-- Thursday, February 10, 2000 --

3:36 a.m. Today we had a good, hard soaking rain. It's the first real rain of the season and it came down in proper monsoon sheets for a while in the afternoon. Very cozy. Electric blanket cozy.

The first clue that the rain pounded and pummeled like this in the sunny paradise of Southern California was in the wonderful movie Best Friends. If you haven't seen the movie, do yourself a favor and rent it. It's just about a perfect film.

It's about trying to be a writing couple in Hollywood and trying to be a couple who finally gets married. It has one of my favorite funny scenes of all time. Their wedding. If I told you that it starred Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, you might look askance and hesitate -- but trust me, it's fabulous.

At one point there's a rainstorm. If you're not from this part of the world, you might think the rain scenes, in which a car is washed right out of the driveway and down the street, are exaggerated. They are not.

We saw the movie when we were still living in Manhattan, and we looked at each other and wondered: wha? What are we getting into? But we still packed up our little car and came out here.

We even lived in the very same hills in the movie for a time, and the hills are actually mountains -- don't let them fool you. Entire slabs of back yard give way when it rains. It's a fragile landscape filled with houses built on sticks. Cars easily wash into ravines and the ravines have mountain lions in them. It's true.

We eventually bought a house where there are no hills, fewer coyotes, and little or no chance of a raging fire or a ravaging flood, because we are chicken when it comes to natural disasters. We happen to be in a tsunami zone, according to our insurance company, but I've checked with the locals and the belief is that Catalina Island would block the big wave, were it to suddenly rear.

The island is 26 miles across the sea, exactly as the song says, and it's where we might go to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary at the end of this month. You can sail there in your stupid little boat, of course, but I wouldn't consider it. Not yet. Instead, we'll get on some sort of a boat and ride across like normal people. Then, once you get there, you rent a bicycle to get around the island because I don't think they allow cars there.

We'll see. So far, we can't seem to decide on an anniversary destination. We certainly could never rent a tandem bike -- who would be in front? We can barely agree on dinner each night. We don't celebrate our anniversaries in the off years because we've never been able to decide whether it should be February 28 or March 1.

And since it only comes once every four years, we try to do something that is memorable. It's sort of a superstition -- a feeling that the next four years will somehow be influenced by what we choose to do with our anniversary.

Maybe the wine country and a tour of some vineyards? Maybe the mountains and some snow? Maybe the Bel Aire Hotel and some pampering? Or Big Sur? Or fly home and maybe have dinner in the town where we were married? Or just stay home and be cozy?

It's clear to me that you can think about the future, make elaborate plans for the future, and even take out insurance against the future. But you can't always keep your car from washing into a ravine. That's the nature of marriage.

And now it's late and I've got a blanket to turn on and a book to read. It's still raining, and it's supposed to continue through the night. Let the rain come down. Our roof's been recently patched. Our car is parked behind a sturdy metal gate.