Back in the kitchen, the rest of my family was eating less nutritiously. Cereal. Juice. Lightly buttered toast. And for the grownups, coffee weakened with skim milk.
I sat across from my father, whose face was hidden by the paper I'd procured. He must have been reading the sports section, because the back of the sports section is where they put the weather, and it was the weather page that faced me as I poured Frosted Mini-Wheats into a bowl.
There is so much information on the weather page. There is a map with color-coded temperatures. A detailed forecast for the city, the area, the state, and the country for the day that lies ahead, plus a long-term guess for five. There are highs and lows for more than a hundred cities. Pictures, sort of like on a horoscope, showing the phases of the moon. Charts having to do with air quality, humidity, precipitation, river stages, lake levels, and what was going on outdoors a year ago today. There are even phone numbers to call to get more information!
Finally, there's a friendly little paragraph written by a weather forecaster about making the weather a part of your life—as if anyone could escape it! This time the paragraph was about lightning and how many times it kills people.
A university reported that three hundred unlucky people die every year from lightning strikes. The weather service said it's a hundred and six. The safety council said it's exactly one hundred. The national climate data center said it's only forty-one.
The weather forecaster said he didn't know which experts to believe, but even if the highest number were the one that's true, the odds of being killed by lightning were three million to one, better odds, he said, than your chance of winning the state lottery, where the odds on any given day are five million to one. Since I'd seen the lottery strike right across the street, is it any wonder that I'm a little jumpy during thunderstorms?
Then, as sudden as a bolt ka-blamming from the blue, brain lightning struck the breakfast table. I spied some words on the weather page that I'd failed to see before. Without warning or apology, I jerked the paper from my father's hand.
"Hey!" he said, spitting Grape Nuts on the table. "I was reading that!"
"Hold on a minute," I responded impatiently. "I'll give it back."
There it was, a single, tiny line of type, just above the giant ad for trucks and minivans, and just beneath the heading "Special Bulletin." Seven nearly microscopic words, like seven dwarfs, standing in a single line, saying
THE WAIT IS PART OF THE CURE.
There on the weather page I'd found a phrase in a familiar tone having nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with recuperating rabbits.
The paralyzed Orwell was on the move, jumping from the comics page and its superstitious horoscopes to the sports section's popular weather page.
On the move and moving up, on the rise in his personal career, Orwell was no longer to be found among fortunetellers. He had joined the ranks of the weather forecasters!