The remorse of reveling in rain

Is it okay to take pleasure when others are in pain?

I think a lot of us like rainstorms, except when they’re havocking so many people and places in California. In those moments, I feel guilty for enjoying the streams pouring outside our family room window.

That goes for blizzards or high winds or any other kind of inclement weather. Beautiful from the inside, perilous on the outside.

This winter’s rain has exacerbated my increasing paranoia over car accidents. Our family was broadsided twice last year, most recently two weeks ago, and if you had seen these crashes, you’d wonder how anyone survived. Naturally, I’ve always tried to be careful in the rain, especially in those nighttime storms that outrun your windshield to the point that you’re leaning forward to squint through the deluge. But even with good visibility in the rain Monday, I found myself tightly gripping the wheel on my back-and-forth 15-minute drives, giving tons of space and keeping the speedometer at 11 mph on city streets. OK, I’m kidding about the last part, but you get the idea.

In the process, it brought up an issue in my mind that’s always bugged me, which is that during so many rainstorms here, you’ll hear or see people talking about how bad Californians drive in the rain. Look, I’m not prepared to make a state-by-state analysis, but I’ve seen plenty of bad-weather crashes in other locales, and I suspect that there is a per-capita equivalence between here and there.