Chances are good that when you go to retrieve your newspaper from the stoop this morning, you will be greeted by a man riding by in an ark, a family of ducks in funny hats and that dorky Morton salt girl. She’s out of rehab, you know.
What I’m saying is that it’s raining. It rained yesterday, it’s raining today and I’m told that it will be raining tomorrow. When you look at the extended forecast on my phone’s weather app, what you see is a block of days that to me looks like a very filthy word (you know the one) followed by five exclamation points.
After what felt like eleventeen months of winter, we finally made it to spring only to damn near drown while celebrating in our yards. It just feels so cosmically unfair. Can’t ride our motorcycles, can’t mow our lawns, can’t find out once and for all whether or not we look good in a Speedo. (Hint: We don’t.)
In Maine, the weather can never be just bad, it has to be epicly bad. Vacationland? Bah! The little slogan on our license plates should read: “Maine. Well, at least it’s not snowing.”
It reminds me of that old childhood nursery rhyme we used to chant. How did that go? Something like, “Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day or I’ll start drinking the moment I crawl out of bed in the morning.”
I apologize. It’s just that the dismal forecast gives me that ticklish feeling between my shoulder blades that comes when some dripping wet editor is about to make me write a weather story. Which reminds me why I stopped by your breakfast table this morning in the first place.
Somebody asked me recently if I remembered writing my very first weather story for the paper. Fact is, I don’t, but since it would have been in the mid-1990s, a time when I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and just oozing youthful enthusiasm, I can kind of recreate the scene in my head — and in yours if you’ll allow it.
The year was 1994. The city editor at the Sun Journal was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking bear of man named Tim McCloskey. (Tim was actually none of those things, but it makes my scene work better, so just work with me here.) I, on the other hand, was a bow tie-wearing, freckle-faced kid in suspenders and a felt hat hawking newspapers on street corners. You know, “Hear ye, hear ye, read all about it,” and all that rot.
When I got the call to produce a weather story for the paper, I imagine I jumped like a floppy-eared beagle chasing a Frisbee.
“Keen!” I surely cried when the request came down. “Shucks, mister. You bet I’d like to write about the weather! That would be swell!”
So with my ear-to-ear smile and twinkling freckles, off to report I went, possibly whistling and twirling a cane as I did.
My thought process probably went something like this: Look at all the wonderful snow! Why, kids must be out sliding on the hills while their red-nosed parents drink hot cocoa and talk about investment strategies. I’ll be darned if one of them isn’t smoking a pipe!
I skipped all the way to the hills behind the Colisee, which back then was still called “that barn-looking thing where people play hockey and such.” On those hills in the park, I found kids, all right, but they weren’t sliding. They were standing in the snow and smoking, regarding adults like myself with narrow-eyed suspicion.
“Hello there, kiddos,” I said to them as I approached with my new reporter’s notebook and No. 2 pencil. “What do you youngsters have for sleds? Red Racer? Flexible Flyer? Snow Lightning? Gosh, you must be having a heck of a time out here, ay wot?”
I awoke hours later in the hospital, having been beaten, tossed in the snow and relieved of my wallet, shoes and bow tie. The doctors told me I was lucky they were able to remove the No. 2 pencil, what with it being jammed in all the way to the eraser.
“Gosh,” I told them, gathering my clothes and making for the door. “Thanks for the patch job, fellas. But I’ve got a story to write!”
I would have gone driveway to driveway, seeking interviews from men and women out shoveling their yards. “Golly, sir or madam. Can you believe all this snow? We’re going to have a bang of a Christmas this year, I reckon.”
You people wonder why I act the way I do. Clearly, it goes back to the vicious shovel beatings I took as a newbie reporter who exhibited just a tad too much glee for weather reporting.
I didn’t call the weather service for snow totals back then. I went out and measured it myself, using a simple plastic ruler that came with the pencil box. I baked brownies and brought hot apple cider to my hardworking colleagues. I built magnificent snowmen under the grand clock on Park Street, until some deviant came by and did unspeakable things to it, at which point snow sculpture was banned on the newspaper property.
Why, I was whistling George Bailey back then. I was Charlie Brown, Hermey the elf and that doe-eyed Who kid from Whoville back in the day. Journalistic meteorology was my passion! Weather stories were my life!
Or not. I think chances are very good that I bitched like crazy about my first weather story just as I bitched about the last one. Winters have always been hell for my poor, crime-reporter soul and spring brings no relief. So you’ll forgive me if this long string of rain leaves me with a poor disposition. You’ll pardon me if I cuss a little when people say things like, “Say, we’ll probably get some flooding. You should write a story about that.”
I won’t swear at you, though. I’ll just hold up the image of the grim string of days on my weather app.
Yeah. So take that, Morton.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. He’s shining his freckles practicing his “Howdy, there” as the flood threat builds. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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