Birthday Weather

(or, How to Write a Week's Worth of Perfect Weather Forecasts)

I got home late on Monday from a trip to Atlanta to perform a wedding ceremony for friends of my son's, so I didn't realize that the weather had changed until Tuesday morning -- my birthday. I've written before how I developed this magical-thinking notion when I was a little kid, about how the weather would change to fall for my birthday. (Of course it's not logically true, and yes, of course, I do know that, but it's how it felt and still feels to me.) And so here it was, my classic birthday weather: perfectly clear blue skies, lower temperatures (even if only slightly), low humidity, and soft breezes. I can tell you, it put me in a great mood.

Tuesday morning I had a business meeting (the only one I had scheduled all day) at the Mojo Coffee House, and it was a pleasure to walk there from the house. While getting my cup of coffee, I overheard one young woman tell the barrista to read the weather page on the back of the Living section of the Times-Picayune. The girl behind the counter said she had read it, but the first girl urged her to look at it again. I was intrigued, and looked over their shoulders.

As faithful readers of the T-P know, the weather takes up a half-page at the back of the Living section and is printed in full color, with a close-up map of the Gulf Coast region, with whatever relevant weather patterns shown in symbols across the map. Tuesday's map showed the region clearly, with no clouds or arrows over it, and dotted with sun-circles from Galveston, Texas, all the way to Panama City, Florida.

Below that is the 5-day forecast, again, with a symbol for each day's weather and a brief word description of the weather predictions for those days. On Tuesday, the little boxes for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all held bright sun-balls. And for each, the Times-Picayune writer, apparently reluctant to repeat the same thing over and over, outdid him- or herself in describing the week's perfect weather:

Wednesday -- "beautiful with bright sun"
Thursday -- "mostly sunny and pleasant"
Friday -- "delightful with plenty of sun"
Saturday -- "Sunny, breezy and pleasant"
Sunday -- "plenty of sunshine and nice"

But don't believe it -- with humidity this low and temperatures in the low 80s during the day and the low 60s at night, lovely breezes, and no clouds in the sky -- they just should have written PERFECT across the whole week and been done with it.