Communication

Talking The Temperature

by Terry Barlow
04/07/18
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 I have noticed with our advancing years together that my wife and have taken what seems like an inordinate interest in the weather and daily temperatures.  This is ironic due to the fact that as a younger man I used to mock the weather reports for being what was then perceived as being big staged productions of so much ado about nothing!  Those visiting our land from another culture could notice it immediately.  They were so contrived and superficial as to be laughable,  because people seemed to welcome being distracted from thinking and talking about more important and more urgent issues.  This satirical attitude and humor was epitomized by one novelist's quip in one of his popular novels back then about a weather report informing the expectant public that there "will be no weather today!"
   So I can't help but ask and wonder what is it about our old(er) age that predisposes us toward this preoccupation with temperatures?  My wife says it is to help with planning what to prepare for with regard to wardrobe or to know if she will be able sit on the porch and enjoy the yard and a good book.  I, on the other hand, think it has more to do with the deepening impact that extreme temperatures, high or low, have on an aging body, even a gracefully aging body.  I don't know that it is any one thing, more likely it is a combination of reasons producing this obsession with temperature numbers, not the least of which is distraction as mentioned above and a vacation from bearing the weight of problems, be they personal or more global ones.  My brother-in-law says simply it gives us something to talk about, as if we don't already have enough in this big wide, complicated world of ours.  But then he went on to say something even more to the point and at the crux of the issue.  It gives us something safe to talk about in all different and diverse kinds of settings.  Ah, now we're shedding some light!  There probably has never been a time in our history as a nation when we were more in need of something safe to talk about than now in 2018.  But then someone else might say that there's nothing safe about climate change, which is at least a little related to the topic of interest.
    My wife and I, though, are not consciously seeking or needing non threatening topics to discuss.  At any rate we enjoy checking in daily on the weather these days and times,  and it is less stressful and therefore healthier to enjoy things and people than to play the cynic and ridicule them.