Run! Run! The Rain Is Falling!

I wasn’t going to write about the weather today until I received a call from a woman who said she had seen the devil’s face in a cloud formation.

She was walking her dog Mitzi just after sunrise when she looked up and there it was, the horns, the leer, the lust, the whole evil enchilada.

“He comes with the rain,” the woman whispered.

Of course.

Strange things are known to happen in L.A. when it rains. Seeing the devil in a cloud formation is just one of them.

While I have no proof that they are weather-related, news of Madonna’s dog going crazy and Pamela Anderson’s marriage coming apart also coincided with the onset of rain.

I’m not sure it was raining the day Michael Jackson’s new wife got pregnant, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Another reason I’m writing about the weather is that it seemed only yesterday the fire season officially ended in L.A. County, and now we’re facing the storm season. The fire season will probably begin again Wednesday followed by the storm season Saturday.

After the woman called Thursday about the devil’s face in the clouds, I looked outside. I didn’t see the devil, but no matter. I never see the face of the Virgin Mary either when it appears somewhere.

I did see a light rain falling. It wasn’t a killer rain, but already there were flash flood warnings in Malibu, power failures in Santa Monica, slide alerts in the canyons and traffic tie-ups everywhere.

Disaster was pending. Run, run, the rain is falling.

*

I grew up in Oakland, where rainfall was not a cataclysmic event. Water fell from the skies, went into storm drains and ran out into the bay.

I’ve been told by my sister Emily that when I was only 3 I had the habit of stripping and running naked in the rain, I loved it so much.

“You were nutso,” she told me unceremoniously when we were talking about it one day recently.

“I was a kid,” I said. “Kids do strange things. I don’t run naked in the rain anymore.”

“Surprise, surprise,” she said, “tell me another.”

“Your sister sure knows you, Nutso,” my wife, Cinelli, whispered.

Emily doesn’t pray for me as much as she used to. When I moved to L.A. 25 years ago, she did novenas for my salvation every time there was a disaster. But then her joints got bad, which prevented her from kneeling a lot.

“I don’t do standing-up prayers,” she said righteously. “I’ll light a candle once in a while.”

In Oakland we had winter, spring, summer and fall. In L.A. we have summer, fire, flood and slide. I’m not saying Oakland is or ever was Camelot, but at least I never remember it being 96 degrees on Christmas Day.

My first December in L.A. was a sizzler. I watched scenes of Santa Claus in the snow on television as I sweltered in the hazy heat of fire season in Southern California.

“Next year,” Cinelli said, “we’ll string Christmas lights on a potted palm.”

Noel, baby.

*

About the devil in the sky.

I think Fritz sees it too and Johnny and Dallas and all of those other goofball local television forecasters who warn us the world is going to hell every time it sprinkles.

Only Diane Barone on KCLA doesn’t judge the weather. “I just tell you what to expect,” she said to me one day in a manner that reminded me of my sister Emily. I’m surprised she didn’t add, “Nutso.”

“What may be bad to some,” she said, “isn’t necessarily bad to everyone.”

The current storm is a result of the so-called Pineapple Express, a system that taps into ocean moisture near Hawaii and dumps it on us. We may get (gasp) an inch or two of rain out of it.

“This is nothing,” our Topanga forecaster, Richard Kelly, told me one day during an earlier visit by the Pineapple Express. “In 1980 we had 5 inches of rain in two hours. That was a storm. This is just a shower.”

The rain is falling harder now. It taps against my window and drips off the branches of the oak trees. Somewhere, the woman who called me is cringing in terror. Mitzi is under a couch. They think it’s Satan come atap-tapping.

Cinelli just passed and saw me at the window looking longingly at the rain. “You can love what you see,” she said, “but keep your clothes on, Nutso.”

I’ll try.

(Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com)