Much bemoaning has been heard in the last decade about how divided America has become. I think we’ve gotten past that this week. Across all racial and religious lines, despite Marxist leftism and Americanist rightism, irrespective of age, college football team loyalty, or propensity toward cell phone moronism, America has come together to say with one common voice:
It’s too darned cold.
Yahoo Weather told me at 7:00am that it was five degrees out on the streets of Memphis. That’s just downright disrespectful. My phone began ringing at 7:30 as victims reported waking up to frozen pipes. Those pipes have been just fine for twenty three years, but nooooooo, the weather had to dive down to South Dakota levels and wreak havoc across our beloved southland. And I don’t even want to know what South Dakota is like today.
In fact, that last paragraph was written over a bowl of beef stew at Jason’s Deli on Highland. This paragraph is being composed at home ten hours later. What happened, you ask? A housewife called me in the middle of lunch to complain that bucketfuls of water were pouring through her ceiling. Some women have a low tolerance for that sort of thing, so I closed my laptop and headed for the truck. En route to her house, another girl called with a similar problem. Before I could finish that conversation, I received a third call: water pouring through the ceiling. I got home at 9:20pm. Mankind was not created to live like this.
It’s getting better. The forecast for tonight shows a low of 23 degrees, which is a far sight better than five. It’s supposed to climb into the 60s by the weekend. But for tonight, I can’t bear the thought of opening a refrigerator door.