Rain in Chicago. Sometimes it looks as if it’s falling up, marching skyward and vanishing into the heavens. It fuses with cabbage colored tides of the Great Lakes, a venal cocktail of Heaven and earth. Falling up, falling down, it tells no secrets but those we allow.

I didn’t bring an umbrella to the conference today so I stood beneath the glass canopy overlooking the foyer and waited for the rain to stop. I waited as throngs of my Jewish compatriots strolled, umbrellas raised, through the streets towards whatever awaited them on the other side of the night. I breathed the scent of G-d against the masses; it smelled like sweat. It’s a tough business this feeling good all over, a red herring, a key to the Necropolis, but we can’t endure without it. The rain took me home this afternoon, wherever that may be.