. The tip of the fountain's obelisk gleamed in the sudden sun as if freshly polished. (She certainly would have remarked on that, had she seen it on just the right day.)

As I dashed back to meet that damned schedule, and to bolster the first impression I was trying to make that day, I found comfort in all those little details I was seeing. I decided things were better for me because of what had passed through, even though it was, once again, all past-tense.

It seems that's always the way I go about it.