Entry Eleven: Parrish

"It Pours"
Tim Parrish

"And at that moment I hated him, for hitting me, for making Bob go to war, for being an adult in a place that made no sense.  But mostly I hated him for being weak in the way a child sees weakness,
hated him for being n to solve complexity with a simple gesture, hated him because when he'd held Mr. Ramos I had seen the limitations of strength."

Out of everything I’ve had the possibility to read for this class, this is the first story that felt like a chapter taken out of a novel – something that I had a piece of, but not the entire story. This text read and felt very much like a book, with characters and complexity that I wish had more time to be dwelled upon. Unfortunately, all we have are these pages from Parrish, pages that I find very interesting.

One of the things that stuck out to me the most was the rain, mostly because it was the most consistent thing about “It Pours”. Regardless of how our narrator was feeling, or what was going on, the rain was always there. Water in itself is cleansing, and usually symbolizes something about purity, or the washing away of a bad past or memory. In the case of this, it feels as if the rain does the opposite; with it comes turmoil, tension, and more distress than was there before it all began. In the case of the narrator, his father became more and more disgruntled and short tempered with the rain – in the end, however, he has something that I can only consider to be a mental break. He’s laughing and dancing in their living room while it’s beginning to flood, and it seems very out of place.

Then again, the narrator’s father seemed to be out of place regardless.

Mr. Ramos and the narrator’s father have a lot in common, mostly being their habits that heir on the side of obsessive. With both of these men, they hold steadfast to rules and rituals that keep them in a sort of schedule; they do things because they feel they have to, more so with Mr. Ramos than the narrator’s father. But I believe that both of these men are coping with trauma in the only way they know how, by sticking to what they know and forcing the rest of the world to follow.

As a whole, I see this story as a reflection of war and familial stress, and how it ultimately breaks down bonds between people. Even with something as cleansing as rain, these characters don’t come together, but instead fight and ultimately end with estranged relationships with one another. “It Pours” feels like a view of hurt people trying to live their lives in the only ways they feel able, even though those ways aren’t quite good enough.