I played golf with three men in The Villages last Sunday. They knew each other but I didn’t know them. We introduced ourselves and that’s when I noticed the logo shirt one of the guys was wearing. I waited until the second hole to say, “So, you’re a local celebrity.” he denied the status, but I said, “I think anyone actively involved in radio or TV is a celebrity.” His shirt identified him as the senior forecaster at WVLG’s weather center.
We talked a bit while waiting on several tee boxes for the group ahead to move forward. He told me a couple weather-related stories. The most surprising to me was that he gets calls from time to time from irate Villagers who blame him for the poor weather. Some must think he has God-like powers, and he can control what’s going to happen with the weather. “They get particularly angry when I make it rain on their golf days.”
As we continued to talk, I learned that he was originally from a town north of Boston where he was a “cop” for thirty years. He had studied weather forecasting in college but became a policeman instead. And then he said, “The local fire chief knew that I knew a bit about weather forecasting, so he reached out to me from time to time to gain some insight regarding what to expect particularly when storms were headed our way.”
He went on to say, “The fire chief called me into his station prior to the blizzard of 1978. He wanted to know if I could offer any insight to the situation. Back then the firemen had to hand shovel the entrances to each fire station because they didn’t have snow blowers. I told him based on what I could tell, we’d have at least twelve to sixteen inches. If the storm turned a bit, we could have between twenty-four and thirty. He got mad at me and told me to leave. He saw that as too much snow for his men to shovel and blamed me. We ended up with thirty-two. It took him a couple of weeks to apologize to me.”
We spoke a bit more about people seeking advice. We agreed that you shouldn’t ask questions if you can’t handle the answer. Some people want an affirmation of a preconceived notion, and when they don’t get it, they have their feelings hurt or sometimes get angry.
I’m not sure if his reference to the fire chief triggered a story about a firefighting dad from my time in Addison or not, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I knew the family of five: two boys, one girl, one mom and a firefighting dad. The fire fighter made the commute to Garden City from Lake Somerset to work each of his twenty-four-hour shifts.
One morning I got a call from one of the teachers via the intercom. She was sending a student that was in distress and wanted me to help. The girl was a second grader, and her arms were itching her terribly. I took a look and saw what I thought was a horrible case of poison ivy. I’d had a similar rash several times, so I felt sorry for her. After a cursory look, I asked a few questions.
“Were you outside a lot this weekend?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“My dad, my two brothers, and I cut firewood for our wood burner.”
“Did you get a lot?”
“Yes.”
“Well, based on what I see, I think you have poison ivy.”
“Yes, I know. My whole family has it. Both of my brothers and my mom and dad. My brothers have it on their legs and my dad has it on his face. Now my mom has it here.” She ran her hand across her chest has she spoke of her mom’s rash.
I’m pretty sure her mom didn’t rub poison ivy across her chest, but her dad may have had some ivy oil on his face when he – well, you get the picture.
In any case, this memory wouldn’t have popped up if I hadn’t asked the weather forecaster about his job or the second grader about how she got her poison ivy. Those two “asks” were made forty years apart, but somehow my brain connected to two, and I just had to tell.