umbrella
Today I experienced Times Square in the rain. There were umbrellas and puddles everywhere.
When I was in high school I played the clarinet in the jazz band. First I played in the symphony band for a couple years, but then I switched to the jazz band because I had a crush on the jazz band guitarist. One afternoon the jazz band took a bus from my high school to New York City to perform in a cafe. It had rained recently in the city so there were puddles everywhere. I was wearing flip-flops, and I walked through an ankle-deep puddle, losing one of my flip-flops at the bottom of the puddle. I had to stick my hand into the puddle to fish it out.
Today I didn’t have to go fishing for my shoe in a dirty, oily puddle, but I did have a breathtaking moment. I was standing partially underneath a stranger’s red umbrella. I looked upwards through the umbrella at the lights in Times Square. The lights cast shadows of the rain on the red fabric and made shadowy red ripples shimmer downwards. It looked like the umbrella was crying so hard that its tears formed a rippling bloody stream that turned into a waterfall that crashed from the edges of the umbrella to the concrete below.