A healthy clarity amid sobering health news

Rain creates an illumination

of its own. Filtered through heavy clouds and reflected off the puzzled landscape that is L.A., it translates gloom into the kind of half-light that accompanies dreams and memories.

I remember a storm at sea many years ago on a troop ship bound for South Korea. Even though the ocean was a dark gray, there was a glow to its expanse, as though it was lighted from within.

Storm light anywhere is a transfixing iridescence that exists both during the day when the autumn-toned leaves of the liquidambar trees radiate a soft sheen through the dampness, and at night when streetlights splash pools of luminosity off the wet pavement, mimicking the effects of a film noir movie set.

Rain creates different moods in different people. Some glory in the rarity of a stormy day in a city that has been painfully dry. Others complain that rain depresses them. They long for a continuation of the sunshine that paints the endless days with a murky yellow.

I greet the rain with the excitement of a child, walking through it bareheaded during the day and drifting into sleep at night as it taps on the roof with the steady beat of a metronome. I pull the drapes open and let the half-light in, and I lie there pondering the years that have brought me to where I am.

What occupies me today is a personal situation, although universal to those of us to whom a lifetime of martinis and cigarettes, minimum exercise and endless angst have caught up with in mid-stride.

In the day before the rain began, announced by lightning and accompanied by bass drums, I had been told by a cardiologist that my heart function at best was only 50-50. His conclusion was the result of tests taken a week earlier. When I asked what that meant on a scale of one to 10, he said "a five."

One tends to recall minute details in moments of personal importance: creases in the white medical frock that he wore, a woman seen from a window in the office pulling

a child by the hand across

the street, a pot of artificial flowers on the floor in a corner, ceramic cats lined up on a shelf.

I was speechless for a moment and then suddenly said, "I've joined a gym," as a quest, I suppose, for his approval and perhaps a positive response, like agreeing that joining a gym would raise the odds to 60-40 in my favor, or even 70-30. He replied in an almost distracted manner, "No need to treadmill. Just walk now and then." Not even a 51-49. I was fading in the stretch.