With all the craziness in the world, sometimes it’s essential for your mental health to put it all aside and just be silly.
Being silly is a good thing — sometimes. There’s certainly a time and a place for it. Most of us are loaded up with stress — our jobs, whether we can pay for food, whether we’re going to get COVID if we go shopping and some jerk who’s too important to follow health directives comes in contact with us. And, of course, there’s sickness and death.
All of these stressors are real, and if they’re allowed no outlet, dangerous. That’s when being silly comes in. That’s when you pump up the volume and listen to an hour of Lynyrd Skynyrd music to clear your head of all the other toxic stuff swirling around inside it. There is no crisis that cannot be quelled — if only for a short amount of time — by tapping your foot to a rousing version of “They Call Me The Breeze.”
But anyway, one of my all-time favorite things, when I want to get silly, is to talk about the weather.
Weather is an interesting juxtaposition, really. Nothing in life affects us like weather. It affects our moods and our bodies and pretty much governs how we live our lives.
Yet here’s the silly part. The world could be careening toward disaster, with unspeakable tragedy the basis for every story on the evening news, and the vibe immediately changes when it’s time for the weather report. And this is true no matter what the forecast is.
The weather forecaster is always jolly, always happy. Ed Harding could be deadly serious, and all of a sudden, he’s a happy fella as he introduces Harvey, or whomever. And even though Harvey’s about to tell you that the bi-polar vortex is about to descend upon us, with bone-chilling temperatures unheard of even for this part of the country, he does it with a smile.
And oh, don’t forget there’s a possibility of coastal flooding because the wind’s coming in from the northeast. Ha! Ha!. And usually, when they’re done yucking it up for five minutes, they hand it back to the anchors so Maria Stephanos can say, “So get those heavy jackets ready …” Gee, thanks. I thought I might go to work tomorrow in a bathing suit.
Does anyone else shop for weather forecasts? I do. And I know others who do it, too. You know what I mean. If you watch Channel 5, and you hear that we’re going to get a foot of snow, you immediately turn to Channel 4, where they might say we’ll get 6-8 inches. Bingo! That’s the one you hang onto. So when you end up with 14 inches you curse those idiot weather forecasters, and start ranting that they get paid six figures for being wrong half the time.
How silly is that?
Now for the point of all this. It seems that whenever I get sick, it’s in the wintertime. But believe it or not, that actually works out in my favor. You don’t have to experience winter when you’re sick. You let someone else do the work.
And I missed February — or at least a good part of it — because I was sick. That makes twice in five years that February has come and gone with me as a non-participant.
My mother used to dread February the way I dread root canals. She hated the month with a passion. The minute the calendar turned from January to February she was on edge.
“Something bad always happens in February,” she said.
Well it did this year, but we’re not going to dwell on that. It’s March. We are, meteorologically speaking, into spring. Yeah, I know. The vernal equinox comes later, but it’s March. That light at the end of the tunnel might actually be the sun. And perhaps a few forsythia buds.
Harvey told me that weather people consider the spring months to be March, April and May. I’m down with that. Anything that says “spring” I’m ready for.
As Mary Shelley might have written, “begone, vile winter, or stay that I may trample you to dust.”
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On a more serious note, many, many people have been kind to my family over the past month and a half. We sincerely appreciate all that everyone did for us. The support helped get us through what we had to endure.
