Good Morning.
Today is an Old Testament Day. In a couple of hours there will be a phenomenon called a total eclipse of the sun that requires the use of special glasses or a device made with cardboard and a pin in order to view it safely. Otherwise the person who is not properly impressed with OT events may suffer the consequences of permanent visual damage.
The first hurricane I remember was Carol in 1953. We lived sixty miles from the ocean but felt the effects of her mighty self
with high winds that toppled trees and blew shingles and siding around. A few years before there had been a minor earthquake, unheard of in the northeast, that left a crack in the basement floor. I would not do well in California. With a hurricane you have days of warning and can find inland safety but not so much with an earthquake even though the seismologists can give a maybe heads up. Or maybe not.
I now live in an area susceptible to tornadoes. They scare the daylights out of me and that was before I saw the movie
Twister with trucks and cows being tossed like pennies into the air and the final scene with the divorced but soon to be reconciled couple hanging upside down on the pipes in a farm shed and staring into a spinning cone. I doubt that anyone
would survive such an experience but I watched with great respect anyway. The only time I was ever really near a tornado was forty years ago when something charged up the street a block away. They said it would never jump the river but it did. This is because you cannot always predict OT stuff despite random claims to the contrary.
With a deluge of rain we get floods, the kind that send a torrent of water through a populated area with people standing on their rooftops waiting to be rescued. We get mud slides with cliffs falling into the sea and houses, often architectural wonders
that jut precariously from the top of a precipice, crashing down with them. We have forest fires, sometimes deliberately or carelessly set, but often ignited with a gigantic finger of lightening.
On regular days the tides come in and go out with the moon, the sun rises and sets with streaks of peach and magenta, and that's the long and short of it. Not so on an Old Testament Day. The sun will have its face completely covered, an event that is, to use my least favorite, dreadfully overused word, awesome. It is supposed to mean worthy of awe with the person blown away or maybe even humbled. It is not supposed to be used in connection with a touchdown or a day at the spa.
I have pondered why there will be a speech this evening about Afghanistan, especially when there have been absolutely zero
speeches about anything of the sort to date. Why today, I ask? Why on an Old Testament Day, and I believe I have the answer. It has something to do with not wanting to be upstaged by anything or Anyone.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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