#38



Years ago, she had tried writing a story about a man who waits for a woman in the rain outside of a subway station in order to greet her with an umbrella. The story came to her after she encountered a man waiting outside of a subway station in the rain with two open umbrellas. But she abandoned the story because she could not figure out what was so interesting about the man and his two umbrellas, nor the woman he might have been waiting for. And she had not thought about the story again until last week, when she got off the subway and saw a man, much younger than the one she saw years earlier, waiting in the subway station with two umbrellas. She watched as the man greeted a woman who had also gotten off the train and handed her one of the umbrellas. She walked behind the couple out of the station into the pouring rain and thought of her abandoned story as they opened up two very large umbrellas. Following behind them, she wondered if she should try to restart the story. But by the end of the block, she conceded that there was still nothing very interesting about the man or the woman. Nothing except the fact that they were dry and she was soaking wet.