I am one of those older fellas who do not often talk about the weather.
Early on, I noticed that when folks didn't know what to say to each other, but felt, out of politeness, insecu-rity or just a dogged desire to be gumming and flapping, that they must say something, the topic they often chose to bore others with was the weather.
Cincinnati, the locale where I grew up, liked to think of itself as special in every way. The weather was no exception.
"If you don't like the weather around here, just wait five minutes," somebody would say, and that tired old saw never failed to get a round of answering guffaws.
Oddly enough, I discovered, once I started moving around this big country we share for 77.4 (male) to 81.6 (female) years, on average, that everywhere in the Land of the Free people are fond of saying something banally similar to Cincinnatians about their particular area's weather.
Even though I determined long ago - around the time puberty hit me like that proverbial ton of bricks - not to be drawn into these boredom-on-the-hoof weather confabs, I also have to say that as I age I am more and more conscious of Mother Nature and her climatological vagaries.
Certain things stand out.
What I can remember about Cincinnati was how nine out of 10 storms came into the area out of the west (Indiana). I could count on one hand the storms blown up from Kentucky (to the south) or funneled down from Cleveland (north).
This habit came back to bite me when I lived in Idaho because I would look to the west some mornings, see blue skies and head on down the road only to be swamped by a mountain snowstorm.
What I remember most about Idaho weather were the icicles hanging from my nose like baby walrus tusks every day for the solid six winter months whenever I ventured out for the quarter-mile walk to and from the Idaho Mountain Express office.
San Antonio, Texas, where I found myself quartered under Uncle Sam's roof in the late '60s, was a sleepy southwestern city with nothing much to recommend it other than some great Mexican food, a pretty inner-city waterway and the Alamo.
But the skies of central Texas were an astonishment to little Mid-western me.
You could see forever. I can remember afternoons, on a duty break, sitting out on a barracks porch and watching thunderstorms come in from miles and miles away.
Later in my military spin cycle I wound up in Wichita Falls, Texas, where weather was less entertaining and more frightening, since that city had been ravaged more than once by tornados.
But even up there in Wichita Falls, mucho miles north of San Antonio, the skies were incredibly wide and open.
When I lived on Kauai, I saw grown men who seemed (previously) afraid of nothing go through spasms of flop sweat and nervous chatter each and every hurricane season.
These fellows had been island-bound during Hurricane Iniki in 1992 (guesstimated damage more than $10 million) and a 1982 hurricane whose name escapes me, and what they'd seen had scarred them for life, vis-à-vis weather.
In Polynesia, as in the Idaho Rockies, weather conversations tend to be less polite and more focused, because in those places weather is both a friend (sunshine and snow) and an enemy (hurricanes and blizzards).
Seattle, like Cincinnati, is usually a place where weather, be it Cincin-nati's clammy summertime humidity or Seattle's damn near ever-present winter drizzle, is more of an irritant than a factor to be feared.
But this November, Mother Nature showed a little bit of tooth and claw to people she usually taps playfully rather than smacking hard.
We have all just lived through the wettest month in recorded Seattle history, almost 16 inches of rain! Plus a snowstorm and half of another just to show us how bad weather might easily get worse.
I am judging nobody lately if they start talking to me about the weather, global warming, baby El Niños and other related topics.
In fact, I have been unapologetically joining in.
This was a month that wreaked havoc on my golf game, my hairstyle and my ability to keep my powder, and everything else, dry.
What a November for real weather, huh?
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