Sturm unt Drang

I was soaked to the skin by the time I climbed out of the car walked to get the golf umbrella out of the trunk.

The remnants of Hurricane Jeanne ran over us, just in time for rush hour in the city. I left my desk a half hour early to see if I could minimize some of the irritation, and all things considered, it wasn’t that bad. The drenching curtain dropped about mid-span on the 14 th Street Bridge, and the wipers on full hard could barely stay ahead of it. The car shuddered with the motion and the tires threw roostertails of spray.

The drivers were confused on the Virginia side of the river, not an unusual occurrence even in the best of times, and I turned off the clogged arterial route and motored slowly through the neighborhoods. There was no place to park in the lot at Big Pink, not close to my unit, anyway, and I slid the car in one of the spots that line the ramp to the underground garage.

I have been on the waiting list for one of the underground slots for nearly a year. I was glad I didn’t have one tonight, since the rain was coming down so fiercely that at the bottom of the ramp the water was rising, overwhelming the drain and threatening to flood the old people’s cars down below.

The rain was so heavy that I should not have bothered to hurry. By the time I got the trunk open and the umbrella deployed, it was as though I had stepped into my morning shower after putting on my suit.

I slogged up to the unit and got out of my wet clothes and into a dry martini. I listened to the radio. A woman had been swept to her death by the rain in Virginia , and another in Philadelphia .

Even the tail end of this storm was pretty fierce. I could only imagine what the sturm unt drang had been like down in Florida . In German the words mean ”storm and stress.” Four storms in two months. The first time in over a century that a state had been hit by storms that often. That is a lot of stress to the system.

I give up. Sign the Kyoto Treaty, somebody. I surrender.

On the Left Coast I heard that Mr. St. Helens was trembling again, maybe magma surging up the throat of the volcano. And there was a seismic event on the San Andreas Fault that measured a six on the Richter Scale, and five hundred little aftershocks. No one was injured, thank goodness.

That seemed to be the tone of the day. Things were not nearly as bad as they could have been, though stressful. The two Italian ladies were released by their kidnappers in Iraq . One of them says she is going to go back and continue her charitable works. A CNN producer was released by his Palestinian captors. A major al-Qaida operative was busted in southern Pakistan , and two bad guys were convicted in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen . They were sentenced to death.

Then came the breathless news. Major League Baseball is returning to the Capital after thirty-three years, almost to the day. The last game played by the Washington Senators was on the last day of September in 1971. Owner Bob Short had announced that he was moving the team to Texas in exchange for $8 million up front in television rights. A surly crowd of 14,460 bought tickets. Another 4,000 fans did not, leaping over the turnstiles to get in and carrying protest banners advising Mr. Short to do something improbable. The owner was also hung in effigy over the railings at RFK Stadium.

Frank Howard had two home runs in a good performance against the Yankees. The Senators were ahead 7-5 with two outs in the ninth inning. Yankee Horace Clark was at bat, facing Washington left-hander Joe Grzenda when the fans came over the wall. Players for both teams ran for cover as the bases were ripped from the ground and the bullpen roof was scaled in order for irate Washingtonians to dismantle the scoreboard.

Chief Umpire Jim Honochick was stressed out, hiding in a dug-out. He called the last game, giving a forfeit victory to the Yankees. I might have got it wrong, but apparently the Senators had been discovered in a sub-basement in Union Station where they had been hiding for three decades. Mayor Williams assured them that all was forgiven, and that the City will replace the bases and rebuild the scoreboard in time for next season.

I turned off the radio. I couldn’t handle any more good news.

I poured another martini and watched the rain as the darkness deepened. We already had the plague of locusts this year, what could be next? Another Ice Age? Where the hell was I going to park?

Big Pink’s electrical system is cranky, and was never designed to accommodate all the personal appliances that are so necessary to survival in our exciting new millennium. I got out some candles and the flashlight just in case, and made sure there were batteries for the radio incase I needed a sudden infusion of good news in the darkness.

Then I fired up the computer to check the e-mail. In addition to the spam, there was a note from a druid friend of mine. He had an explanation for the events of the season.

Two rare planetary alignments will grace the sky in October 2004, and are crucial events on the way to the rapture, which was scheduled a long ago by Mayan cosmologists for December 21, 2012.

The day after the Senators return to Washington , and again at the end of October, the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, and Uranus will arrange themselves with the moon into a pattern approximating a five-pointed star. This pattern is known as a Grand Quintile, and according to informed observers, signifies an opportunity to attune to the elusive Fifth Harmonic.

Naturally, I am concerned. Think about it. The second Grand Quintile will occur on Oct. 28, within hours of an important Solar Eclipse, and just days before the Presidential election. I made a note to fill the bathtub with fresh water, lay in an extra stock of batteries and inventory the canned goods.

The lights flickered and failed and the rain pounded down on the patio. I clicked on the flashlight and opened the Complete Works of William Shakepeare that I use to wedge the Murphy bed closed when I am not in it. The book fell open to the play Julius Caesar.

”Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves.”

Before the batteries ran down, I made another note to send the quote to the new owner of the Senators, just in case the astrological thing was getting to him. It might be a comfort as we move toward the holidays in 2012.

I’m going to have to get the cards out early that year.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra