The I of the Storm

The East Coast is bracing for the storm to end all storms ("see," said my daughter, "the end of the world is beginning..."), and the local news shows have been, as usual, looking for that all important "Chicago connection." It is, after all, or should be, all about us.

As far as I can tell, as I gaze out the window at the low, late afternoon sun of a beautiful October day, we folks here in the Midwest fit into the day's news of natural disasters only in a geographical sense, in that we are situated somewhere to the left of the hurricane churning up the Atlantic and somewhere to the right of the earthquake prompting tsunami warnings somewhere in the Pacific. Once again, we just sit here taking up space in the middle. The place where nothing happens. For me, we are like the hour or so between the opening scenes of a movie and the climax, the time when I generally doze off and don't really miss anything important.

Overlooked so often, we crave attention. "Look at us, look at us," we cry out, mostly to ourselves, since everybody else is paying attention to the more important things going on in the world's foreground. But being self-important is better than being not important at all, so our newscasters do not disappoint. Today, while folks on the Jersey shore were doing the opposite of partying and a crane was dangling precariously off a high rise in midtown Manhattan and Big Apple grocery stores were down to their last beer and my brother the Jewish doctor was preparing to stay indefinitely at the hospital and my eighty-one year old mother sat nervously looking out the window on Ocean Parkway hoping she would not actually see the ocean come rushing down the street, our local newscasters were wringing their hands over the winds that might end up swirling over Lake Michigan later this evening. A tempest in a teapot, I suppose, but it's our tempest, and it's the best we can do. Okay, the bikers and the joggers on the lake shore might have to head indoors to the health club for a day or two, but I'm guessing not too many people are actually going to be out on Lake Michigan on an evening in late October, no matter how pretty the day has been. If winds blow and waves churn and nobody is there to feel it, is it really happening?

Sometimes it's not such a bad thing to fly under the radar. If this is, as my daughter suggested this morning, the beginning of the end of the world, I'm thinking I'd like to distance myself from any connection Chicago might have to what's happening in the corners of the world that get attention whether they like it or not. I still refuse to believe the end of the Mayan calendar has anything to do with the end of the world; I believe with all my heart that they simply ran out of ink. Or got bored.

But if, by chance, I am wrong (hey, it's happened once or twice), I will take comfort in the notion that they probably forgot about the Midwest anyway. I'm already making arrangements for my loved ones who live where everything happens to come here for December, just in case. To the place in the middle of the movie, the place that could easily have been forgotten on the cutting room floor when the Mayans were figuring out the ending.