Not Worrying About Hurricanes

Image via WikipediaI grew up in New Orleans. Hurricanes in my youth were exciting but really no big deal. My father would put masking tape on the plate glass window of his grocery store and we would wait for the winds to blow.

We would sit outside unless and until the winds got really bad and then we would go inside to “ride out” the rest of the storm looking through the masking taped plate glass window.

If the storm was a direct hit and the eye passed right over us, we would go back outside and look up through the eye hole.

If it got too late, my mother would send my brother and me to bed and we would find out the rest of the story in the morning.

One thing we never did even think of doing was leaving town.

Betsy and Katrina changed all that.

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We have now gone to the other extreme with hurricanes...

• In the old days we hardly paid any attention until the storm entered the Gulf of Mexico.
• Now our 24 Hour New Cycle starts telling us about puffs of wind that might turn into something puffier while they are still off the coast of Africa.
• We give them names when they elevate themselves to stiff breezes.

Many of these storms lately have stayed in the Atlantic and headed north into the Arctic. There they quietly turn back into puffs of wind.

By the time the hurricanes are in the process of unpuffing in the Arctic, there have been hundreds of thousands of tee-shirts sold in the Good Ole USofA that have printed on them, “I Survived Hurricane Harry In 2010”.

Would I kid u?