Waiting for the storm that never showed up

We waited most of this week expecting to get wiped off the map, and it never happened.

I think that’s great. Bring on the weekend!

But some of you are kind of mad about it. You didn’t want to get wiped off the map, of course, but on Wednesday everything in town was closed except your own place of employment, and where’s the fun in that?

In the end, the folks in charge played the percentages. With big funnel-blobs moving toward us on the radar like mines floating in the sea, area schools made the right decision to close.

As school administrators in Atlanta can tell you, if you gamble the other way and keep school open and lose, you’ll never live it down.

On Wednesday, my only moment of slight disgust came when I finished work for the day, changed into my gym clothes and drove to the YMCA, only to find the parking lot empty and the doors locked.

Meanwhile, the sun was shining and birds were singing.

This is terrible, I thought. Now I can’t work out.

Hey wait, I thought. I can’t work out. This is great!

So I went home and ate a bag of pork rinds.

Truth be told, the hardest part about this storm that never came was waiting for it – and imagining what might happen to you, your loved ones and the stuff you own.

And when you do that, you get ready.

I bought a raincoat and two giant sheets of plastic. My wife suggested we fill the bathtubs up with water.

“Why would we fill the bathtubs up with water?” I said.

“So we can bathe and flush the toilets if there’s no water,” she said.

“That seems kind of dumb,” I said.

“And when a tree falls on the house, you’re going to put on your new raincoat and go up on the roof in the middle of a tornado with your two giant sheets of plastic?”

“That’s exactly right!” I said.

When a storm’s coming, you feel better if you do something to prepare.

It all made me think of the book “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis, where Wormwood, the junior devil, is elated about World War II, thinking that the fear of war will make it easier to lure humans to hell.

Screwtape, the senior devil, replies that war actually makes their jobs harder because when humans face the possibility of death, they tend to prepare themselves.

“In wartime,” Screwtape writes, “not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.”

Likewise, there’s something about a line of tornadoes possibly headed toward your town that leads you to consider your own mortality. Especially when Kendall Jenner isn’t around to hand that line of tornadoes a Pepsi.

Instead, you start asking the big questions. For me, it was this: “What happens if a tree falls on my house?”

I learned that I should not, under any circumstances, put on my new raincoat and climb up on the roof with my two new giant sheets of plastic.

But Bess had told me that already. I really wanted to know if I’d be covered by my homeowner’s insurance. And I got the standard insurance company answer:

It depends.

Not exactly comforting words. But I’ll wait until the next impending storm to worry about that.

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 3:23 PM with the headline "Waiting for the storm that never showed up."