When It Rains, It Pours

My favorite logo is the Morton Salt Girl. Still wearing the same yellow dress, still shielding herself from rain with an umbrella, and still spilling salt from a container clutched under her arm, she hasn’t changed since I was a boy.

Once, when I asked why the girl was wasting salt, Mama said, “She doesn’t know it’s spilling. Morton wanted to show that its salt flows freely, even in rainy weather, emphasizing its motto: ‘When it rains, it pours.’” Dad often used that motto to describe unlucky events that build upon one another, increasing in size, like snowballs rolling down a mountainside. I’ve dealt with when-it-rains-it-pours situations, but none tops an insane sequence described by a friend, with exemplary exaggeration expertise. In his yarn, he claimed that a tiny snake initiated snowballing chaos of avalanche proportions:

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Anticipating cold weather, a couple brought in a potted plant, not realizing it was a garter snake’s home. When he warmed up, the narrow fellow emerged. Seeing him, the wife screamed for her husband, who was showering. While her naked mate, on hands and knees, was looking under a sofa, the family dog cold-nosed his haunches, causing him to flop to the floor, writhing in panic, certain he was snake-bitten. Fearing heart attack, his wife dialed 911. When the Emergency Medical Technicians arrived, they ignored hubby’s ravings about a snake and strapped him on a gurney. While lifting him, the snake slithered by, terrifying one technician, who dropped the gurney, dumping the patient headfirst on the floor, giving him a concussion requiring hospitalization. Still fearful, the wife, now alone, called her neighbor’s boyfriend, who searched thoroughly, found no snake, and agreed to sit with the distraught woman until his girlfriend arrived. While regaining her composure, she dangled her hand between the sofa’s cushions, felt the snake, and fainted. Seeing no signs of life in her, the man initiated mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When his girlfriend arrived, she assessed the activity as amorous, banged her boyfriend’s head with a heavy crystal ashtray, rendering him unconscious, and stormed out. Soon the wife came to, saw the comatose guy, assumed the snake had bitten him, and tried reviving him by pouring whiskey down his throat. Policemen arrived, saw the unconscious man, smelled liquor, assumed a domestic dispute had turned violent, and arrested man and woman. While handcuffing them, the snake crawled across the floor. One of the cops shot at it and missed, hitting the end table’s leg instead, tipping over a lamp, bursting the bulb, and setting the drapes afire. They called the fire department. While backing into the driveway, the firemen began raising the ladder, which tangled in overhead power lines and tore them down, leaving the neighborhood in the dark. Fortunately, they dowsed the drapes and saved the house. The only fatality was the harmless little garter snake, found in the driveway the next morning, flattened by the fire truck. Summing up this snowballing chain of events, Dad would have said, “When it rains, it pours.”