How’s that go? “It’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar, where do we take it from here?”
“Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too – ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth.”
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations – Book III, #13
Coming into San Antonio, southbound, the usual traffic signs were flashing with hurricane warnings and notes that the shelters were open. Not that it mattered.
By Saturday morning, the fancy downtown hotel’s TV was showing the same reporters who were in Cancun a few months ago, standing on some beach in Southeast Texas, down along our Toxic Triangle (where the refineries and superior blues musicians come from).
I kept thinking, can we sue the media for the panic generated?
The “computer models” and “weather experts” couldn’t agree, and I kept thinking, after that interchange with a client on Friday morning, maybe I should just look into being a weatherman. Except I’d probably have to get my haircut and wear a tie. I wonder of they’d like a weatherman in a bolo tie? That would be a little different, and surely they could use something more than hurricane reports to spice it up.
Best guess? There were no good guesses. The storm was going to either head up the Sabine River, and station itself over Shreveport. Or maybe it was going to go to the west, and hit Dallas. One model from Thursday, they don’t remember, but I do, showed the storm going to Dallas, then Ft. Worth. Another showed it looping back to New Orleans, while a different projection had it going south-southwest along the Texas Coastal Bend.
Early Saturday morning, there were long, thin trails of vapor, clouds that looked like, maybe, they were arms of the storm, arching overhead downtown San Antonio. A little later, as I showed up, for a showing at the bookstore, the sky was clear again. Breeze kicked up a little but not much.
Overheard:
“I was training, with this girl, and she was telling us she couldn’t come in because of the wind, the rain, the tornados – she was scared.”
“I told her we’d be lucky to get a little breeze, and we could pray for rain, but that’s probably not going to happen here.”
