Friday

It rained the whole week before our recent trip to Dalat. It rains several times every day, in fact. This is normal. What isn't normal is that I didn't have an umbrella that week. During the rainy season, umbrellas tend to accumulate between our shoe hutch and the laundry closet door. Last week there was a little tiny blue one and a little tiny pink one there. My strong black umbrella was lost. Little tiny umbrellas are made for a purse: they collapse on spindly wire fingers and telescope down insubstantial aluminum shafts. Their tops are small and they only protect a radius of two feet. It doesn’t take much breeze to render little umbrellas totally useless. These little things fit their pursey niche, I suppose, but aren't worthwhile against rain. They accumulate because we don’t use them enough to accidentally leave them in taxicabs or nightclubs. My beautiful black umbrella was strong and useful. Also a yard long. Also I'd lost it at the end of the previous week. Every single day I couldn’t use it. I needed to buy another umbrella. I never would have bothered doing this in town--it's pretty easy to avoid the rain at home--but looking online I noticed it was also going to rain every day of our vacation. This raises a question: could I have boarded an airplane with my black umbrella? It folded into a hooked cane with a metal tip. In an environment where security screens for toys and mouthwash, a pointy stick is probably also verboten. But we frequently fly within various rainy seasons, and umbrellas small enough to fit into the checked luggage are essentially worthless. I don't want to accumulate any more of these niche umbrellas--or lose any more of the good ones. [Cavin]