The house on Canterbury Road had a garage that didn't contain a car. It contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and a wall covered with weather charts going back thirty-two years, because my father had been a farmer and I had inherited his obsession with knowing what tomorrow would bring, even though I spent my days selling the idea that tomorrow could be whatever you wanted it to be.

My name is Robert Harrington. I am forty-eight years old and I work in advertising on Madison Avenue, which means I am professionally obligated to tell people that their lives will be better if they buy the right detergent, or the right car, or the right brand of conviction about themselves. I am very good at my job. The reason I am good at my job is that I understand certainty. Everyone wants certainty. That is the entire product. You don't buy a car to drive from point A to point B. You buy a car to be certain that point B will treat you better than it treated point A.

But I knew, underneath the ad campaigns and the focus groups and the carefully tested slogans, that the world is not certain. The world is a series of events that happen to you while you are busy doing something else, and the best you can do is arrange yourself prettily and hope the chaos chooses a direction you can live with.

My family knows this. We have always known it. My father farmed land in Nebraska that my grandfather farmed before him, and my great-grandfather farmed before my grandfather, and for three generations, the Harrington men kept records. Not just farming records, which any farmer keeps, but something more obsessive. My great-grandfather wrote down the temperature every morning at six o'clock, the direction of the wind, the color of the sky, the behavior of the birds, and the price of wheat in Chicago. My grandfather added rainfall measurements and soil pH levels and lunar phases. My father added commodity futures prices and federal reserve interest rates and the weekly employment reports from Washington, and he built a system so elaborate that when the drought of 1972 hit and every other farmer in Nebraska was losing their crop, my father's corn yielded at ninety percent of normal because he had seen the patterns forty years of data revealed and he had planted three weeks early and harvested two weeks late and bought wheat futures when everyone else was selling.

I grew up reading these records the way other children read comic books. They were to my father what the bible was to a priest and the stock ticker was to a broker. He could look at a column of rainfall data from 1953 and tell you, with absolute certainty, what the autumn would look like. He didn't guess. He didn't hope. He looked at the data and the data told him the future.

Then I went to college and studied English literature and decided I would never be a farmer, and then I went into advertising, and then I married a woman who was beautiful and ambitious and didn't care about weather charts, and I built a life in Connecticut that had nothing to do with fields, except that every morning at six o'clock, like clockwork, like religious observance, I looked at the sky and I thought about what was coming.

The campaign that defined my career, and perhaps revealed my sickness, was for Midland Agricultural Supplies. I was given the account by a creative director who thought I needed something simple after burning out on a car campaign that cost four million dollars and attracted zero attention. The Midland account was different. The client wanted ads that conveyed certainty. Perfect harvests. Reliable weather. Predictable returns on investment. They wanted to sell farmers the idea that farming was predictable, which was like selling ice to a fish and hoping the fish didn't notice the irony.

I wrote three versions of the campaign. The first version was the one they approved, because it was the one that said: when you work with Midland, you are working with certainty, and in a world of chaos, certainty is the most valuable commodity you can own. I knew it was a lie the moment I wrote it. I knew it because I had spent the previous evening reading my father's rainfall data from 1976, which showed a pattern so unusual that when the unusual weather came and destroyed half the crops in the Midwest, my father lost everything, and the records couldn't save him, because they could tell him what was happening but not what to do about it, and knowing what is happening is not the same thing as being able to stop it.

The second version of the campaign I wrote but never showed anyone. It went like this: you are standing in a field in Nebraska. The sky is grey. The rain is coming. You know it is coming because you have been watching the clouds since you were six years old, and your father watched the clouds before you, and his father before him, and you have recorded every drop of rain since 1968 in a notebook that fills three binders a year, and the rain is coming and you are certain, and then the wind changes direction, and the rain goes somewhere else, and the field cracks, and the wheat turns to dust, and you realize that knowing the rain was supposed to come doesn't help you when it decides not to. You can see the future. You cannot change it.

The third version was written in the garage at 2 AM on a Tuesday, because I couldn't sleep, because the second version was the truth and the first version was the lie and I was paid to tell the lie, and I am not a good liar. The third version was a single line of copy, repeated on a white background, the way some of the best ads are, because sometimes the simplest thing is the most honest thing: there is a word for men who can predict the weather but cannot stop it. The word is helpless.

I showed the approved campaign to the client. They loved it. They ran it in Farm Journal and Successful Farming and the regional agricultural publications. It was effective. Sales increased twelve percent in the first quarter. My father called me from Nebraska, which he did twice a year on birthdays and holidays, and told me the ads were good, and I lied and told him I was proud of the work, and he said something I have carried for twenty years: we Harrington men know about certainty, Bob. You just keep looking at the sky. That's what we do.

But I wasn't looking at the sky anymore. I was looking at spreadsheets in a Manhattan office, and the weather didn't matter, and the harvest was somebody else's problem, and the only thing I was certain about was that my life was a story nested inside another story nested inside another story, and I couldn't tell which layer was real.

I was the ad man selling certainty to farmers who measured their lives in rainfall, while I myself stood in a Connecticut suburb with a garage full of weather charts I hadn't opened in years, watching the Connecticut sky with the particular grey that only exists in Connecticut, which is a grey that knows it is grey and is somewhat ashamed of it.

My son is sixteen. He doesn't keep records. He doesn't look at the sky. He talks about changing the world, which is what sons do, and I feel a surge of pride and terror, because I know what happens when you try to change the world: it changes you first, and then it doesn't change at all, and you are left standing in a field that cracked and a life that didn't work out the way you calculated, and a sky that keeps falling rain on people who have memorized every drop but cannot build an umbrella.

I go to the garage sometimes. I open the filing cabinet. I pull out a binder and read my father's handwriting, the careful columns of data that once predicted a drought and once predicted rain and once predicted everything perfectly and couldn't save a farm, and I close the binder, and I go back inside, and I watch the evening news, and the weatherman tells us what tomorrow will bring, and I nod the way I have nodded for forty-eight years, at the sky, at the data, at the people who tell us what is coming, at the thing that comes anyway, at the certain and uncertain and inevitable and surprising heart of trying to know what is coming when you cannot stop it.

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