I've been noticing lately that peoples' moods are like the weather today. A rain storm is hugging the coast. Low, dark clouds cover southern New England like a wet, wool blanket. Three to four inches of rain are expected between now and tomorrow morning. On a scale of 1-10, this Friday in May is starting to look like a minus three.

It's been a long winter, and folks are ready for spring. The calendar tells us it's here, but the calendar lies. What's to be done? How best to improve those moods? Maybe today would be a good day to read something written by an Irishman. Beckett perhaps.

Beckett, whose works, according to the novelist William Kennedy, are about " Prolonged and profound suffering. " Take those two tramps Estragon and Vladimer in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. They who cannot go on, but do go on.

Like Sam Beckett himself. Beckett's first novel, Murphy, was rejected by forty two publishers and sold only six copies in its first year of publication. When Beckett was asked how he could continue writing after that initial failure, he said, " I couldn't have done otherwise. Go on I mean. I could not have gone through that awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence. "

Ah. That should cheer ya up, ya moody bastards. Pick up y'er fookin' umbrella, that black one. Grab a book and take a walk. Hold the umbrella with one hand, the open book in the other. Read y'er way through the rain. Go on!