Toni in the Rain

Tami.

No, I think her name was Toni, though it's a wonder I remember anything at all about the quiet, mousy little girl in our high school band.

Never once did I see her with a friend, and I never heard her utter a single word. Not even when she was spoken to. The teacher would ask her a question and she, like a deaf-mute, refused to answer him.

It's a wonder any one of us even knew her name. And it was a marvel how her name suited the person we saw, uncommon in our small-town confines.

She sat in the "third clarinet" section, holding her instrument, gazing at the sheet music in front of her. What she saw there must have transcended the notes and staffs printed on the brittle, yellowing paper. The sounds she made with the school-owned, fourth hand clarinet were barely audible above the racket we made. But I could hear the songs she played. They bore little or no resemblance to what the composer had written.

It still amazes me how vividly I can conjure up the memory of her. How aloof she was from everyone...I was no different---she never spoke to me, either. That was just as well, as far as I was concerned. She never even once looked at me.

But now that I think about it, I believe she DID look at me once. She gazed into my eyes and cast her spirit into mine, tortured and ecstatic. The transaction shook me to my foundations, even though I felt nothing at the time.

She planted her seed of alienation into my life.

Not love.

Not lust.

Not even a better understanding of why she was the way she was.

Those seeds took many years to sprout and blossom. but bloom they did.

I confess. I could have cared less about Toni. As hardened to her plight as the rest of my classmates were, I dismissed her strangeness as possibly drug related.

Maybe we were all right. Maybe she WAS a fifteen year old junkie floating out on the mainline. Who knows but that she'd dropped so much acid that it became impossible for her to relate to other people. So she'd crawled into her shell with her pills, needles and powders.

For some reason I could not bring myself to accept the "drugged-up" theories, the nasty rumors that floated around the entire school about Toni...weird, shy Toni.

Today, running it all through my mind again, I am even more confident that it was not drugs, that it was something else. Now the seed that she sowed is ripe for harvest. The alienation she planted within the virgin soil of my heart has become manifest in countless ways...

The most vivid memory I have of Toni is probably the ONLY thing my classmates remember of about her.

It was early morning and our marching band practice had been cancelled due to the rain that had begun to fall. The entire band was crowded together in the rehearsal room, creating havoc and generally having a good time.

Our attention was diverted when one of the guys, laughing, pointing out the window, called out, "Hey! Come and look at this!"

There, in the center of the practice field, stood Toni, soaked and dripping, her arms raised to the sky like she was praying to some Rain God. She seemed so naturally in place out there, alone in the downpour. It was the first time I'd ever seen her smile.

A sight so bizarre that it frightened me. To this day the recollection gives me goosebumps.

I think it was the smile.

The other kids laughed, mocked her, called her names, yelled scornful taunts at her through the window.

That was the day people started saying she was legitimately crazy.

That was also the last anyone ever saw of her. It was as if she'd vanished from the face of the earth. Her disappearance was mysterious, especially to us children who had spent so much time in her silent company.

It was not so mysterious, however, to the policemen who drove her away to a place we had no conception of. A place where noone, not even Toni, could feel at home.

Toni, if you were here with me right now, oh, how I'd like to talk to you. You wouldn't have to talk back...talking was never your style, anyway, was it? Just listen to me, because I've got so much to tell you now. So much I've learned in the thirteen years since I last saw you (a statue of wet flesh in the rain, praising the emptiness of sky that you called your own).

Maybe...just maybe, if I could treat you now with the dignity and respect you were denied all those years ago...you might speak to me, tell me all the thoughts trapped within your mind, be they mundane or twisted like the tunnels of time. You might share your understanding of the universe.

The secret of YOUR universe.

That would be enough for me.