Auntie Em, Auntie Em....
... where are those people when you need them?
Every so often DIH gets the smug feeling that's she finally getting the hang of this Midwestern thing. Without exception these are the times when something comes along and destroys her confidence.
Take yesterday, for example. Out and about in the auto. On way to supermarket before picking up child at school. Suddenly a torrential rain. Hm, DIH says to herself. Given my fellow Minnesotans' driving abilities, perhaps it would be best to can the supermarket and simply arrive at school early.
So I head to the school parking lot. Get a primo space (I was half an hour early after all). Rain intensifies. Naturally I take out the book I've got in my purse and within minutes am happily engrossed in "The Code of the Woosters."
Well, between Bertie's problems with yet another would-be bride and the pounding of the rain on the car roof, one can miss a few things Little things like, oh, I don't know, tornado sirens.
Seems half the city was under alert yesterday afternoon. All the children in the school were being herded to the basement even as Jeeves was trying to sort things out for Bertie W.
I keep telling myself itwas the rains' fault. If it hadnt' been making such an infernal racket maybe I would have heard the siren. Not that Iwouldhaveknown what to do next, of course, but still. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. Although I'm not sure it applies to forces of nature.
Every so often DIH gets the smug feeling that's she finally getting the hang of this Midwestern thing. Without exception these are the times when something comes along and destroys her confidence.
Take yesterday, for example. Out and about in the auto. On way to supermarket before picking up child at school. Suddenly a torrential rain. Hm, DIH says to herself. Given my fellow Minnesotans' driving abilities, perhaps it would be best to can the supermarket and simply arrive at school early.
So I head to the school parking lot. Get a primo space (I was half an hour early after all). Rain intensifies. Naturally I take out the book I've got in my purse and within minutes am happily engrossed in "The Code of the Woosters."
Well, between Bertie's problems with yet another would-be bride and the pounding of the rain on the car roof, one can miss a few things Little things like, oh, I don't know, tornado sirens.
Seems half the city was under alert yesterday afternoon. All the children in the school were being herded to the basement even as Jeeves was trying to sort things out for Bertie W.
I keep telling myself itwas the rains' fault. If it hadnt' been making such an infernal racket maybe I would have heard the siren. Not that Iwouldhaveknown what to do next, of course, but still. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. Although I'm not sure it applies to forces of nature.
Don't feel so bad about it. I'm a born and bred flatlander, and I did much the same thing one time. I just thought it was a thunderstorm -- we get a lot of those -- so I blithely went about my (dampish) business. When I arrived at the school to do some volunteer work, found everyone in the basement. Later learned there had been a touchdown within the county. As a relic of the previous age, I believe that warnings are given much more frequently nowadays than they were in the olden days, thus cheapening their attention-getting value. At least, it has worked that way for me. And I have always had trouble hearing the sirens if I didn't have a window open. Which begs the question of having open windows during a vigorous thunderstorm ... eh?
ReplyDeleteI was once ensconced in my easy chair (not a Laze-E-Boy) on a nice Sunday afternoon, reading something or another by Wodehouse, when the sirens went off and I swore voluminously about "waste" and "scaring people needlessly" because everybody knows that "tornadoes never strike in the middle of Minneapolis."
ReplyDeleteThat evening on the news I learned that one had skimmed over St Louis Park, right through Minneapolis, coming within a mile of me, while taking the roof off of the apartment of a friend while she was in it. It struck in two other nearby locations before moving on to Roseville.