I grew up in New Jersey and remember countless days standing at my bedroom window watching the raindrops slide down the pane. For a boy rain ruined everything. It certainly didn't get you out of school, like snow; it turned the baseball fields to mud and the woods into wet, sticky, gloomy places. It flattened meticulously pomped hair. Soaked your stash of Playboys hidden in the thickets. I never thought I'd miss it. Now, decades later, I'm in California, sitting in Starbucks and praying, no, not praying, not wishing either, not even hoping, but wanting rain. I'm thirsty for rain and if the skies suddenly burst, I'd go outside, tilt my head back and open my mouth. There have been signs: a savage downpour in the northern county, a flashflood in the desert, but most of the state has gone untouched. No significant rain or snow for many years. Water restrictions, forests in trauma, foothill vegetation turned to tinder. But there's a god that many say is about to come to our rescue. More a Greek god than anything else. El Nino: a band of warm water currents that develops way down in the southern Pacific and when strong, changes everything. This year it's strong, super-strong, the scientists say, and almost can't fail but to open the heavens as winter approaches. There will be record rainfalls and with a little of luck, it will turn to precious snow in the mountains, nourishing a snowpack that used to twenty-feet high even in summer, but now is little more than a glaze. I sit in Starbucks and look for signs that El Nino will fulfill its promise, and the monsoon will arrive, the gutters overflow and the dead grass rise. That night and day, I will step outside, tilt back my head and drink, and months from now, that I'll look out my window and wish the rain to stop.