By:
The Dude on the Right
Here in the Chicago area it’s been a very mild winter, with one snow storm at
the beginning of December and then pretty much nothing for almost a month and a
half. Hell, the weather has been warm enough that a lot of folks were able
to go golfing here in January, although getting a tan didn’t seem to be an
option. But once again a storm seems to be upon us, although the weather
folks still can’t seem to pin exactly what is going to happen. My Weather
Channel forecast seems to be saying I will be getting two, maybe three inches of
snow between now and Noon tomorrow, the local dudes seem to have me in a swath
that will get between five to seven inches of snow, and I’m not sure what the
Farmer’s Almanac says for me since I haven’t actually read one since I was about
seventeen and my dad bought it.
With that, there’s a part of me that likes the
fact that even with all of our technology, even with all of our computer models,
even with all of our experts, the weather still gives us uncertainty.
It makes
me sort of remember when I was a kid growing up in Ohio. As a kid, and
because there wasn’t cable TV yet, all we had was
Dick Goddard to tell us what was going to happen. Sure, there were
probably some other dudes on some other channels, but Mr. Goddard always gave a
breath of honesty to a weather forecast: That as much as he could look at
the way things were taking shape, Mother Nature has a mind of her own, and he
had no way of totally reading her mind. He also had the power of the
Woolly Bear, a strange caterpillar that Vermillion, OH, has adopted as its
own. Anyway, as a youngin’, we would hear about snow coming, but thanks to
Mr. Goddard, there was always an uncertainty about how much snow was actually
going to make it. That led to one thing, and one thing only – going to bed
knowing most likely we were going to have to go to school, but there was always
that chance, that Mother Nature decided it would be better for us to stay home,
build snowmen and snow forts, have snowball fights, make our parents drive us
through the snow-covered streets to the great hill in Amherst, and thanks to
Mother Nature, and not Dick Goddard, we got a snow day.
The fun thing to hear,
a year or two ago when I was visiting my parents in Ohio, was that Mr. Goddard
still knows that Mother Nature has her own mind, even as far as the computer
modeling, the forecasting, the satelliting, have come in all of these years.
There he was, in front of the weather map, telling everyone in his viewing area
that in the next twelve to twenty-four hours he couldn’t tell them how much snow
was coming. There was a chance of anything from less than an inch to
almost a foot of snow, depending on how the cold front moved, and in my head, I
knew that he knew that Mother Nature still has her own thing in mind, even
though I wouldn’t go to bed dreaming of a snow day.
And so, with the winter
weather that is supposed to come tonight, I wait again to see what Mother Nature
has in mind for my Monday. It’s not nearly as exciting as when I was a
kid, because there is nothing like a snow day when you are ten year’s old and
you can build a snow fort, but I would like to know if I can sleep in tomorrow,
maybe pretend I was ten again and build a snow fort, or if I’m going to have to
head out, in a measly inch or two of snow, and do some business consulting.
As I do every time I hear a snowstorm might be coming, since I was like five
years old, I pray Mother Nature wants me to make a snow fort. And that
Dick Goddard (or now, in Chicago, it’s Tom Skilling) just can’t read Mom
Nature’s mind.
That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!