The hound and I shake vigorously and throw a satisfying amount of water around the kitchen. We just made it inside as cool mist turned into a long-awaited deluge. Bring it on, I say,12 hours of alternating drizzle and deluge have not softened the lumpy drought-hardened soil in the field yet. Give us another couple of days of this.

As we walked down to the bog, we reveled in the soft, moist air and the greenest of greens (I can’t vouch for his reveling in green – I ‘m not even sure how much he can see it at all). We love the piney scent-carrying wetness that has him dashing off left and right.

And yet, on Friday the weather man announced a rainy weekend with a regretful catch in his voice. Sadly, he seemed to imply, I can’t deliver a weekend, if not on the beach, then certainly worthy of it. Does he not, like almost everyone I know, feel a huge wave of relief at not only much-needed moisture, but a temporary stay from the heat of summer? Where does his script come from? What is he performing?

I noticed the existence of to me unusual and ritualistic opinions that “this is a good thing, this is special, you like this” when I first arrived in this county. That lobster was special I knew from Agatha senior who loved her seafood beyond measure. But so were, I now discovered, roses and classical music, both de rigueur on certain occasions. And, somewhat bewilderingly, turkey and pumpkin pie. By their mere presence they announced the specialty of the day.

My healthy blush and blond hair were occasion for much rather baffling exclamation. Baffling to me because the former was a major source of often cruel teasing of this pink little girl, and where I grew up the latter was generally considered to be less than nothing special, seen as telltale evidence of one’s having been pulled out of the clay wholesale and not much improved from having been rinsed off.

And like that arch-Dutch dismissal of my “milkman’s-dog’s-hair,” there turned out to be similarly ritualistic expressions around disapproval in my new country, rain being a major one. Getting wet was something one had to appear to avoid at all cost. It has to seemed me odd since my first sultry New Jersey August that rain should be considered a bad thing in a district that not only gets so little of it, but where wet comes with warm! I could understand if that were the case in the Pacific Northwest (where I have never been), or in the chilled sodden bogs I hail from, but in New York and New Jersey?

Of course part of settling in was learning what to exclaim about in which way –and soon I was a pro at ooh-ing and aahing and acting greedy about any sweet, but especially chocolate chip cookies and any pie.

Acculturation is not performance, but happens when you stop noticing the unusual. But like banana cream pie (really, I can’t even pretend), there area few of these ritual performances I have not been able to “unsee”, despite my love of this country, many of its habits, and its tension-filled composition of immigrants and egalitarian ideals that I think has occasioned many of these ritual approvals and disapprovals — born perhaps among people moving from great scarcity to relative plenty in a generation. Born among those who have to learn what to expect of the weather, what is beautiful, and who is gorgeous. As if their lives depended on it.

One of these unusual habits I remain an outsider to I would call the “cute” bonding ritual. Like me, girls are pink and we like it. Squeal. Lately, we don’t like it, or at least many say they don’t, even if some of them want to own and empower it. But for the past 35 years I have seen girls getting pinker and frillier with more and more exaggerated exclamation of, “how cute!” (Now cat videos are even in on it.) I tried, but I have never gotten used to it. I wore a pink dress in the wedding of a dear friend – who got me to do so by insisting it was lavender. You know who you are, your punishment will come in due course, trust me.

The second ritual I can’t get the hang of I would call the “wink-wink approval method.” On the day I immigrated, July 29,1981, the woman who fingerprinted me ahead of a line of people from around the world commented approvingly on the size and shade of my little finger. She gave me a very bad kind of frisson that I have never had occasion to lose. The ideals I love here, and even the chocolate chip cookies, seem to be served up along with a generous helping of wink wink sauce. All are created equal, but girls should be pink. All are created equal, but not as equal as you are if you are pink like me.

On occasion, I have used being pink to my advantage — for instance when I had the confidence to walk into a jewelry store and ask for a bathroom at a street fair while knowing that I would not have received the welcome I got if I had not been a pink middle-aged lady, and the folks I was with had directed me back to the office we came from. They’d not be likely to go into that store to ask for a bathroom.

And like the weatherman who knows we’re in deep trouble about water but can’t stop himself from performing the routine he somehow thinks makes him likable or acceptable, it isn’t popular to disrupt comforting rituals of safety, security, and belonging in favor of getting out there and calling the wink wink approval method by its name. It means sticking your neck out. It means being visible for who you are.

For an immigrant like me, sticking your neck out is a scary thought. The promise is that, if only you get it all right, you will be safe among those who also like pie. Except some aren’t. Some can’t ever get there no matter what they do because they aren’t pink like me and can’t receive wink wink sauce on their ice cream (anything with cookie dough in it scores high on the “need to respond loudly with greed” scale).

And I can’t help but think that it would be to our benefit if we were slightly more aware of our ritualistic assumptions and resisted them a little bit, day by day, in a kind of practice run for the big time. Who knows, we might even enjoy getting wet and playing rainy day games.

Pizza? Of course I want pizza! Who wouldn’t want pizza?

—

Check out the album – the summer splendor is almost getting tiresome but I can’t stop turning myself into mosquito food for minutes at a time to try and get a shot at it.